5 ms·

> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines

by kartan 10y ago

> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?

Houshalter 10y ago
Yes that's probably why the industrial revolution didn't happen. There's a good comment below that explains other societal reasons why the industrial revolution didn't happen, like the lack of contract law and investors. I also read a great theory once (but I can't find it again through google!) that the industrial revolution really required the invention of the cannon first. Building an efficient steam engine in roman times would have been incredibly expensive and dangerous, because of their primitive metal technology. The cannon created a tech race between nations to develop more/better/cheaper/lighter cannons. Which resulted in better metal working tech. Once you can make big pieces of metal that can withstand and direct the pressure created from explosions, steam engines aren't too far away. But Heron's invention was still useful, and would have been the fastest moving thing ever built up to that time. Perhaps it could have been adapted to military applications, like flinging tons of rocks really fast at high speed?
- mturmon 10y ago
  The thing you can't recall in your second paragraph sounds like the sort of "chain of inventions" that James Burke used to explain on the old BBC series Connections. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) ) See in particular episode 6 in the original 1978 series (just going by the summary on Wikipedia).
  - stinkytaco 10y ago
    I'll chime in here to add The Day the Universe Changed, on PBS. Less "invention" specific and broader, about how certain concepts shifted us. It has also aged better, in my opinion. Connections, especially its last episode, seems rooted in a certain place and time.
  - fapjacks 10y ago
    All of those Connections shows with James Burke (Connections, Connections^2 and Connections^3) were totally phenomenal to me when I saw them and absolutely sparked my interest in inventing. I still occasionally watch the original Connections series, having downloaded them to my collection.
- taejo 10y ago
  I've heard it said that the bicycle basically needed the car, despite seeming to be much simpler: accurate mass production of ball bearings, chain drives, and pneumatic tires were all driven by car manufacturing but needed for really practical bicycles.
  - stevekemp 10y ago
    > I've heard it said that the bicycle basically needed the car Interestingly our roads were built with bicycles in mind: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/15/cyclists-paved-way-for-roads https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1... Many similar sources such as: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/12/the-secret-history-of-cars-begins-with-bicycles/383254/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/12/the-secret-history-of...
  - Someone 10y ago
    But bicycles are useful on their own (possibly more so in a world where cars do not exist), so the existence of bicycles alone could easily have driven innovation. In fact, Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire for his son's tricycle and they were initially used for bicycles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop#Pneumatic_tyres https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop#Pneumatic_t...)
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Bicycles are hugely useful -- they were the first mode of transport that was affordable to an ordinary person (though relatively about as expensive as a car today), and didn't require feeding, shoding, tackle, or stabling. With a bike, a person could move beyond 3 miles in an hour, or get to and from a railroad station allowing for much longer commutes, visits, or recreational travel. As of the late 19th century, horses consumed about 25% of the grain production of the US. Much of that was to provide drayage of people and goods to and from railroad stations or train yards.
      - RbrtM 10y ago
        The first mode of transport affordable to an ordinary person was probably an animal like a donkey or an ox, etc..
- WalterBright 10y ago
  The industrial revolution requires coordination on a vast scale, and a lack of bureaucracy that can arbitrarily block it. Hence its emergence in free market countries.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Steam engines need fuel. There's no coal (to speak of) in Italy. Europe's coal belt starts in Scotland, runs through England, into France (and a nubbin in northern Spain / Portugal), Germany, and Silesia. Oddly enough, the first countries to industrialise were, in order, England (which wasn't busily falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders), then (after they'd stopped falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders) France and Germany. They remain the heart of the European economy, a century and a half later. The third great set of coal deposits were in the United States, though that was a country that also had tremendous forests, more readily accessed (and frequently local to where energy was needed). Coal consumption didn't exceed wood as a fuel until the 1880s. The US also benefited from oil, and was the world's leading extractor of oil from the 1860s to the 1950s. Having first developed coal, iron, railroads, canals, and steamships, the US could usefully transport that oil from the remote rural regions in which it was found (Titusville, Pennsylvania, Ventura, California, Spindletop, Texas) to the urbanised regions (New York, Philadelphia, Boston) where it was used. The bootstrapping of technology was itself a really interesting story -- gunpowder, metallurgy, iron, fuels, steel, electricity, and prime movers, most especially diesel and gas turbine engines. See Vaclav Smil (Energy in History) and Manfred Weissenbacher (Sources of Power) for more on this. (The fourth coal belt is in China.)
