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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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 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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Imagine if you were living in this period - England was constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology, they needed certain political rights that didn't exist to previous humans. The rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, sell across markets - things that lay people didn't have access to in earlier eras. And most importantly, courts that would enforce said rights for you!

And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.

Rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, and sell across markets were extant across different civilizations throughout history.

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.

The problem is that (early) Medieval Europe has lost much of that.

Romans built blocks of dwelling houses 5-6 stories high, houses with central heating, and running water delivered to their cities (and wealthier homes) by systems of aqueducts and pipes, etc. These are things that we associate with 19th or even 20th century in large parts of Europe.

Sadly, their social institutions, even as famous as the republic, were also not practiced and even forgotten for long centuries. Much of the Enlightenment was fueled by re-reading and re-understanding of classic Greek and Roman works, which felt fresh and mind-expanding at the time.

> Sadly, their social institutions, even as famous as the republic, were also not practiced and even forgotten for long centuries.

I mean, the main social institutions that underpinned all the others in Rome were massive human trafficking and looting operations. The enlightened Greeks weren't any better.

My personal guess is that we would've had the industrial revolution thousands of years earlier if these groups we like to glorify in our history books would've laid off the enslaving, murder, and robbery.

Its hurts that people like you are here solely to make others throw out the baby with the bathwater. MLK JR was a baptist. Do i have to hate him because of the baptists' pro-life stance? JKF was a kennedy; do i have to hate the civil rights act because of his illgotten wealth?

On the one hand, you have a family that smuggled alcohol and a person who has religious views I don't hold. On the other hand you have people who, as a civilization, committed unapologetic genocide, rape, robbery, and founded their economic system on human trafficking . Personally I don't see how these are remotely comparable.

I'm not saying the Greeks and Romans didn't have any merits at all. Can we learn some things from them? Sure. Do we have to call them 'great,' and aspire to be like them? Absolutely not.

I would not undersell the late middle ages. It was a complex society with sophisticated economics and social structures. Just to pick one example European warfare was highly organized by the late 1400s and enabled them to found huge empires overseas.

Late middle ages / early Enlightenment, say, 14-15 centuries, were very cool in their special way, with very complex social structures. ThInge like the Hanseatic league, the great geographical discoveries and conquests, the beginning of modern science, the flourishing of arts — this all required highly advanced society, compared to, say, what Charlemagne or (imaginary) king Arthur would have.

The very concept of "the Middle Ages" in Europe tends to muddle our thinking.

Life in 700 AD was completely different from life in 1400 AD. Cities, population density, building styles, international trade, weapons and warfare, agricultural methods, secular institutions - almost nothing stayed the same.

People tend to even forget that the official definition of "the Middle Ages" stretches back into the Dark Age, where kings were more like chieftains, castles basically unknown, even most of the clergy struggled to read and write, and a typical member of the elite warrior class looked nothing like a stereotypical knight.

I'm not familiar with the Chola but one problem the Arab world had during this period was their equivalents of corporations dissolved upon the death of any of the principals. For a trade expedition that might last a year or two this is a perfectly sensible arrangement. But not for large mills or foundries requiring multiple principals to build and run and which might last decades and which can't be easily divided.

Another one is that ancient Mediterranean traders used what were essentially futures contracts to trade wheat and other grains.

We tend to underestimate how complex even pre Bronze Age kingdoms were. To rule them, our ancestors came up with an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts.

> an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts

I seem to find that this is still the best way to communicate.

So long as we keep updating the symbols from time to time, such that that they don't deviate too much from other means of communications.

Symbols are always lossy, they cannot be relied on even in the best case. I think what matters are the games we play with them.

I largely agree with this.

But I still think there was something unique about the legal entitlements in 17th century England that didn't really exist in previous eras. Previous versions of complex structures were still family oriented, or had to put up with local power brokers, or were a fiefdom unto themselves.

Like, you didn't see James Watt build a fort and hire goons to protect his assets. But that would have been a completely normal requirement of establishing an organization in the Roman world.

I'm having a really hard time understanding your observation, or how to apply it.

What was unique about legal entitlements 1600s England that wasn't in, say, 1600s Netherlands?

Like, why doesn't the Dutch East India Company count?

Or quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine#Free_miners :

> The organizational structure of Falun Mine created under the 1347 charter was advanced for its time. Free miners owned shares of the operation, proportional to their ownership of copper smelters. The structure was precursor to modern joint stock companies, and Stora Enso, the modern successor to the old mining company, is often referred to as the oldest joint stock company still operational in the world.[2]

I'm largely thinking about why the Industrial Revolution couldn't be cooked up during, like, the Roman period despite there being many places with a similar set of ingredients.

My point isn't that England was first or best at these things, but the chronology of these things coming first was essential for the puzzle pieces coming together.

You're walking very close to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

English is an unusual European language using "did" to express some negatives, like "I didn't want it" instead of "I want it not", and with a relatively insignificant gender system in the grammar.

Maybe that was part of the puzzle.

Or perhaps Anglicanism was part of the puzzle.

