Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II • Hacker News Board

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#241

Post by nradov » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:22 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #178

legitster wrote: post #145

Environmental collapse and the price of steel! 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 fore…

I wonder if there is anything today that would need to come down (or up) in price to kick off a revolution. I've heard some argue that was decentralized payments online (cryptocurrency) but that hasn't led to much outside of speculation IMO. The other thing I heard was battery technology. Just recently a podcast with Matthew Ball, he makes the argument that AR/VR/metaverse technology needs a breakthrough (in part) in…

Better battery technology won't allow mobile device electronics to run cooler. We need more power efficient chips using the upcoming 3 nm process technology.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#242

Post by s1artibartfast » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

eesmith wrote: post #224

legitster wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it. Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money. LCD screens did not produce as good of a picture quali…

> Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money. Am I missing something? It looks like hundreds of diesel-electric locomotives are more powerful than the most powerful steam engines ever made. I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_locomotives then sorted by t…

I assume they meant that the diesel trains were not as powerful when first implemented, but they were cheaper.

It fits with their other examples much better.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#243

Post by zabzonk » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #232

zabzonk wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually many gliders, such as thosed used by the nascent Luftwaffe when they were banned from real aircraft used things like rubber bands and human towing to launch, and I can remember ground-based winches being used to launch RAF cadet planes when I was a kid.

I'm not arguing that ground-launching gliders isn't possible. I'm saying that having an airworthy craft once you're off the ground takes some doing, and it's probably easier to get there if you're experimenting with powered craft. The early powered heavier-than-air craft were not especially aeronautically sound. But with the ability to perform design-build-test cycles, and not kill overly many pilots in the process,…

Sailplane is basically more wing, isn't it? I don't see how that needs an engine in its past, but I could understand material constraints.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#244

Post by Gibbon1 » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

antonhowes wrote: post #204

legitster wrote: post #145

Environmental collapse and the price of steel! 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 fore…

I don’t think this fits the evidence. At least for the 17thC. People in England did not know how to make good iron with coal, let alone steel, despite many decades of extraordinary government encouragement and special incentives - witness the many, many failed patents that had to be reissued from Sturtevant in 1612 all the way through to the 1660s and beyond. Cities like London made the switch early on to using coal…

I think you are correct. Coal gave Britain a leg up as early as the 14th century but not for steel making. It's fungible though coal was being substituted for burning wood. Which means probably more wood to make steel. Also more land can be used as pasture.

Basically England was boosted by the energy input from coal.

One thing about Sweden for a long time. They had a lot of trees and very high quality iron ore. Which I think is the reason they were so powerful during that period. Sweden cut down all their trees to make steel.

When I think of steam engines I think also of simple franklin stoves and pressure cookers. People tried to make both of those long before steam engines. They are both much more efficient in terms of the amount of fuel consumed but the cost was too high for that to pencil out.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#245

Post by huseyinkeles » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #240

To me the most surprising thing about this series is that de Caus had a working CSP (concentrated solar power) setup by 01615 ( https://antonhowes.substack.com/i/57230676/solar-powered-ste... , original source https://archive.org/details/raisonsdesforce00Caus ). I had thought CSP only dated to Shuman's installation in Egypt in 01913, but I see that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Histo... also…

Out of curiosity, what’s with the dates prefixed by 0?

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#246

Post by davidgay » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:44 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #158

qsort wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very unlikely that slaves would be able to cover any present-day jobs except very menial service tasks. Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver, which is one of the least qualified jobs today.

Slaves did many skilled labor jobs back in the day. In Uncle Tom's Cabin (a book you really should read, but beware the purpose was to make you pick up your gun and march, so if you have those tendencies...) on of the important slaves held a good factory job. Of course most slaves were just hard labor, but they did hold other positions. I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other t…

> I think you can find examples of slaves holding every position in society other than government leader.

Even that one seems available:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokollu_Mehmed_Pasha

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#247

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

fellellor wrote: post #144

qsort wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under compensating someone for their work? Modern industrialised economies have plenty of tools to simulate the effects of slavery. Although without the fun stuff like whipping and other forms of gratuitous cruelty. In its essence slavery is an exchange of labor deal where the buying party has it way better than the selling party.