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    As you mention yourself, the US got by using mostly wood until relatively late in the second industrial revolution. There is still a lot of useful energy in wood. Even ancient rome burned a ton of wood for heat and their own industries. It would have been more expensive and less sustainable sure, but I think it would have been enough to start. There is also wind and water power which was utilized a lot during the start of the industrial revolution.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Wood is sustainable until it isn't. Rome and the Mediterranian had a long history of deforestation, going to Egypt and Sumer. The first story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be read as a story of ecological limits and deforestation. Roman heating systems, hypocausts, had voracious fuel appetites. I'm not finding a solid reference but believe one could consume a ton or more of wood daily. That was imported from distant locations. Early industrial windmills and water wheels typically produced 10 - 20 kW of power, with perhaps a few thousands throughout Europe, for a total power capacity of a few tens of MW. The power availed by coal and oil is thousands and millions of times this. U.S. woodfuel consumption wasn't sustainable, and hasn't increased from levels of the late 19th century.
api 10y ago
After initially being skeptical and disliking him for libertarian leaning political reasons, I've come around to wondering if John Maynard Keynes might have been even more right than we have imagined. Slave labor is kind of an extreme case of the paradox of thrift. Slaves have no disposable capital and they flood the labor market down to zero. Slavery is like a permanent deflationary spiral. There is just no reason to innovate or invest in anything except conquest and luxuries, which describes most ancient cultures well. Had the Greeks or Romans abolished slavery and set a minimum wage we might be flying to Proxima Centauri in a fusion rocket starship by now.
- digital_ins 10y ago
  kinda describes what's going on in developing countries too. The lack of innovation in developing country might have almost nothing to do with the previously popular and highly peddled concept of "inferior races"
  - api 10y ago
    Humans are wired for scarcity, but scarcity thinking is bad economics. We need to realize and own our power and start thinking in positive sum race to the top terms instead of fear based austerity terms.
- dennisgorelik 10y ago
  Slaves are not really that cheap. You have to feed slaves, train slaves, guard slaves (from running away and from being stolen by somebody else).
  - api 10y ago
    They are much cheaper than paid labor in many ways.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Alternatively, if the industrial revolution had been advanced by 1,000 years, we might be halfway through learning how long it takes to recover from fossil-fuel induced climate change.
notahacker 10y ago
The other issue with having most of your labour performed by slaves is that the slaves themselves generally don't have the motivation, or education, or chance of actually being taken seriously to propose even incremental process improvements.
- HarryHirsch 10y ago
  That's what you think. The nobility would usually sit in Rome or any other nice place and leave administration of their landholdings to a competent slave. Read Cato the Elder's Agri Cultura for details. Demotivation would be an issue for those slaves low on the food chain but not for every slave. For more contemporary examples, look no further than Daenerys' Dothraki handmaidens.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    There's plenty of historical evidence that industrialization and slave labor do not mix (for example, the US North industrialized and the South did not). It's not so easy to draw firm conclusions from Roman society, because the historical record of that is a little thin. The Nazis employed slave labor, but they had a lot of trouble with sabotage and intentionally shoddy work. Game of Thrones is entirely fiction, and is zero evidence as an "example" of slavery.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Contrasting: prison labour, concentration-camp labour, sweatshops, workhouses.
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        Prison labor is used for menial labor. See what I wrote about the nazi's use of concentration camp labor. Sweatshops and workhouses are not slave labor (and also are used for menial labor).
        10y ago
agumonkey 10y ago
I'd add a dose of social myopia. Even without slaves, you'd have to make everybody imagine a world taming forces. I believe up until Newton, the value of technology and its pace was very different. So people wouldn't align and go that deep into physics and engineering. It's a bit of a stretch for steam power, but another instance is electricity, a phenomenon which was known at the time but would require way too much desire and stack to master. ps: This is something that distort my perception of the world. Somehow similar to the comma.ai birth, the owner believed the others were caught into a limited view of the world. It's possible that a lot of stuff that we dismiss because we believed in others are "limiting" our existence. But the brownian motion seems unavoidable for now.