Or the wealth from colonial exploitation and slavery that was used to fund these projects.

For that matter, when Watt developed his steam engine, Scottish "colliers and salters [were] in a state of slavery and bondage" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Slavery_and... , so there's another puzzle piece. That surely seems like part of the legal entitlements you refer to, albeit in Scotland instead of England.

Or, as English people 150 years ago argued, the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Scottish races -- a puzzle piece that biology has conclusively shown does not exist.

How do you know which puzzle piece is relevant enough to the puzzle, vs. a happenstance?

The travails of the early inventors in Britain are tragicomic in terms of the opposition they faced.

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.

If you read English literature from the mid-18th century there doesn't seem to have been a sense that they were in the late stages of humanity. People were adaptable and accustomed to tolerating hardships that would shock most of us. Yes, the large trees had mostly been cut down but they were able to import enough lumber for essential construction projects.

One of the most important, but that people forget very often. They needed to right to have strange ideas without being chased down and killed due to them.

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.

The Europe science and engineering moved into England much before the economical activity

interesting- I haven’t heard of this view before. can you give some examples?

History of corporations: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40697762

(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.

I think your 15th century date is for a book describing double-entry bookkeeping, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Della_mercatura_e_del_mercante...

Regarding its invention, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping#Histo... says:

> The earliest extant accounting records that follow the modern double-entry system in Europe come from Amatino Manucci, a Florentine merchant at the end of the 13th century.

and lists precursors under "Other claimants".

England may have run out of trees but Canada hadn't.

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.

> You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

So which great invention is just around the corner now?

> at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.

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.

> And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.

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

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 as a fuel over the course of 1570-1600, but this was for domestic use. Industrial use lagged many decades behind, with iron very much last - long after glassmaking, saltmaking, brewing, and even baking.

When the English iron industry struggled to adapt to rising fuel prices, the overwhelmimg response was just to import it from Sweden. And that was especially the case with the steel industry, which didn’t really take off in England until the breakthroughs of the mid-18thC (long after Newcomen or Savery).

If there’s evidence I’m missing, however, I’d very much like to know.

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.

I'm specifically thinking of the period in the early 18th century with the Darby family.

Yup, I figured. Plausibly fits for Wilkinson and Watt (though I have my doubts). Doesn’t fit for Savery and Newcomen, the subject of my piece.

Railroads were widely deployed without steel. Serious railroad deployment started in 1830 [1], using cast and wrought iron. Not until the 1880s was steel available at low cost. It's amazing how far they got with crappy materials.

> But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better.

A Bessemer converter is very simple. It's basically a big iron vessel lined with bricks and mounted on a pivot so it can be tilted and poured. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Inputs are mostly coal, iron ore, and limestone, along with compressed air and some additives, but making good steel from those is tricky. The person who got this right, after about 10,000 tries, was Robert Mushet, who is mostly forgotten.[2]

Could that have been done earlier? Maybe. Probably not before analytical chemistry. The detailed composition of the inputs has a huge influence on what you get out in steelmaking. Before Mushet, the output from steelmaking was kind of random and often bad.

(1830 was when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway started operation. This was when railroads got out of beta and started changing the world. Before then, it was mostly one-off mine-haulage systems and prototypes. The Liverpool and Manchester finally got it right. They had regular service with multiple steam locomotives of a common design, double track lines, stations, signals, timetables, and tickets. At last, a production-ready product. This is what allowed the Industrial Revolution to scale.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forester_Mushet

Sounds like energy production recently. While oil was cheap enough we had no reason to invest in cleaner tech. Even the threat of climate change isn’t enough. It’s only when oil gets real expensive that we invest in alternatives.

Imagine all of those minds that went into oil extraction and where else they could have been better spent over the years. I know turbines really leveraged computer models to achieve such stunning efficiency, but in all honesty I don't think it would have taken much past the 70s for us to have achieved nuclear / renewables at similar energy output as oil / gas at the same timeframe if we didn't have the shortcut available for so long.

A lot of very smart people went into nuclear up to the 80's. It didn't make much of a difference.

People severely underestimate the impact computers have on our society and the dynamism of the current day R&D. Even here on HN.

Oil extraction engineering has a pretty phenomenal return on investment. If oil sells at 100 dollars per barrel, that's 600 dollars per cubic meter. If you produce a cubic meter per second (1/200th of world production), that's 50 million dollars per day.

But certainly, nuclear or renewables could have been developed more and earlier.

The role of materials in technological innovation, and the technological prerequisites of those materials, is hugely underappreciated IMO.

Until roughly 8,000 years ago, the only materials available were those found in (near) finished form in nature: stone, wood, bone, grass and fibres, ceramics (requiring firing), concrete (typically also), and metals with low melting points.

There'd have been some glues / resins (bone, tree-sap, and a few other compounds).

A huge part of what creates impressions of times and periods over the past 400 or so years is the gradual introduction of new materials: glass, finished bricks, wrought iron, steel, and in the case of textiles, the emergence of synthetics beginning in the late 19th century (celluloid, viscose, and eventually Nylon and polyester).

