3 ms·
There's an interesting example of technological synergy at the dawn of the steam engine industry. To build an effective steam engine, you need a precisely grou
by jdietrich 7y ago
There's an interesting example of technological synergy at the dawn of the steam engine industry.
To build an effective steam engine, you need a precisely ground piston and a precisely bored cylinder, otherwise you can't get useful working pressures. Grinding the piston is laborious but straightforward - you just need two centers and a cutting tool to achieve a rotationally symmetrical part. Boring the cylinder is much more challenging, because you need to cut a very wide, very deep, very straight hole into a huge lump of iron. Cutting that hole requires a very rigid, very powerful machine.
John Wilkinson developed an effective boring machine in 1774 for making cannons, but it was limited in speed and capacity by the water wheel that powered it. The next year, the Boulton & Watt company was founded, building stationary steam engines with cylinders made by Wilkinson. Wilkinson received the second steam engine built by Boulton & Watt, which he used to power a bigger and faster cylinder boring machine, which he used to build more and bigger steam engine cylinders for Boulton & Watt.
- charlieflowers 7y agoBootstrapping
- chrisco255 7y agoDogfooding
- masonic 7y agoRecursion.
- dmitriid 7y agoThis also shows the curious paradox (if it’s a paradox) that we can’t easily re-create many of the industries from scratch. We’ve had many intermediate steps that we discarded along the way. In other words, modern industry is the product of modern industry.
- chii 7y agoIt's the same for semiconductor fabrication. The plans and steps all require a computer (cept for the simplest of chips which would'be been originally hand-designed). This means that if there's some planetwide disaster that wiped all electronics, we'd have to restart from scratch as even viewing the blueprints of a chip requires a chip!
- Animats 7y agoThere are points in mechanical history where you have a real problem taking the next step. The classic is "who made the first tongs?" You need a handling tool that will survive fire to do blacksmithing. How was the first one made? It's ascribed to God in some Jewish text and to Thor in some Viking legend. Probably someone used chipped rocks as handling tools. Another bootstrapping problem is making a precise screw thread without another screw, as in a lathe, to use as a reference. This was solved by Maudsley, who invented the "screw originating machine".[1] The sequence for bootstrapping machine tools from a very low level is well known, because hobbyists sometimes build their own machine tools and need to take upward steps. Hammer, anvil, forge, lathe, better lathe, better lathe, good lathe, planer, bigger planer, drill press, better drill press, milling machine, better milling machine, good milling machine. There's a set of books on this intended for a post nuclear disaster. (It assumes you have aluminum scrap around.) Electronics is tougher to cold start. [1] http://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co46546/tool-for-originating-screw-threads-made-by-henry-screw-cutting http://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co46546/tool-...