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Environmental collapse and the price of steel! I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were
by legitster 4y ago
Environmental collapse and the price of steel!
I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided.
However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available forests that they were forced to turn to inferior coal fired steel.
But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better. In the end, you had steel that was drastically cheaper than before. Cheap enough to build boilers.
I think people make the mistake of thinking the steam engine kicked off the industrial revolution. But I believe the spark was cheap metal. And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.
- mason55 4y agoSounds like energy production recently. While oil was cheap enough we had no reason to invest in cleaner tech. Even the threat of climate change isn’t enough. It’s only when oil gets real expensive that we invest in alternatives.
- 3pt14159 4y agoImagine all of those minds that went into oil extraction and where else they could have been better spent over the years. I know turbines really leveraged computer models to achieve such stunning efficiency, but in all honesty I don't think it would have taken much past the 70s for us to have achieved nuclear / renewables at similar energy output as oil / gas at the same timeframe if we didn't have the shortcut available for so long.
- Gravityloss 4y agoOil extraction engineering has a pretty phenomenal return on investment. If oil sells at 100 dollars per barrel, that's 600 dollars per cubic meter. If you produce a cubic meter per second (1/200th of world production), that's 50 million dollars per day. But certainly, nuclear or renewables could have been developed more and earlier.
- marcosdumay 4y agoA lot of very smart people went into nuclear up to the 80's. It didn't make much of a difference. People severely underestimate the impact computers have on our society and the dynamism of the current day R&D. Even here on HN.
- legitster 4y agoImagine if you were living in this period - England was constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress. Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology, they needed certain political rights that didn't exist to previous humans. The rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, sell across markets - things that lay people didn't have access to in earlier eras. And most importantly, courts that would enforce said rights for you! And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.
- pratik661 4y agoRights to privately acquire land, create corporations, and sell across markets were extant across different civilizations throughout history. The Chola merchant guilds had formalized corporate structures that dissipated the risk of long voyages 2000 years ago. Seeing that the Romans traded with the Cholas, the Romans probably had corporate structures too. Humans have been living in complex societies since the Bronze Age. It’s difficult to run a complex society without some sort of bureaucratic organization.
- pratik661 4y agoWe tend to underestimate how complex even pre Bronze Age kingdoms were. To rule them, our ancestors came up with an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts.
- Crespyl 4y ago> an intricate way to let different combinations of symbols represent abstract thoughts I seem to find that this is still the best way to communicate.
- bko 4y agoI wonder if there is anything today that would need to come down (or up) in price to kick off a revolution. I've heard some argue that was decentralized payments online (cryptocurrency) but that hasn't led to much outside of speculation IMO. The other thing I heard was battery technology. Just recently a podcast with Matthew Ball, he makes the argument that AR/VR/metaverse technology needs a breakthrough (in part) in battery technology. Right now the best system can run at half the performance you need for 30 minutes and gets really hot. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/matthew-ball/ https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/matthew-ball/
- qz_kb 4y agoIf robots were way cheaper it would change quite a bit.
- legitster 4y agoI tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it. Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money. LCD screens did not produce as good of a picture quality as plasma or even HD CRT screens, but they were so cheap and light you can do things like replace signage. Crypto is weird. Crypto is proving to not be any cheaper than what it supposed to be replacing (currency, securities). But if you think about what crypto is - it's really an escrow service that's so freaking cheap it's being used for dumb things like payments. But I think like how it took a couple decades for people to start figuring out what they could do with cheap steel, I think eventually crypto might genuinely start finding useful applications.
- eesmith 4y ago> Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money. Am I missing something? It looks like hundreds of diesel-electric locomotives are more powerful than the most powerful steam engines ever made. I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_locomotives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_locomotives then sorted by tractive effort/force and looked for the most powerful diesel and most powerful steam. EMD SD70ACe-T4 - diesel-electric - 200,000 pounds-force (890 kN) starting, 175,000 pounds-force (778 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC (478 built) GE AC6000CW - diesel-electric - 188,000 pounds-force (836 kN) starting; 166,000 pounds-force (738 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_AC6000CW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_AC6000CW (317 built) by comparison: Erie Class P-1 - steam - 176,256 pounds-force (784 kN) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplex_locomotive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplex_locomotive (10 built) ("high tractive effort, but low speed, about 10 mph, over short distances" .. "the Triplexes produced huge amounts of tractive effort (TE) that may have been the highest of any steam locomotives before or since"). XA Triplex - steam - 166,600 pounds-force (741 kN) compound - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-8-8-4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-8-8-4 (1 built) ("unable to sustain a speed greater than five miles an hour, since the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce") Power isn't the only factor. Steam engines produce the most power when just starting, which helps explain why the most power steam engines were also so slow. (Something like the Union Pacific Big Boy had less tractive force, at 135,375 lbf, much higher speeds, topping out at 80mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy) Going back to your thesis, in researching this I came across the Kaufman Act, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_Act , which banned steam engines in New York city due to pollution problems. Originally it required electric propulsion, but was amended to allow diesel when that proved viable, and that in turn provided a stepping stone toward dieselization of US trains. Diesel trains are not worse polluters than steam, so your thesis doesn't really seem applicable.
