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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Women may have done half the labour but they didn't spend all their time weaving cloth and making clothing. You're forgetting about all the food preparation and preservation that women did. Women cooked meals, baked bread, preserved fruits and vegetables, and brewed beer, in addition to all the farm work they did (feeding chickens, collecting eggs, milking cows, working vegetable gardens, harvesting). Of course, women didn't do all of that work alone, they taught their children how to do it and supervised their labour. Large families were preferred because children are inexpensive (cheap to feed and clothe) relative to the labour they produce under proper supervision. Expensive entertainment and education for children was still centuries away.

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Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work.

of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done.

women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids.

you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives.

not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)

The spinning wheel was in use in Europe in the 14th century [1]. That's a lot earlier than "slightly before" the 1800s.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/An_amoro...

History is long - I'd call 14th century slightly before. The end of the medieval period does reach the 14th century, but most of the time period we are talking about didn't have it, and the culture effects of it would (as always) take longer to settle out.

> spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all)

Nope. You can invent it, but if there is no economics to drive its adoption it won't spread.

Medieval thread production and thread consumption was roughly balanced so there was no great economic incentive to engineer it.

A spinning wheel is significant labor from a craftsman which means you need to have excess cash to buy and maintain it--farmers surely didn't have that. In addition, if you suddenly generate 10x the amount of thread, that doesn't mean that it can be consumed--weaving doesn't magically get faster. There isn't a lot of trade beyond a single village, so there is nowhere for excess thread to go in order to become money. All this is even before you have engineering limitations--spinning wheels didn't create great thread for weaving from most fibres.

(Side note: In fact, the excess thread from spinning wheels basically didn't get consumed initially. It just created a surplus of rags. Which then led to printing because there was suddenly a cheap supply of something looking for a usage to consume it all ...)

Contrast this to later: The invention of the flying shuttle suddenly kicked up demand for thread which then needed the spinning jenny which then needed the cotton gin. That was all "demand pull"--there was pent up demand that would result in profit if you could fill it. And, even still, a LOT of "inventors" went bankrupt inventing all those things!

I think you are completely right about demand pull being a deciding factor in adoption of new inventions. Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].

Although I would question if multiple hours of daily labor isn't itself a significant demand pull? I assume everyone wants to free up time spent on monotonous tasks, but maybe this is wrong.

[0] - https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Aeolipile

> Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].

They simply didn't have the metallurgy.

A more interesting question is why China didn't kick off into an Industrial Revolution given that they effectively had all the same technologies and perhaps actually had a few more.

There were some cultural issues like considering philosophy more important than trades and technology. However, the general issue seems to be that demand and supply were balanced enough that there simply wasn't a huge incentive.

> they invented a steam engine[0]

The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.

The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.

> steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode

That's an interesting insight. I had not thought about the possibility of a scientific understanding of pressure developing prior to the steam engine. If you have some pointers to read up on this, I'd love to learn more.

Also, there were demands for pumps in antiquity, particularly in hydraulics. Lot's of labor was invested in building aqueducts and underground waterways. I always saw the Aeolipile as a tech demo showing that heat can be used as a power source for mechanical motion, but this is probably because I live after the steam machine, knowing it's true potential. I've long wondered why the idea wasn't expanded upon by the Romans or later the Greeks or Egyptians, but I suppose it wasn't convincing enough on its own.

I don't have specific links to this but it's more general reading of tech / military history over the years. I'd love to see a definitive study of the tech tree behind steam engines, but I do know that making bullets/shells precisely fit gun barrels took a long time, and this is analogous to making pistons in engines that don't lose pressure. The first mine-pumping steam engines were the size of small houses and stupidly inefficient, but, assuming lots of coal, they were still cheaper than having people / animals working water pumps all day. And they provided a good opportunity for engineers to properly iterate the technology with commercial pressure. They had a lot to learn though trial and error about how to optimise the things, e.g. adding condensing chambers that separated out initial water heating from power generation. This was all way beyond what the Romans could have achieved.

As you say, with retrospect we can see the Aeolipile as a tech demo, but at the time it was an interesting novelty with zero practical application.

Historians have come up with a lot of theories. There is no way to answer for sure though. General thought is they didn't even try because they had slaves they could force to do the hard labor, so there was not point. England developed steam engines in a world where slaves didn't exist. The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology as a society like England did, and so they mostly didn't try to develop technology (except as it related to winning wars - anyone who wins wars was a big deal)

However it isn't clear if the Romans could have developed the metals needed even if they tried. There are a lot of parts to better metal alloys that they didn't know and trial and error is a slow process when you don't have why something didn't work.

> The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology

The Romans were engineers par excellence.

They worked both steel and glass in this time frame. Look at how they built Pompeii for the local conditions. They built the Colosseum with lead clamps and rebar to prevent it from collapsing with earthquakes (it eventually collapsed because everybody stole the valuable lead as Rome failed). Their art was better than anything produced until the Renaissance happened. I can go on and on ad nauseam.

Romans most certainly did not look down on engineering and technology.

England developed steam engines in an era where slaves were increasingly expensive and less socially acceptable than before and , contrarily, in an era where exploitation of the poor was still very normal and acceptable. Hephaestus/Vulcan was disabled, yes, but also was very powerful (governing volcanos and fire in Italy isn’t a weakling’s domain). They absolutely valued technology… to say otherwise is wild.

I wish even today, exploitation of the poor was not normal and acceptable.

There was this synergistic interaction between coal and iron ore deposits, trains and the steam engine. Having a portable steam engine meant that you could build trains, which meant that you could transport coal and iron ore to the steel mills, which meant you could build more steam engines, which meant that you could build more trains and expand the rail network. The fact that these things followed one another wasn't a coincidence.

And then later they realize the tar that comes out of making coal coke can be used to treat railroad ties to prevent rot, letting you lay larger networks of rail.

A more primitive spindle wheel was invented in the Warring States period in China:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/early-china/article/...

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