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

I used to use a lot of vintage German cameras. Really right up through the 1950s the tolerances were wide enough that no two cameras were exactly alike. The parts were all replaceable, and there were often adjustments & shims inside to keep things in spec. For example, one camera might have part A that's a little long so it's matching part B would be a little short to compensate. They'd sort it out at the factory where they have the parts bins and could keep trying different part Bs to match the part A installed until they had a close enough match, then shim it.

This was even more so in the 1920s-1940s cameras.

The cameras actually had stickers in the film compartment warning you to send it in for professional service for any repairs. Note the implication that the camera needed frequent enough service that they'd actually bother putting a sticker in it!

So for some we look back on the era as things being user-serviceable and parts replaceable, but it was that way for reasons of manufacturing ability.

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?"

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.

Not that the rebuttal is conclusive; I tend to think that you are closer to being correct than the author's conclusion (which is that the inventors themselves are rare). But I think you would need to specifically address the argument in the article rather than claiming that the article failed to consider this point.

One of the often-overlooked prerequisites for Watt's improvement of the steam engine through the use of an external condenser was the need for a precision cylinder. Then-recent advances in boring machinery for making cannons provided the means, but cannons had been around for centuries before this development came about. Furthermore, while this improvement depended on an advance in precision engineering, Newcomen's steam engine was already eighty years old.

The industrial revolution and its successors depended on the mutually-supporting bootstrapping of several disparate facets of technology, all of which could possibly have started earlier, so it seems unlikely that the timing of the initial spark can be attributed to an until-then absence of just one of them.

It's amazing how many details needed culminate into what now seems a relatively obvious technology.

Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58

I think it's fair to call these mini-documentaries.

The premise of the show is still very actual, even more so with current technologies.

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 hunting, fishing, or farming.

The current ratio in developed countries is something like 1 to 2 percent of the population directly working in farming, and maybe 20 to 30 percent working in "food production". Think workers at the biscuit factory, or chefs in a restaurant.

Everyone else is free to do science, engineering, project management, finance, or whatever.

The difference between 2% of the population free to work on non-food activities and 70% is massive.

This is why so much progress has happened just in the last few centuries.

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 things so others can move into their place. In my example the economics of running a phone company had to change before an innovation could happen.

This is because they were incredibly inefficient, and needed huge amounts of coal. Really the only way to solve the transport problem was to not have to transport the coal at all. As it saw continued value produced, the mechanism was made more efficient, until eventually it was viable to use in certain other places.

However, the transport problem still remained. You could replace muscle power with steam power, but if it still took massive amounts of muscle power to get your coal, that wasn't worth much. The breakthrough here came with stream trains. Now you could use coal to transport your coal. And muscle power was possible to be largely eliminated.

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.

I think it's steam-engine-time, when the steam engine arrives. And gets successfully marketed.

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

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.

I still, without evidence, cling to the notion that external technologies (like advances in precision engineering) held things up, but the article makes a very compelling argument that this is not the case, and that it really was a question of having an individual inventive and ambitious and persistent enough to really attempt to reduce to practice the concepts that were floating around at the time.

Lol, that's pretty much the case today, as anyone who's driven a sports car in traffic, on public streets can attest!

In my public education the steam engine received zero coverage which is a pity because it's development and application spurred so much science and understanding. I've often thought a science curriculum based on the study of steam and work would be particularly enlightening.

There's a very real possibility that liquid rockets would have remained a novelty, just another "Nazi Wunderwaffe" had they all been tried and hung for their crimes instead of pardoned and put to work. Solid rockets were (and are) more than sufficient for all military applications. But to get people into space, you need liquid engines. Would we have ever invented them independently? Very possibly not.

Even if a competent project manager had been in charge, steam-driven mechanical computers would have been extremely expensive, physically large, and very slow. Most of the time, I’d expect special-purpose devices would have been more cost-effective.

The technologies to build electronic computers didn’t exist for another half-century at least.

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

So close! And yet no way to play it back. And trying to come up with some way to play it back seems to have eluded him, and others for a couple decades. Some of de Martinville's recordings have survived, and today software can reconstruct them into almost-intelligible speech and music. They're the oldest known recordings of a human voice.

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

Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 - July 2022 (304 comments)

There were a variety of earlier pieces of farm machines that could be driven by treadmills and belts; steam engines could naturally slot in as a drop-in replacement for the treadmills to power all of your equipment.

Atmospheric engines, WP has a good description and history:

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