The development of cheap high-quality steel, and later aluminium, titanium, and other difficult-to-produce metals, has had a huge impact.

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 battery technology. Right now the best system can run at half the performance you need for 30 minutes and gets really hot.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/matthew-ball/

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 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.

>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.

I like this lens, although I'd stop short of saying it's "most" technology revolutions. Rather, it's a counterweight to the common perspective that revolutions are made of radical novelty; the reality is that both forces are important.

My favorite example of this is the home computer. When they came out, they barely did anything; in a world where a "computer" already meant (in some cases) a nice Unix system with editors and compilers and preemptive multitasking and all the sorts of things we still take for granted, they were more like Arduinos. Absolute rubbish. And yet, university researchers abandoned their mainframes in droves to do their data processing on silly little home PCs. Why? Because crappy though they were, they represented freedom. You didn't have to plead to be allowed time on one, or worse hand over your batch FORTRAN program on a giant stack of punched cards (don't drop them) to some overworked secretary in "data processing" and wait a whole business day to get your printout of "error on line 5". Buy a microcomputer, and your allocated time was 24h/day, and your data turnaround was instant. You could even write your thesis on one - bye bye typewriter!

Worse (i.e. cheaper) is better.

> 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 tractive effort/force and looked for the most powerful diesel and most powerful steam.

EMD SD70ACe-T4 - diesel-electric - 200,000 pounds-force (890 kN) starting, 175,000 pounds-force (778 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC (478 built)

GE AC6000CW - diesel-electric - 188,000 pounds-force (836 kN) starting; 166,000 pounds-force (738 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_AC6000CW (317 built)

by comparison:

Erie Class P-1 - steam - 176,256 pounds-force (784 kN) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplex_locomotive (10 built) ("high tractive effort, but low speed, about 10 mph, over short distances" .. "the Triplexes produced huge amounts of tractive effort (TE) that may have been the highest of any steam locomotives before or since").

XA Triplex - steam - 166,600 pounds-force (741 kN) compound - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-8-8-4 (1 built) ("unable to sustain a speed greater than five miles an hour, since the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce")

Power isn't the only factor. Steam engines produce the most power when just starting, which helps explain why the most power steam engines were also so slow.

(Something like the Union Pacific Big Boy had less tractive force, at 135,375 lbf, much higher speeds, topping out at 80mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy)

Going back to your thesis, in researching this I came across the Kaufman Act, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_Act , which banned steam engines in New York city due to pollution problems. Originally it required electric propulsion, but was amended to allow diesel when that proved viable, and that in turn provided a stepping stone toward dieselization of US trains.

Diesel trains are not worse polluters than steam, so your thesis doesn't really seem applicable.

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.

Except the Kaufman Act link points out that diesels were introduced in NYC because the didn't pollute like steam locomotives.

That doesn't fit OP's thesis at all.

Definitely not current diesel trains, but maybe gp is referring to when they were first introduced.

The sentence uses "Diesel trains are" and "steam trains of yore were" - past vs. present.

Take the 2-8-0, which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-0 comments:

> From its introduction in 1866 and well into the early 20th century, the 2-8-0 design was considered to be the ultimate heavy-freight locomotive. The 2-8-0's forte was starting and moving "impressive loads at unimpressive speeds" and its versatility gave the type its longevity. The practical limit of the design was reached in 1915, when it was realised that no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement. ...

> During World War II, 14 of these locomotives were equipped with superheaters, which raised their tractive effort from 28,777 lbf (128.0 kN) to 33,557 lbf (149.3 kN)

Then compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_E3 , a diesel from 1938 with "Tractive effort Starting: 56,500 lbf".

That's from time when people became convinced that diesel was better than steam. Why? Quoting https://www.american-rails.com/diesel.html

> This changed after General Motors successfully demonstrated the diesel's viability during testing of its FT freight design in 1939.

> The demonstrator set toured the country, convincing skeptic after skeptic that diesels were not only efficient and reliable but could also outperform the iron horse.

Not simply because it was dirt cheap.

Stats at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_FT . The top speed of 95 mph is 15 mph higher than the Union Pacific Big Boy.

Note also "Steam locomotives could be built with fewer precious materials, and with less conflict with military needs.", which is yet another factor that OP's thesis didn't consider.

Did you catch things like "no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement" and from earlier "the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce". These designs were pushing the limit of what steam could do, and diesel looked like it could pass those limits. And did.

While I don't think that cryptocurrency is about to kick off a technological revolution on par with the industrial revolution, it is important to note that the technological advancements that led to here weren't readily apparent when they were invented either, except to slightly zany visionaries. The invention of the automobile for instance was seen for a few decades as a rich person's toy. People usually have small minded views of the implications of new technology, because we look at them through the lenses of the world we live in now.

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.

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.

If robots were way cheaper it would change quite a bit.

> And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.

I've always wondered why some fantasy stories seem to be perpetually locked in pre-industrial technology. This does seem like a plausible canonical explanation if they had fast replenishing resources due to magic.

And also price and availability of pit coal. In 1700 over 80% of the worlds coal was mined in Britain. (from wikipedia)

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