3 ms·

There is a rather long history of wind being used to transport goods, with horses as a backup when you must transport people or things in any weather regardless

There is a rather long history of wind being used to transport goods, with horses as a backup when you must transport people or things in any weather regardless of waterways nearby. Alternative paths to industrial revolution may not have produced 21st century conveniences right away, but neither did the actual industrial revolution. You can power factories with pumped hydro.

scythe 4y ago
There is a long history of sails, but even modern sails can go quite a bit faster than their ancient counterparts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_sailing#Apparent_wind_sailing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_sailing#Appar... The necessary developments in math and physics are not to be underestimated. I'm not disputing whether you could eventually do it without coal, I'm attacking the supposition that medieval-to-earlier civilizations (the Song Dynasty, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Roman Empire, etc) could have industrialized if they had only realized one or two key things. There's a whole framework of understanding that had to be established: calculus, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, et cetera; the Europeans had the benefit of importing knowledge from all over Eurasia, from paper (China, imported via Middle East ca. 1200s) to positional numerals (India), to algebra (al-Khwarizmi, born near Uzbekistan, worked in Baghdad). Leonardo Bonacci's schooling in Algeria was transformative for Italian mathematics. Et cetera. A single wind turbine will only pump water at a measly rate up a large incline. In order to gather enough wind turbines' output to achieve useful energy storage, you need a means of transmission; the electric dynamo dates to 1831, while the electrostatic generator was developed around 1663, but could not operate while transmitting power. Pneumatics require, again, high precision. This stuff only seems easy now because we have so much understanding of the physical world that was unimaginable when Constantinople and Tenochtitlan were conquered. A modern train car can be pushed by hand; a sailing train car with the steel and lubricants available to da Vinci or Ben Sheng would hardly budge without a gale. Coal is so, so easy by comparison.

scythe 4y ago

There is a long history of sails, but even modern sails can go quite a bit faster than their ancient counterparts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_sailing#Apparent_wind_sailing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_sailing#Appar... The necessary developments in math and physics are not to be underestimated. I'm not disputing whether you could eventually do it without coal, I'm attacking the supposition that medieval-to-earlier civilizations (the Song Dynasty, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Roman Empire, etc) could have industrialized if they had only realized one or two key things. There's a whole framework of understanding that had to be established: calculus, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, et cetera; the Europeans had the benefit of importing knowledge from all over Eurasia, from paper (China, imported via Middle East ca. 1200s) to positional numerals (India), to algebra (al-Khwarizmi, born near Uzbekistan, worked in Baghdad). Leonardo Bonacci's schooling in Algeria was transformative for Italian mathematics. Et cetera. A single wind turbine will only pump water at a measly rate up a large incline. In order to gather enough wind turbines' output to achieve useful energy storage, you need a means of transmission; the electric dynamo dates to 1831, while the electrostatic generator was developed around 1663, but could not operate while transmitting power. Pneumatics require, again, high precision. This stuff only seems easy now because we have so much understanding of the physical world that was unimaginable when Constantinople and Tenochtitlan were conquered. A modern train car can be pushed by hand; a sailing train car with the steel and lubricants available to da Vinci or Ben Sheng would hardly budge without a gale. Coal is so, so easy by comparison.