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The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic
by lkrubner 10y ago
The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when?
As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?
Has a fact been discovered if one person learns of it? Or is it only discovered if the news spreads to all of society? If the latter, then science is a social process, not an individual one.
The historian Fernand Braudel points out that an Italian engineer, wanting to show off his skills, built an automated saw mill in Italy, back during the 1200s. The logs were slotted automatically and run through the mill automatically. This engineer had created an important part of the Industrial Revolution, 500 years early!!! Did it matter? No. The project was merely a demonstration. The abundance of wood was never used. How could it be? There was no system of transportation for the abundance of wood, there was no finance to cover operating expenses, nor any finance to support a building boom that might use the wood, nor any modern labor market from which the mill owner could hire more workers to do the initial cutting of trees, nor was there the modern strictness regarding contracts, nor were commoners allowed to bring civil suits against the nobility (in case of default, supposing a nobleman contracted to have a manor built), nor was the judiciary independent, nor... In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a social process, involving the creation of dozens of important modern institutions, and the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of those institutions. No single engineer, however brilliant, could jump start the process.
- rwmj 10y agoSo maybe the thing to invent is banking?
- Houshalter 10y agoChristians prohibited loans and banking. Jews were able to practice it though.
- jeff_petersen 10y agoIIRC Christians prohibited charging interest on loans (usury), not banking per se. I suppose a bank could be operated by Christians that simply accepted deposits and charged a sum for safekeeping with no loans whatsoever. I don't know that anything like that ever happened in practice, however, since anybody with enough money to require safekeeping in a vault probably had their own vault. Likewise an interest free loan would be permissible, though there wouldn't be great incentives to offer them except to family members, for example.
- lmm 10y agoWhat happened in the Islamic world was partnerships instead. If a merchant wanted to make a trade expedition funded by a banker, they'd set up the expedition as a partnership with the banker providing the funds and the merchant doing the work, splitting the profits, in a way that's economically equivalent to lending money at interest. Similarly, insurance syndicates tended to be organised as a bunch of merchants getting together and agreeing to pool a certain amount of funds that would be used to repay any of their losses. (It works up to a point, but it's hard to scale. You can emulate a loan contract between two parties, but you can't have a bond market because the "loans" aren't tradeable)
- lkrubner 10y agoIf you lend someone money, how would you get them to repay you? If you want to become a banker, then you need to sign contracts. You need an independent judiciary that will offer fair and impartial hearings. Above all else, you need equality before the law: the legal immunity of the nobility needs to be suspended. If someone fails to repay you, then you need to be able to take them to court.
- Retric 10y agoOne consideration is the Barring straight is very narrow compared to other ocean passages, so people may have regularly crossed each side without thinking 'new land'! From their perspective the map looks like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples From their perspective North America is simply yet another settled area.
- lkrubner 10y agoMy whole point is that you don't know who "their" is. Please stop and think about who you mean when you use the word "their". Do you mean 1 person, or 2 people, or a 100, or a million? And the map you are linking to did not exist 20,000 years ago!
- Retric 10y agoTheir being the people who crossed from one side to another. 1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying "achievement unlocked: new continent!" And then run around telling everyone about it. Yes, European mapmakers did not known about such crossings, but being a very remote area in 1400's they probably never asked. And from an oral history perspective it would not be anything unusual because a 50 mile ocean crossing is just a regular thing to sea going populations. Also, DNA evidence is going to be sketchy because it's really hard to say if someone migrated 400 years ago vs 600 years ago. PS: I am not saying this 100% happened, but it seems very likely.
- lkrubner 10y agoAbout this: "1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying 'achievement unlocked: new continent!'" Yes, that is the point that I made above. The people had no idea.
- acjohnson55 10y agoYes, this totally! People deeply overestimate the value of any single insight, and largely forget about the dozens of mundane but non-trivial details a successful implementation relies on. Great entrepreneurs understand this and know how to solve enough of those "little problems" to enable a big idea to thrive, and that's the magic of it. Bad ones obsess over the idea itself.
- summerdown2 10y agoThat's impressive, but the invention of sawmills didn't need to wait until the industrial revolution. I've just come back from The Netherlands, which had massive uses in wind powered technology in the 1500's, including windmill powered sawmills that led to the Dutch golden age because they could build boats faster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_Corneliszoon_van_Uitgeest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_Corneliszoon_van_Uitg...
- lkrubner 10y agoYou are referencing an event more than 300 years later than the event I am speaking of. But yes, to your point, much of what was necessary to the Industrial Revolution was pioneered by the Dutch during the 1600s: contracts, fair and impartial courts, the end of legal immunity for the nobility (regarding civil contracts), modern finance, modern insurance, advanced transport, modern storage facilities, etc. This is also covered by the historian Fernand Braudel, who is worth reading.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThe Dutch also benefitted by use of peat for heating and cooking fuel, which preserved their (scarce) lumber supply for shipbuilding. See Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power, Vaclav Smil, Energy in History.
- WalterBright 10y agoInterestingly, Edison realized that inventing a light bulb was not enough. He had to invent the power generation and distribution industry to make it usable.