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

The Chola merchant guilds had formalized corporate structures that dissipated the risk of long voyages 2000 years ago. Seeing that the Romans traded with the Cholas, the Romans probably had corporate structures too.

Humans have been living in complex societies since the Bronze Age. It’s difficult to run a complex society without some sort of bureaucratic organization.

(Paywalled, but you may be able to find a copy.)

Private land is almost as old as record history. So is selling across markets.

Double entry book keeping was invented in the late 15th century.

All of these existed for centuries before the steam engine.

The Europe science and engineering moved into England much before the economical activity, and as far as I can see, it was mostly because of that one. Some of the greatest minds of the time were literally chased outside of Italy during that move.

Also, it's a right that was missing from most of the world for about a millennium by that time.

So which great invention is just around the corner now?

Yet when you bring up a certain recent improvement to records of entitlement around here, you tend to get crucified. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I wouldn't call the industrial revolution "the greatest moment of human progres". I would call it "the moment that sealed our fate". Climate change, un-renewable resources scarcity, biodiversity collapse, etc. We are headed at a breath-taking rate towards a planet that will be hardly inhabitable for us. We may only subsist as nomadic tribes only a few centuries from now.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kay_(flying_shuttle)

Weavers rioted against his invention. He hardly collected any royalties from his invention in England, and departed for France persona non grata. The French manufacturers also did not pay royalties on the monopoly to the flying shuttle granted him. He died in poverty.

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

He lost a major patent case, which allowed competitors to use his inventions. He did make money because he owned mills himself rather than being a tinkerer like Kay.

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

He was run out of town because his spinning jenny put too many spinners out of work. He moved to the town that bought thread because they welcomed the lower prices. His patent survived but did not stop others from copying.

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

Crompton could not afford to patent the spinning mule, so he open sourced it following promises from manufacturers to pay him a fee. The promises were broken. Crompton never made any money from his invention.

Then, as now, a patent is only worth one's ability to fund litigation.

Hell my own country didn't have any forests left by the 17th century and built ships from Baltic timber. For 300 years the entire world fed European industry with its natural resources. It is why God created Africa.

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 quality as plasma or even HD CRT screens, but they were so cheap and light you can do things like replace signage.

Crypto is weird. Crypto is proving to not be any cheaper than what it supposed to be replacing (currency, securities). But if you think about what crypto is - it's really an escrow service that's so freaking cheap it's being used for dumb things like payments. But I think like how it took a couple decades for people to start figuring out what they could do with cheap steel, I think eventually crypto might genuinely start finding useful applications.

So of course cryptocurrency hasn't led to much beyond speculation. Not to say that it will lead to anything more, but it would be erroneous to discount that possibility off hand. At the very least IMO it will lead to a social revolution, of what magnitude I don't know.

Also I'd note, the industrial revolution really came to the dirty masses with the assembly line, not the invention of the steam engine or the automobile. So analogously with regard to cryptocurrencies, maybe they are the car in this scenario, and the real revolutionary technological advancement that leverages them has yet to be invented. Or, maybe not.

Personally, I think that much like the apparently dire state of the world at the dawn of the industrial revolution led directly to it, the things we think now of as symptoms of Armageddon are probably going to play a large and in hindsight constructive role in whatever comes next. Maybe climate change becomes a crash course in terraforming, or genetic and biome engineering. Trying to predict what happens next is a fools errand but these are fun possibilities to think about.

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.

Untangling the history of technological innovation is an adventure into dependency hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Byzantine_Empir...

Then, just copy and paste the title of the article you want to read into the libgen search bar and you're good to go.

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.

The Romans valued research and engineering highly enough to be way ahead of both contemporary and successor civilisations in many aspects of it and have people willing to document their pure research into steam (which as the article acknowledges, turned out to be at best orthogonal to the pure research that got us pistons and condensing engines), they just didn't have all the intermediate inventions like high quality iron, rail lines and spinning jennies to make large scale use of steam that the British did 1500 years later, the same level of demand and competition for new products etc etc. But the abundance of cheap labour was something they actually had in common with the British Empire; it's just the British Empire used it differently (and displaced even more cheap labour by killing off craft industries as a result)

Which is why our word for the ultimate automaton--the "robot," comes from the Czech robotnik, or forced laborer/slave.