by kartan 10y ago

Houshalter 10y ago

Yes that's probably why the industrial revolution didn't happen. There's a good comment below that explains other societal reasons why the industrial revolution didn't happen, like the lack of contract law and investors. I also read a great theory once (but I can't find it again through google!) that the industrial revolution really required the invention of the cannon first. Building an efficient steam engine in roman times would have been incredibly expensive and dangerous, because of their primitive metal technology. The cannon created a tech race between nations to develop more/better/cheaper/lighter cannons. Which resulted in better metal working tech. Once you can make big pieces of metal that can withstand and direct the pressure created from explosions, steam engines aren't too far away. But Heron's invention was still useful, and would have been the fastest moving thing ever built up to that time. Perhaps it could have been adapted to military applications, like flinging tons of rocks really fast at high speed?

mturmon 10y ago
The thing you can't recall in your second paragraph sounds like the sort of "chain of inventions" that James Burke used to explain on the old BBC series Connections. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) ) See in particular episode 6 in the original 1978 series (just going by the summary on Wikipedia).
- stinkytaco 10y ago
  I'll chime in here to add The Day the Universe Changed, on PBS. Less "invention" specific and broader, about how certain concepts shifted us. It has also aged better, in my opinion. Connections, especially its last episode, seems rooted in a certain place and time.
- fapjacks 10y ago
  All of those Connections shows with James Burke (Connections, Connections^2 and Connections^3) were totally phenomenal to me when I saw them and absolutely sparked my interest in inventing. I still occasionally watch the original Connections series, having downloaded them to my collection.
taejo 10y ago
I've heard it said that the bicycle basically needed the car, despite seeming to be much simpler: accurate mass production of ball bearings, chain drives, and pneumatic tires were all driven by car manufacturing but needed for really practical bicycles.
- stevekemp 10y ago
  > I've heard it said that the bicycle basically needed the car Interestingly our roads were built with bicycles in mind: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/15/cyclists-paved-way-for-roads https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1... Many similar sources such as: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/12/the-secret-history-of-cars-begins-with-bicycles/383254/ http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/12/the-secret-history-of...
- Someone 10y ago
  But bicycles are useful on their own (possibly more so in a world where cars do not exist), so the existence of bicycles alone could easily have driven innovation. In fact, Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire for his son's tricycle and they were initially used for bicycles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop#Pneumatic_tyres https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop#Pneumatic_t...)
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Bicycles are hugely useful -- they were the first mode of transport that was affordable to an ordinary person (though relatively about as expensive as a car today), and didn't require feeding, shoding, tackle, or stabling. With a bike, a person could move beyond 3 miles in an hour, or get to and from a railroad station allowing for much longer commutes, visits, or recreational travel. As of the late 19th century, horses consumed about 25% of the grain production of the US. Much of that was to provide drayage of people and goods to and from railroad stations or train yards.
    - RbrtM 10y ago
      The first mode of transport affordable to an ordinary person was probably an animal like a donkey or an ox, etc..
WalterBright 10y ago
The industrial revolution requires coordination on a vast scale, and a lack of bureaucracy that can arbitrarily block it. Hence its emergence in free market countries.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Steam engines need fuel. There's no coal (to speak of) in Italy. Europe's coal belt starts in Scotland, runs through England, into France (and a nubbin in northern Spain / Portugal), Germany, and Silesia. Oddly enough, the first countries to industrialise were, in order, England (which wasn't busily falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders), then (after they'd stopped falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders) France and Germany. They remain the heart of the European economy, a century and a half later. The third great set of coal deposits were in the United States, though that was a country that also had tremendous forests, more readily accessed (and frequently local to where energy was needed). Coal consumption didn't exceed wood as a fuel until the 1880s. The US also benefited from oil, and was the world's leading extractor of oil from the 1860s to the 1950s. Having first developed coal, iron, railroads, canals, and steamships, the US could usefully transport that oil from the remote rural regions in which it was found (Titusville, Pennsylvania, Ventura, California, Spindletop, Texas) to the urbanised regions (New York, Philadelphia, Boston) where it was used. The bootstrapping of technology was itself a really interesting story -- gunpowder, metallurgy, iron, fuels, steel, electricity, and prime movers, most especially diesel and gas turbine engines. See Vaclav Smil (Energy in History) and Manfred Weissenbacher (Sources of Power) for more on this. (The fourth coal belt is in China.)
- Houshalter 10y ago
  As you mention yourself, the US got by using mostly wood until relatively late in the second industrial revolution. There is still a lot of useful energy in wood. Even ancient rome burned a ton of wood for heat and their own industries. It would have been more expensive and less sustainable sure, but I think it would have been enough to start. There is also wind and water power which was utilized a lot during the start of the industrial revolution.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Wood is sustainable until it isn't. Rome and the Mediterranian had a long history of deforestation, going to Egypt and Sumer. The first story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be read as a story of ecological limits and deforestation. Roman heating systems, hypocausts, had voracious fuel appetites. I'm not finding a solid reference but believe one could consume a ton or more of wood daily. That was imported from distant locations. Early industrial windmills and water wheels typically produced 10 - 20 kW of power, with perhaps a few thousands throughout Europe, for a total power capacity of a few tens of MW. The power availed by coal and oil is thousands and millions of times this. U.S. woodfuel consumption wasn't sustainable, and hasn't increased from levels of the late 19th century.

