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

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

#41

Post by shagie »

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…

While science fiction, the Safehold series by David Weber gets into this. As the series opens, everything is made by its own guild/foundry to the point of cannon balls for one ship wouldn't work on another because of the lack of standardization. Guns (muskets) where such that if a part broke you needed a gunsmith to craft a new part for it... which might have slightly different dimensions so it was best if it didn't break in the first place.

As part of the foundations for rapid technological advancement, standard weights and lengths were put into place by the crown... and that then allowed the foundries and factories which made the parts to specialize instead of needing a master gunsmith to craft each part for each gun, you could have many lightly trained people making the parts and then the gunsmiths only needed to assemble it.

At a point later in the series, one of the characters on the other side of the war demonstrates this by taking three rifles and disassembles them, and then reassembles a working rifle with parts randomly selected from the different three disassembled rifles and asks his leadership if that was something that they would be able to do (it wasn't).

This in turn allowed for tighter tolerances for the weapons of war which then in turn meant more powerful weapons and being able to out produce larger nations even with a smaller industrial base.

Consider the question then of "at what point in the history of the world could you take three rifles made by the same maker and swap parts and still have it be perfectly serviceable?"

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

#42

Post by wongarsu »

somecommit wrote: post #29

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 peo…

> 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?

Railways predate steam locomotives by about 250 years [1], or 200 years if you only count overland railways (as opposed to their use in mines). They were mainly used for transporting coal. You could argue that replacing the horses with steam engines was a very straightforward idea as soon as it was technologically feasible.

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

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

#43

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

sumtechguy wrote: post #33
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…

There is that also a matter of economics too. For example take the iPhone. All the bits for an iPhone were in place easily 10 years before that. Yet we did not have it. It took breaking the idea of paying 40 bucks a megabyte, or before that some amount of money per min to talk on land line and over the air. Once those two things were 'gone' we got what we consider a modern cell phone. Sometimes it means taking away t…

I think you're underestimating the amount of innovation required to make the original iPhone.

The hardware required an extremely thin battery, a super-efficient processor, a high quality display with a built-in capacitative sensing grid, robust(ish) glass, and very small carrier, WiFi, and Bluetooth hardware.

The visible software required a good touch OS with a secure file system, while the underlying carrier stack relied on data compression and adaptive line quality innovations, under a complex mix of networking protocols.

The productisation required a complex logistics chain that sourced raw materials and converted them into phones at unprecedented scale with extreme precision.

Very little of this existed in 1997. ADSL was just starting to be a thing, WiFi was still fairly exotic, and most people were still using dial-up. Windows 95 was everywhere and OS X hadn't been invented yet. Most phones used GPRS.

Products like the Nokia Communicators might look somewhat iPhone like, in a bricky way, but they just didn't offer the same intuitive pocket-sized touch screen benefits.

Modern phones are very literally the summary of modern materials science, microelectronics, comms and data compression theory, industrial engineering, and some CS, in a package that hides the physics and engineering in an almost effortless way.

They seem simple, but they're anything but.

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

#44

Post by throwawayffffas »

red_admiral wrote: post #13

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

Just came here to link this.

Tldr: There was no use case for low power steam engines in the ancient/roman world. There was no know-how on building high pressure vessels that would allow higher power steam engines (this know-how was gained by work on cannons).

The key use case for the first practical engines was draining coal mines, in the ancient/roman world this was not a big problem because most of their energy was from wood not coal.

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

#45

Post by rofrol »

photochemsyn wrote: post #32

Author has an interesting point of view, I always assumed that the issue was the quality of the steel available at the time was too low to prevent explosive failure under pressure or collapse under vacuum: > "Now, one might suggest that Petty and Kalthoff simply lacked the tools or materials to make sufficiently strong and precisely fitting vessels and pipes. But I highly, highly doubt this." This issue has been hist…

Similar comment here:

The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel. Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment of successful railroads.

Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a modest iron and steel industry.

A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000 experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough heat and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore, leaving pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a "double carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish mountains" which was iron, 86…25; manganese, 8…50; and carbon, 5…25. Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are thus put back into the molten iron, and steel comes out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611002

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

#46

Post by scythe »

photochemsyn wrote: post #32

Author has an interesting point of view, I always assumed that the issue was the quality of the steel available at the time was too low to prevent explosive failure under pressure or collapse under vacuum: > "Now, one might suggest that Petty and Kalthoff simply lacked the tools or materials to make sufficiently strong and precisely fitting vessels and pipes. But I highly, highly doubt this." This issue has been hist…

>This issue has been historically researched with respect to artillery development, which seems to have been mostly bronze up until the 18th century, when reliable iron/steel artillery was introduced.

But then couldn't they have simply made steam engines out of bronze? It might be more expensive, but it's certainly enough to demonstrate the concept.

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

#47

Post by derekp7 »

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…

The question I have is how did mega projects in ancient times (such as the Pyramids) get enough people to work on them, and still have enough food to feed them? Or were the people on those projects (and other city-building projects at that time) only less than 5 percent of the total population?

Also, is that 95% that are spending the majority of their time on food production? Or is that including people that spend a lot of time on fall harvest and spring planting, but don't do much else during off seasons?

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

#48

Post by virtualritz »

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 the 80's my uncle, a trained mechanical engineer, tried to build a working scale small gauge steam locomotive at home for fun. He was a train geek. I reckon it was maybe 1/16 scale or the like.

He machined all parts on his Emco Unimat II, a 70's hobbyist convertible lathe. The final piece was beautiful.

Ultimately the kettle couldn't build up enough steam because of tolerances of parts.

He machined the resp. parts from scratch with more rigor. A year later, the 2nd version moved half a meter before it stopped for the same reasons.

I remember his swearing and disappointment. But then he explained calmly to my cousin and me why he couldn't do any better w/o an investment into heavier, more precise and much more expensive tools. Too expensive for a hobbyist.

Go figure.

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

#49

Post by _trampeltier »

sumtechguy wrote: post #33
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…

There is that also a matter of economics too. For example take the iPhone. All the bits for an iPhone were in place easily 10 years before that. Yet we did not have it. It took breaking the idea of paying 40 bucks a megabyte, or before that some amount of money per min to talk on land line and over the air. Once those two things were 'gone' we got what we consider a modern cell phone. Sometimes it means taking away t…

I never understood, why there was no Palm with phone in the mid 90s.

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

#50

Post by scythe »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #5

Often multiple inventors arrive at the same idea at almost the same time, for example Edison and Swan for the light bulb, Meucci and Bell (among others) for the telephone, Tesla and Marconi for radio, the Wrights and many others for the airplane etc. possibly because the technological and social level of society has reached a certain point in its development when the "time is ripe" for a given invention. As Charles F…

The light bulb was first developed by Sir Humphry Davy eighty years before Edison. The only problem was that it was made of platinum, which turns out to be impractical. Edison's great achievement was making it affordable enough for everyone to get one.
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