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.

Actually, not a few people did exactly that! If they had used a scaled-up paper plane, they might have lived. Or think of a modern hang-glider, but made from bamboo and silk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Eiffel_Tower_ju...

Midden heaps can also close the gap.

Generally, we only know of landmark size applications of historical technology, which tend to be rare.

What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite#Military_applications

Steering is important though, you need to a) go up, b) go the right place, not back at you, c) come down, again not where you are.

Another thing is topography: Either you have (steep) local elevations as a natural starting point for gliding, but then there is usually not much of an open space to go for a real application. Or there are wide open spaces, but no natural elevations. (Mind Eilmer starting from a tower.) So, even if you know about the principles, there's not much application for human flight, rendering it rather for use as a toy. (There are hints for bird-shaped gliding toys in ancient Egypt. But was there really a human-flight scale application in an all flat landscape like this?)

It's quite good at steady-power output. Throttle response is poor.

Both automobiles and aircraft operate with quite variable power requirements. Though at least for long-range air travel, once the take-off / climb portion of flight has been completed, cruise is typically at a fairly constant setting.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltaplane

The only thing I would change is that this makes it seem like powered flight was waiting on the engine, when it was waiting on the plane.

One thing that struck me at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is how far advanced IC technology was while the Wright brothers were gliding in wooden contraptions. They had turbocharged v12 diesel engines and Benz was already making aluminum engines for cars before the Wright brothers made their first attempt.

I found it fascinating how as soon as flight was demonstrated, it only took a few years to go from a wooden prototype to a sophisticated machine with a very complex engine.

Bonus pic of some of those early engines https://i.imgur.com/mENnuHH.png

It seems to me that for flight the construction materials (silk, bamboo, string, glue - what the early WW1-era aircraft were made from) and the propulsion (solid-fuel rocket) have been around for over a thousand years.

There was a large enthusiastic group of people working on heavier-than-air flight, with with meetings and newspaper publications. The Spectator has an article titled "Flying Motor-Cars" at https://archive.org/details/sim_spectator-uk_1901-08-31_87_3... which comments:

] The mechanical skill of the world, which is very great, greater perhaps than its originality in scientific investigation, is directing itself for the moment to two definite ends, — the construction of an efficient submarine boat, and the invention of a machine that can travel with at least two persons on board through the air.

That the Wright Brothers didn't know Pearse is besides the point - both drew from shared materials, and a lot of people were trying. Here's a couple of reports from the New York Times:

"TO FLY FROM PIKE'S PEAK.; W.F. Felts Tries His New Aeroplane at Different Altitudes. [Aug. 4, 1897] (followed soon by SNOWSTORM ON PIKE'S PEAK.; W. B. Felts Did Not Attempt His Aeroplane Flight Yesterday.)"

Or "EXPECTS TO BE ABLE TO FLY.; Prof. Bell Believes He Has Mastered the Two Great Difficulties of Aerial Navigation.". That's Alexander Graham Bell.

Your [4] even mentions 'The Wright brothers acknowledged [Cayley's] importance to the development of aviation'.

> here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of nowhere

Where do you get that impression?

Here's a children's book from the US about the Wright Brothers. https://archive.org/details/letsflywilburorv00roop/page/36/m...

] In 1896, when he was twenty-five years old, Orville was very sick with typhoid fever and almost died. Wilbur and Katharine cared for him. Wilbur read while sitting with Orville. He read about Otto Lilienthal, who was trying to fly. Lilienthal built gliders and had flown farther than anyone else in the world. But Otto Lilienthal had a gliding accident and died. The Wright brothers were saddened by this news because they admired Mr. Lilienthal and his attempts to fly.

] ... In England, France, the United States, and other countries, people were trying to unlock the mystery of flight.