api 10y ago

After initially being skeptical and disliking him for libertarian leaning political reasons, I've come around to wondering if John Maynard Keynes might have been even more right than we have imagined. Slave labor is kind of an extreme case of the paradox of thrift. Slaves have no disposable capital and they flood the labor market down to zero. Slavery is like a permanent deflationary spiral. There is just no reason to innovate or invest in anything except conquest and luxuries, which describes most ancient cultures well. Had the Greeks or Romans abolished slavery and set a minimum wage we might be flying to Proxima Centauri in a fusion rocket starship by now.

digital_ins 10y ago
kinda describes what's going on in developing countries too. The lack of innovation in developing country might have almost nothing to do with the previously popular and highly peddled concept of "inferior races"
- api 10y ago
  Humans are wired for scarcity, but scarcity thinking is bad economics. We need to realize and own our power and start thinking in positive sum race to the top terms instead of fear based austerity terms.
dennisgorelik 10y ago
Slaves are not really that cheap. You have to feed slaves, train slaves, guard slaves (from running away and from being stolen by somebody else).
- api 10y ago
  They are much cheaper than paid labor in many ways.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Alternatively, if the industrial revolution had been advanced by 1,000 years, we might be halfway through learning how long it takes to recover from fossil-fuel induced climate change.

notahacker 10y ago

The other issue with having most of your labour performed by slaves is that the slaves themselves generally don't have the motivation, or education, or chance of actually being taken seriously to propose even incremental process improvements.

HarryHirsch 10y ago
That's what you think. The nobility would usually sit in Rome or any other nice place and leave administration of their landholdings to a competent slave. Read Cato the Elder's Agri Cultura for details. Demotivation would be an issue for those slaves low on the food chain but not for every slave. For more contemporary examples, look no further than Daenerys' Dothraki handmaidens.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  There's plenty of historical evidence that industrialization and slave labor do not mix (for example, the US North industrialized and the South did not). It's not so easy to draw firm conclusions from Roman society, because the historical record of that is a little thin. The Nazis employed slave labor, but they had a lot of trouble with sabotage and intentionally shoddy work. Game of Thrones is entirely fiction, and is zero evidence as an "example" of slavery.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Contrasting: prison labour, concentration-camp labour, sweatshops, workhouses.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      Prison labor is used for menial labor. See what I wrote about the nazi's use of concentration camp labor. Sweatshops and workhouses are not slave labor (and also are used for menial labor).
      - 10y ago

agumonkey 10y ago

I'd add a dose of social myopia. Even without slaves, you'd have to make everybody imagine a world taming forces. I believe up until Newton, the value of technology and its pace was very different. So people wouldn't align and go that deep into physics and engineering. It's a bit of a stretch for steam power, but another instance is electricity, a phenomenon which was known at the time but would require way too much desire and stack to master. ps: This is something that distort my perception of the world. Somehow similar to the comma.ai birth, the owner believed the others were caught into a limited view of the world. It's possible that a lot of stuff that we dismiss because we believed in others are "limiting" our existence. But the brownian motion seems unavoidable for now.