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Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

antonhowes.substack.com

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Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#21

Post by lordnacho »

jiggawatts wrote: post #14
lordnacho wrote: post #6

I think the reason is best described by Factorio. Yes, with a lot of spaghetti belts and manual crafting, you can make late-stage products. But to do it well, in a way that transcends merely being able to make a handful of items, you need a huge underlying economy. You end up having to re-arrange your whole factory, or you need to clear new land, which means you need to spend some time on diversions like improved mil…

A nice explanation for the "rate of progress" is the percentage of the population that is not involved in the production of food. Since the dawn of humanity up until "very recently" in the grand scheme of things, something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were directly involved in food production. There were the odd shamans, priests, tribal leaders, or what have you, but everyone else made themselves busy hunt…

That's true, but you need to unlock the tech for you to have enough food to feed everyone comfortably. Until it's comfy you have a fragile economy that occasionally falls into famine, so everyone would have to make plans to accommodate that, ie they can't build the pyramid too high.

Your problem also isn't just inventing better methods, you also have to rearrange society to take advantage of this new possibility.

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#22

Post by berkes »

andylynch wrote: post #16
bilsbie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the carberator did this?

Yes, but a key development in carburettor design was an 1880s patent by Maybach and Daimler, based on the principles of an atomiser as used for perfume.

Steam locomotives and other steam boilers used the same principle (Bernoulli). Did Daimler and Maybach say they took inspiration from perfume atomizers? Because it would make more sense if theyt took inspiration from steam engine's injectors.

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#23

Post by mkl95 »

We knew how to make things like Hero's engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) since ancient times, so at least there was some intuition that something like the steam engine could be made, even if it escaped our ability.

When it comes to building steam based devices the biggest difference to people back then is probably our knowledge of thermodynamics, which grew explosively (no pun) since the mid 17th century.

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#25

Post by macintux »

red_admiral wrote: post #13

Relevant recent ACOUP (Brett Deveraux) post: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

That was a compelling read, and to my untutored eye raises more important points than this one. Economics trumps ingenuity.

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#26

Post by ThomPete »

Another question you might ask is why wasn't the computer invented earlier?

Babbage and Lovelace came close but they didn't realize they had (almost) invented a computer they just thought they had invented a calculator. They thought they solved a math problem when in fact they had solved a physics problem.

We could have been traveling between stars by now.

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#27

Post by MeteorMarc »

bitexploder wrote: post #20
cptaj wrote: post #18

An important factor seems to be precision engineering. I saw the point made in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester, where they argue that while all the science and experimentation was there, it wasn't until precision parts were widely available that steam engines really solved all their problems and became viable https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-per…

In particular, the standardization of units and measurements and the lathe. Lathes with accuracy were a tremendously important component of producing steam engines.

But the first lathes could not be steampowered!

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#28

Post by telesilla »

cptaj wrote: post #18

An important factor seems to be precision engineering. I saw the point made in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester, where they argue that while all the science and experimentation was there, it wasn't until precision parts were widely available that steam engines really solved all their problems and became viable https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-per…

This is also cited as the reason the difference engine was not completed.

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#29

Post by somecommit »

My take is that they were not seeing the point to do so for the most easy one (like a mill, a press...) and from the other hand for clearly useful and advanced device like a vehicle/train it's the lack of amount of available combustible and iron. Even a train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly "why" it could be useful, do you really need to go so far with that amount of people? There were so much less people in the past, same for merchandise quantity probably.

But the response in the article about the knowledge of the "vacuum possibility" is also very interesting, it is not mentioning this but it's crazy to think that we only know that the space emptiness is possible since Einstein theory 100 years ago (and not full of ether).

Or that with the first locomotive people feared to die because of the speed.

Re: Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

#30

Post by wongarsu »

MeteorMarc wrote: post #27
bitexploder wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In particular, the standardization of units and measurements and the lathe. Lathes with accuracy were a tremendously important component of producing steam engines.

But the first lathes could not be steampowered!

Almost any stationary machine that can run on steampower can be run on water power instead. Or by horses trotting in a circle, or humans walking in a treadwheel [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane

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