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Ah yes and during the enlightenment who led the charge? This is such a naive comment… look at what religious cultures used to do prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans. That was the norm prior to the dark ages. During the dark ages, they developed a wealth of technology. The challenge more had to do with the plague, famines, raids from the nords / Muslims, etc A…
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> prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans. Even if you would consider the Romans to engage in explicit ritual human sacrifice they just weren’t within five orders of magnitude of the Aztecs. We have less than ten attested instances of Roman human sacrifice ever. Human sacrifice was the irreducible core of the Aztec religion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religi…
Interesting points, although I’m not sure what they have to do with European history or invention of the steam engine. I can only presume you’ve benefited from a level of liberal arts education that I sorely lack.
Wikipedia and the library are available to you too.
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So why did it not win? The answer. Slaves. Slaves in the mines, slaves in the home, slave driving the rowboats and all services. Labour was cheap and plenty, also intelligent - with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed. Which goes to show, that technology stratifyng society strangles itself, by producing a servant class outcompeting all technology. Give it a hundred years and the "natu…
Isn't that kind of the other way around? Ignoring the obvious moral question, in a primarily agrarian economy slave labor is useful because it's relatively easy to control and there is no need for specialization. OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them.
In its essence slavery is an exchange of labor deal where the buying party has it way better than the selling party.
I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided.
However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available forests that they were forced to turn to inferior coal fired steel.
But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better. In the end, you had steel that was drastically cheaper than before. Cheap enough to build boilers.
I think people make the mistake of thinking the steam engine kicked off the industrial revolution. But I believe the spark was cheap metal. And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.
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When we're talking about industrial revolution type of stuff, there is a whole train of dependencies that I suspect would have been difficult to speed up a lot. Maybe if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed though you could make arguments both ways given the Roman Empire as a slave society didn't necessarily need a lot of labor saving devices. The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the will to put the…
The use of the word dependencies in this context is perfect. Untangling the history of technological innovation is an adventure into dependency hell.
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>OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them. Really? Leaving aside the moral issues most associated with slavery specifically, there is a huge demand in modern industrialized society for all sorts of low cost human labor. If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.
> If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so. They absolutely could if there was any political desire to allow temporary low skilled immigration. In practice this doesn’t seem to be compatible with democracy. Singapore is not a shining light of labour rights or democracy but their government does have to pay attention to pub…
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Fixed-wing flight is one. I remember that being a point in the aviation exhibit at the London Science Museum. Nothing was stopping people from building hang-gliders in at least the Renaissance, maybe earlier? But everyone was fixated on flapping wings. I think one of the Assassin’s Creed games plays with the idea, having Leonardo build a hang-glider for the main character.
Unpowered gliders tend to need aerofoils which is a pretty advanced concept that took us a while to get right