] ... Wilbur learned all he could about flying. He took every book about it out of the Dayton library. Samuel Langley the head of the Smithsonian Institution, was trying to learn how to fly Wilbur decided to write the Smithsonian. A man there sent Wilbur information.

] The famous engineer Octave Chanute was also experimenting with gliders. Wilbur wrote him, too. Mr. Chanute quickly became a friend of the Wright brothers.

Hardly a vacuum!

Basic hypothesis is that once enough precondition for an invention are there then the leap can be made.

Consider the telephone, which is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in most of the world and to Antonio Meucci in my native Italy. Or radio, which is broadly attributed to Marconi or Tesla. In hindsight it seems like one person triumphed upon others, but really if you look at it from their point of view they work with urgency and secrecy because they perceive themselves to be in neck-to-neck competition with their cohorts. They perceive their technological environ very differently from how we do ex post facto.

Sell it to kings, make bets...

Or accuse people of sorcery, have them burned...

In medieval times we can add turning metal on a lathe and winding crossbows.

Think of the most common German surnames, which are all occupational: Müller (grinding wheat), Schmidt (hammering iron), Schneider (sewing cloth), Fischer (catching fish), Weber (weaving cloth), Meyer (owning land), Wagner (making wagon wheels), Becker (baking bread), Schulz (herding peasants), Hoffmann (organizing the court), Schäfer (herding sheep), Koch (cooking food), Bauer (farming), and Richter (judging). This is a somewhat skewed sampling of occupations of men in Germany at the late-medieval or early-modern time surnames were imposed. If you were a Schmidt or a Weber you could expect to spend decades doing hard, physical labor every day, in a fixed physical location, labor that is now mostly done by steam.

Descartes and Mersenne present a early conflicted aversion to the occult/esoteric/natural magic (eg, topics like resonance). I presume that certain ideas became somewhat taboo. This is one reason why it may have taken so long for the concept of resonance to be adopted widely in the sciences (see Buchanan 2019 in Nature “Going into resonance”)

Laws that protected the IP rights of inventors were absolutely crucial to that process.

I say the big picture is that the steam engine was developed within a legal system that in general protected IP rights, at least respected them on a completely different level than before. Granted there are more pieces to the puzzle, but let's not forget one of the most important pieces.

I went to the world’s oldest continuously operated library today, in Verona. Since 517. Wow.

Saw a copy of Ars Magna Sciendi, from Kirscher.

I'm always a bit split when I see it. Even when used genuinely it still comes off as making the comment feel like it exists to showcase long now instead of the response. On the bright side out of all the things to get over this ranks on the "easy" side of the list.

How efficient is such a device? If Cove's device was 20% efficient it was an unheralded breakthrough, though a toxic one, unlike modern silicon solar panels (contrary to a false statement in the article), and made with relatively expensive materials (antimony isn't just poisonous, it also costs US$11/kg). If it was 2% efficient, it might have been viable in a few niche uses. If it was 0.2% or 0.02% efficient, it was a laboratory curiosity. The article says Cove's prototypes were 2.75% efficient and 5% efficient, producing 45 watts from 1.5m² and 60 watts from 1.125m² respectively, which I calculate as 3% and 5.3% efficient, respectively. But it also says the guy went to jail for a year for defrauding his investors.

But apparently nobody has been able to reproduce Cove's results in the last century.

If you do want to, as the article says, "build low-tech photovoltaic devices, which convert sunlight into electricity", you can get about 1% efficiency out of red copper oxide, another toxic semiconductor like the zinc antimonide intermetallic erroneously described as an alloy in the article; this is a common science fair project for kids, and Wilhelm Hallwachs demonstrated solar panels using this chemistry in 01904, the same year as Cove's first experiments. Toshiba managed to get thin-film red copper oxide PV panels past 8% efficiency last year.

You could probably make something like this a lot more efficient with TCES, eliminating the losses from conduction in the pipes between the power plant and the houses, but that's pretty hard to do with copper pipes. Maybe salt-fired ceramic pipes would work for TCES transfer. But even sensible heat transfer with a copper heat exchanger would probably have worked fine.