Not even close!

At its essence slavery is complete ownership of another person. Whether or not you put that person to "work" is a separate issue.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#248

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:49 PM UTC

qsort wrote: post #138

ghaff wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because someone is born into poor circumstances without many options for upward mobility doesn't make them stupid. Furthermore, truck driver isn't a particularly low skill occupation. I couldn't drive an 18-wheeler. Can you? And something like taxi driving mostly seems low skill because most adults in industrialized society have been driving since they were relatively young.

It's not a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote that I'm implying they're stupid.

I think it is. That was pretty much the impression it gave me.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#249

Post by Koshkin » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:52 PM UTC

qikInNdOutReply wrote: post #76

terhechte wrote: post #40

The Greek philosoper Hero of Alexandria actually invented something close to a steam engine in the 1st century BE [1]. Whenever I think about "obvious" inventions which happened quite late in our civilization, I remember "The road not taken", a fantastic short story that plays with this idea. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...

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…

> Labour was cheap and plenty

That is a misconception. Slaves were expensive: one slave was about a soldier's pay for an entire year; and things made using manual labor, too, were very expensive - if you had to buy them, of course.

Re: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

#250

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 8:59 PM UTC

zabzonk wrote: post #243

dredmorbius wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that ground-launching gliders isn't possible. I'm saying that having an airworthy craft once you're off the ground takes some doing, and it's probably easier to get there if you're experimenting with powered craft. The early powered heavier-than-air craft were not especially aeronautically sound. But with the ability to perform design-build-test cycles, and not kill overly many pilots in the process,…

Sailplane is basically more wing, isn't it? I don't see how that needs an engine in its past, but I could understand material constraints.

Imagine you have no idea about aeronautics, controls, lift, thrust, where lift exists, how it works, etc., etc. You have no idea how to actually fly the thing.

Or land it.

So you build your best guess at what a working glider might be. You don't have robotics or radio to remotely control it, so someone's got to fly the thing.

You build a kite flinger and/or ramp or rail to toss it off the side of a building or cliff or whatever.

And then you hope, desperately, that you weren't too terribly mistaken about a great many things.

Franz Reichelt wasn't quite building airplanes, but he turned out to have misjudged his own competence in a somewhat similar manner:

https://allthatsinteresting.com/franz-reichelt

Now consider the same situation, except that you've at least got a motor to buy your way out of design and/or piloting errors, at least a little bit.

Under which of those scenarios do you think actual useful design might have progressed faster?

Keep in mind that people have had the notion of flying with wing-like contraptions dating to the ancient Greeks (see the legend of Icarus). There were numerous inventors who threw themselves off hills or cliffs with various attempts. Lack of power, and the frequent short professional career track of such inventors tended to stymie progress.

Successful gliders and sailplanes almost entirely postdated powered heavier-than-air flight. The first designs appeared after WWI, and practical use didn't appear until the 1930s. My understanding is that popularity of recreational gliding didn't emerge until the 1950s or 1960s, again benefiting from aeronautical engineering, materials, radios, much better knowledge of aircraft operation, controls, and instrumentation.

Glide ratio is one measure of aerodynamic efficiency and sophistication. Early 1930s gliders achieved about a 1:17 ratio. Most modern gliders exceed 1:30, and the best 1:50 or more. This expresses altitude loss per unit foreward travel (e.g., 1 meter loss for 30 meters forward flight).

Google's Ngram viewer is a somewhat fickle guide, but suggests an initial spike in mentions in the late 1930s / 1940s, again in the 1950s, then a third in the 1970s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sailplane&year...

Adding in "glider" (multiplied 10x) still lags "aeroplane" by decades.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28sailplane%2...

There may have been earlier terminology used, and "glider" has other meanings which might confound matches, but at least for "sailplane", the trend line lags "aeroplane" and "airplane" considerably. (I've multiplied "sailplane" results 100x in this plot):

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28sailplane%2...