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Comment by ilinx | Hacker News Reader

Comics aren’t typically my genre, but I love this concept. I’m not really qualified to comment on the historical plausibility of anything, but I did have one thought: In many cases there were more complicated reasons why a technology took so long to develop. For example, the difficult thing about wheeled carts wasn’t inventing the wheel, it was the ability to manufacture a straight axle long enough. It might be cool to see some of that explored. For example, the steam engine you teased would be really interesting to me because it necessitates a boiler that can withstand that kind of pressure. Or, I’d also probably enjoy it if it took some liberties and just had fun with the concept. It’s the sort of thing I daydream about all the time. I just think the idea is fun. I don’t know how much it’s been done before, but it’s a cool idea! I really think I would read this.

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The steam engine took along time to develop for exactly that reason. You needed something that was big and strong enough for it. https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-steam/

The Bessemer Process, as well, allowed better steam engines. Like it or not, human advances follow at a fairly linear level where, indeed, former advances inform the latter. It's not necessarily so that we lost a bunch of information during the so-called "Dark Ages," it's more that humans then focused on a different set of objectives that nevertheless had a lot of scientific advances unto themselves.

I think it's a lot less linear than often imagined. we took a somewhat weird path through physics due to trusting Aristotle blindly for ~1.5k years. it seems totally plausible that if we reran humanity, gravity, basic E&M, ideal gas law etc all get figured out much earlier.

The crankshaft, which is fundamental for a steam engine, was developed in the so-called "Dark Ages".

A fun fact is that the steam engine in England was originally developed to pump water out of mines, where flooding was a frequent problem.

Technological revolutions aren't just driven by opportunity, but also practical need; mine draining was the first "killer app" for steam that let it catch on because it solved a real problem and allowed it to be proven as a concept.

But England was also in a unique position in other ways: It had natural resources like coal and iron, as well as rivers to efficiently transport these, a stable government, and relatively high wages compared to mainland Europe, which served as an incentive to replace workers (and animals) with machines. All of these stars aligned at the right time for steam to become a viable entrepreneurial project, which simply wasn't the case in, say, Germany or France.

And if you have a wheel without a wide axle... then you can build narrow paths instead of roads! [1] (so much for establishing rail gauges)

1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-...

Yes, exactly! Even the simplest printing press needs a screw, a nut, and movable types, each one is its own little invention. To make just those three things, they need good metalworking skills, a way to make threads that fit together, and tools to shape the letters. So even one simple machine like the most basic printing press depends on a bunch of other smaller breakthroughs. That’s what makes it so fun to think about, every step opens the door to ten more.

One of the key components of metal movable type printing presses is an appropriate ink. The concept of using a press to print on paper was well known for 100's of years across the world from China to Europe. Movable type had even been invented earlier, often using wood or ceramics instead of lead. Getting the ink right to work with metal type was not simple and recipes used by various printers were considered trade secrets (though obviously leaked as printing spread widely and rapidly).

Many inventions are like this. They seem simple in hindsight, but at the time, required putting together tools, techniques, materials and insight from multiple sources. There's an old BBC TV show called "Connections" that explores the origins of many modern technology and the often strange paths that led us there. For example, without people loving perfume, internal combustion engines might have taken decades longer to have been developed.

One of the fun things about writing fiction is that I don’t have to stick to the natural flow of events the way history actually unfolded.

Kind of like how some countries in Africa skipped landlines and went straight to mobile phones, I can let the Romans stumble onto just the right ink recipe a bit early.

Yeah, but the Africans involved didn't invent the phones.

I've always found it fascinating with the history of the Industrial Revolution that it wasn't so much about technology, as about the exact right circumstances arising so that the technology could be used and improved. There had to be industrialists, an industry that needed the invention badly enough and people rich enough to be able to gamble on the unproven inventions. The technology itself (as others have said) rests on the shoulders of multiple layers of giants. The society had to be willing to change, and cope with the new inventions and their social consequences (Britain nearly wasn't, as the Luddites showed, and both China and Japan sealed themselves off from foreign inventions to preserve their societies unchanged).

From what I know of late Roman society, it was stratified and fixed, an oligarchy. Any threat to the patrician class would not have been accepted, and the patrician class had no reason to change. This is different from 18th Century Britain where the rising merchant class were challenging the remnants of the feudal peerage, who didn't have enough power to stop them.

I think your premise is interesting, but only as fiction.

Agreed, this is a work of fiction, after all. But what if I put a few traders or patricians on the brink of bankruptcy? That would create the right incentives. Then I give them just enough tools to dig themselves out. Things might start to shift from there.

Yeah, but how do the other patricians react to that?

The Industrial Revolution changed British society, moving power from the feudal aristocracy to the new merchant class. It could only happen in a time where the feudal aristocracy were weakened (this is relatively shortly after the English Civil War). And also when the working class was not so powerful - the Luddites also resented the changes created in British society.

I think you could work with this, though - have the Forum discussing the changes, some backstabbing and politics about who gets licenses to use the new technology, who profits from it, who gets their traditional livelihoods destroyed. And introduce the Roman version of the Luddites - peasants deprived of their ancestral livelihoods by the new technologies.

In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge had a post-singularity think tank using FTL comms to talk to a group on a medieval-tech planet, teaching them how to speedrun through developing an industrial-era tech tree. There was an entire academic discipline that studied the fastest ways to uplift a pretechnological society.

'Recruit a bunch of people to study rocks. Use acid and scratch tests to figure out which ones can be smelted for valuable elements. Recruit a bunch of people to study making alloys. Form an R&D team to develop precision lathes. Invent index cards and file catalogs.'

I also believe that a lot of simple ideas require the right context. A bike could be made out of wood long ago, but without very flat roads you cannot ride very far without getting exhausted.. meanwhile in the 19th, it was a lot nicer and obvious idea.

Same with textiles: automating weaving wasn’t the critical jump; automating spinning was.

Before the Saxony (flyer) spinning wheel was developed and spread through Europe in the late Middle Ages, about 9-10 spinners using hand spindles were required to keep one weaver in sufficient yarn (thread), and that includes the most tedious part of weaving, dressing the loom. Such was the need for yarn that most girls and women spun hours a day - possible while waiting for something to cook, watching children, walking around the village (I was able to spin while walking within a few weeks of learning)

Even with spinning wheels, there were still more people spinning than weaving. There were advances in loom technology in the early 1700s that increased the spinner to weaver ratio again. It wasn’t until Arkwright’s Water Frame that a powered device could reliably spin yarns strong enough to be warp; the Spinning Jenny that preceded it produced less-strong yarns.

Anyhow, ACOUP has a really great textiles series that shows some of that math. TL;DR - it’s all about the spinning (and the picking and combing)

Just finished the spinning and weaving post on the ACOUP blog, absolutely brilliant. So much depth packed into it, and every bit of it feels valuable. One of the best breakdowns I’ve ever read on how labor shaped everyday life. Thanks for this.

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