- antonhowes 4y agoI don’t think this fits the evidence. At least for the 17thC. People in England did not know how to make good iron with coal, let alone steel, despite many decades of extraordinary government encouragement and special incentives - witness the many, many failed patents that had to be reissued from Sturtevant in 1612 all the way through to the 1660s and beyond. Cities like London made the switch early on to using coal as a fuel over the course of 1570-1600, but this was for domestic use. Industrial use lagged many decades behind, with iron very much last - long after glassmaking, saltmaking, brewing, and even baking. When the English iron industry struggled to adapt to rising fuel prices, the overwhelmimg response was just to import it from Sweden. And that was especially the case with the steel industry, which didn’t really take off in England until the breakthroughs of the mid-18thC (long after Newcomen or Savery). If there’s evidence I’m missing, however, I’d very much like to know.
- Gibbon1 4y agoI think you are correct. Coal gave Britain a leg up as early as the 14th century but not for steel making. It's fungible though coal was being substituted for burning wood. Which means probably more wood to make steel. Also more land can be used as pasture. Basically England was boosted by the energy input from coal. One thing about Sweden for a long time. They had a lot of trees and very high quality iron ore. Which I think is the reason they were so powerful during that period. Sweden cut down all their trees to make steel. When I think of steam engines I think also of simple franklin stoves and pressure cookers. People tried to make both of those long before steam engines. They are both much more efficient in terms of the amount of fuel consumed but the cost was too high for that to pencil out.
- legitster 4y agoI'm specifically thinking of the period in the early 18th century with the Darby family.
- antonhowes 4y agoYup, I figured. Plausibly fits for Wilkinson and Watt (though I have my doubts). Doesn’t fit for Savery and Newcomen, the subject of my piece.
- trinovantes 4y ago> And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment. I've always wondered why some fantasy stories seem to be perpetually locked in pre-industrial technology. This does seem like a plausible canonical explanation if they had fast replenishing resources due to magic.
- dredmorbius 4y agoThe role of materials in technological innovation, and the technological prerequisites of those materials, is hugely underappreciated IMO. Until roughly 8,000 years ago, the only materials available were those found in (near) finished form in nature: stone, wood, bone, grass and fibres, ceramics (requiring firing), concrete (typically also), and metals with low melting points. There'd have been some glues / resins (bone, tree-sap, and a few other compounds). A huge part of what creates impressions of times and periods over the past 400 or so years is the gradual introduction of new materials: glass, finished bricks, wrought iron, steel, and in the case of textiles, the emergence of synthetics beginning in the late 19th century (celluloid, viscose, and eventually Nylon and polyester). The development of cheap high-quality steel, and later aluminium, titanium, and other difficult-to-produce metals, has had a huge impact.
- Animats 4y agoRailroads were widely deployed without steel. Serious railroad deployment started in 1830 [1], using cast and wrought iron. Not until the 1880s was steel available at low cost. It's amazing how far they got with crappy materials. > But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better. A Bessemer converter is very simple. It's basically a big iron vessel lined with bricks and mounted on a pivot so it can be tilted and poured. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Inputs are mostly coal, iron ore, and limestone, along with compressed air and some additives, but making good steel from those is tricky. The person who got this right, after about 10,000 tries, was Robert Mushet, who is mostly forgotten.[2] Could that have been done earlier? Maybe. Probably not before analytical chemistry. The detailed composition of the inputs has a huge influence on what you get out in steelmaking. Before Mushet, the output from steelmaking was kind of random and often bad. (1830 was when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway started operation. This was when railroads got out of beta and started changing the world. Before then, it was mostly one-off mine-haulage systems and prototypes. The Liverpool and Manchester finally got it right. They had regular service with multiple steam locomotives of a common design, double track lines, stations, signals, timetables, and tickets. At last, a production-ready product. This is what allowed the Industrial Revolution to scale.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forester_Mushet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forester_Mushet
- emmelaich 4y agoAnd also price and availability of pit coal. In 1700 over 80% of the worlds coal was mined in Britain. (from wikipedia)