131–140 of 232 posts
Not the author, don't know him, no connection – but I caught a glimpse somewhere on the blog that he is currently unemployed. As an open-source maintainer, I feel like it is my duty to plug him so he can perhaps get some patrons or donations, the blog is great. https://www.bookandsword.com/support/ He is also not a software engineer or in tech in any meaningful way, so his 'tip to total income' ratio is probably off…
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Plucking sheep. You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days? While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in ab…
Shearing requires advanced technology that the Vikings may not have had. https://www.griggsagri.co.uk/blog/sheep-shearing-a-brief-his... : “The sheep were shorn using very basic tools, such as metal, or sharp glass, fashioned into an implement to take whole clumps of wool off at once. Over time, the tools were adapted into scissor-like blades to make the job easier.” I think you can call that plucking. People use too…
http://samlingarna.gotlandsmuseum.se/index.php/Detail/object...
https://historiska.se/upptack-historien/object/364462-sax-si...
There's a great book about the progression of clothing, textiles, and fabric being scarce and expensive to commonplace and cheap. It runs through the various technological innovations (think cotton gin, but plenty more), culture, and economics. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Great quote about Viking sail ships: "Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight h…
Plucking sheep. You shear sheep, not pluck them. If you're experienced you can sheer about 100 sheep per day. You can skirt and wash the fleece of those same 100 sheep on day two. How are you spending the remaining 598 days? While I'm not an expert at spinning (although my spouse may be), I would venture that 12 or 15 village women carding and spinning 10 to 12 hours a day would be able to go from sheep to sail in ab…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman o…
> I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. So could a Roman or Greek. He'd just need a counting board and some stones. He could probably do it faster than you, as well. Anyone using an abacus today could perform almost exactly the same algorithms, with the added convenience of having beads on rods in a frame instead of an unwieldy counting board and s…
Indeed, the biggest advantage of paper arithmetic is that it leaves a written record: each step in the algorithm can be checked for mistakes afterward. It is otherwise significantly slower and not inherently more accurate than a counting board.
The other advantage that paper arithmetic has is that it can be easily reproduced in printed books, making learning more advanced techniques more accessible / easier to spread to anyone literate, without requiring an expert teacher.
(And finally, paper arithmetic [eventually] has the advantage that it can be more conveniently extended and generalized to include more kinds of operations and structures, in a way that is easier to explain and teach than adding new kinds of counting board rules. Paper arithmetic is a more natural precursor for symbolic algebra than counting-board calculation.)
The big disadvantage of paper arithmetic is that it depends on widespread literacy and cheap access to paper (or similar material). In a context where paper is expensive or unavailable, written arithmetic is not very compelling.
Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl... That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ide…
A lifetime ago I worked in a textile mill in the US. After a several months I worked my way up to be a machine operator, a weaver. I had upwards of 50 weaving machines I kept operating thru my shift. Each of these produced probably 80meters * 6meters of fabric in an 8 hour shift. And at this rate, mills in southeast asia were able to undercut prices so much the US industry collapsed.
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> but a large low pressure steam engine is perfectly possible. Irrespective of whether it was possible for the Greeks to make them, what would be the economic incentive for them to build large low pressure steam engines at scale? In our timeline, the only serious application of large low pressure steam engines was pumping water out of mines, from after 1720 or so. Even with the incentive of the industrial revolution,…
Milling grain, hammering wrought iron, crushing ore etc. There were plenty of uses of mechanized power even in antiquity, and the ancients realized that through use of water wheels.
Are these actually feasible with a large low-pressure steam engine of the sort that the Greeks could have actually constructed? Remember that the early real steam engines were only just powerful enough to slowly lift buckets of water.
[Edit] - good answers below - thanks! But I think the question of economic viability still stands. As pointed out elsewhere, a waterwheel is easy to construct and doesn't have ongoing fuel costs. A steam engine requires a reasonably well developed iron/steel working industry (including skilled artisans), which in turn requires a fair amount of iron ore and fuel to support smelting. The finished steam engine would require a lot of wood as fuel, or coal, which wasn't widely available in ancient Greece, or easily transportable without a lot of effort. Ancient Greek metallurgy was definitely not sophisticated enough to build a steam train and as for for building a railway 1) they could barely build graded roads and 2) they would have needed a phenomenal amount of mass-produced steel for the tracks.
Must be a slow day on HN when we're talking about tunics.
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Milling grain, hammering wrought iron, crushing ore etc. There were plenty of uses of mechanized power even in antiquity, and the ancients realized that through use of water wheels.
I don't think the OP is saying that there wasn't a need for mechanized power, just that it wasn't profitable to get that power from steam. Water wheels have no fuel costs, and very little ongoing maintenance costs. A steam engine that could be built in antiquity would be incredibly expensive in both respects. So even if the technology existed, there would be little economic incentive to use it over a water wheels, si…
Some generals would likely find a mobile mill stone quite useful. When your centuria loot a conquered land they can now take raw grains in addition to processed flour without being tied down to the local stationary mills.
Something that continually just blows my mind is how new spinning wheels are. The most plausible range of time of arrival of the wheel in European contexts is between the mid-1200s to about 1340, which means that textiles produced previously to that were made with drop spindles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spindle_(textiles)#Hand_spindl... That includes things like clothing, but it also includes more staggering ide…
Consequently, spinning thread may have been the single most frequently performed work-task in the ancient world (the various farming tasks being more varied and more seasonal, while spinning was being done continuously all year round). We tend to think of the pre-modern world as a world of farmers (and it was) but we ought just as well to think of it as a world of spinnners.
I had no idea! From https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...
The spinning wheel started out being three times more productive (at a somewhat reduced quality) and then, within a century or two, ten times more productive than the previous method.
Needless to say, a reduction in labor time potentially close to an order of magnitude in the most labor-intensive part (again, c. 80% of the labor time!) of textile production had enormous economic impacts (...). English cloth production tripled (measured by weight) between 1315 and 1545 and cloth produced per capita increased five-fold.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you wouldn't be building a steam engine with the tools of Greek artisans in antiquity, not even the ones who built the Antikythera mechanism. But we do know some things that would seem like crazy hacks to the ancients. For example, I know a simple trick. I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. This would have blown the minds of a learned Roman o…
> I can multiply numbers, of arbitrary size. And I can do it in a few seconds using just a stylus and tablet. So could a Roman or Greek. He'd just need a counting board and some stones. He could probably do it faster than you, as well. Anyone using an abacus today could perform almost exactly the same algorithms, with the added convenience of having beads on rods in a frame instead of an unwieldy counting board and s…