11 ms·

Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III

142 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

fspacek 4y ago
barry-cotter 4y ago
> So why did it then take almost another half a century, even with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery’s to appear? > The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked on thermometers, weather-glasses, egg incubators, solar-activated fountains, and perpetual motion machines. But because people so rarely try to improve or invent things, the low-hanging fruit can be left on the tree for decades or even centuries.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  I thought the other reason was the availability of cheap labor (including slavery).
- ramesh31 4y ago
  I was having this argument the other day with regards to the post-WW2 Nazi rocket scientists who took the US to the moon. There's a very real possibility that liquid rockets would have remained a novelty, just another "Nazi Wunderwaffe" had they all been tried and hung for their crimes instead of pardoned and put to work. Solid rockets were (and are) more than sufficient for all military applications. But to get people into space, you need liquid engines. Would we have ever invented them independently? Very possibly not.
UncleSlacky 4y ago
Often multiple inventors arrive at the same idea at almost the same time, for example Edison and Swan for the light bulb, Meucci and Bell (among others) for the telephone, Tesla and Marconi for radio, the Wrights and many others for the airplane etc. possibly because the technological and social level of society has reached a certain point in its development when the "time is ripe" for a given invention. As Charles Fort put it: > A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Not sure I buy that. I've never found users (culture) knows what it wants next. In software, users will suggest incremental improvements but never a whole new tool. I think it's steam-engine-time, when the steam engine arrives. And gets successfully marketed.
  - michaelt 4y ago
    Some things are obvious - people have talked about "self-driving cars" for almost as long as there have been cars. Pirates and porn-lovers were watching entire movies on their computers, via broadband internet, 5+ years before Netflix launched their first streaming service. Electric cars - around since the 1880s. Other things are completely non-obvious. Politicians and journalists falling in love with a platform that only allows 140-character messages? Very much unexpected.
- perilunar 4y ago
  The Wright Brothers didn't come up with the idea of the airplane at all — people had been working on it for over 100 years.
  - bumby 4y ago
    There’s an argument that heavier than air flight was mainly due to Curtis who was able to help the Wrights get an engine with a much better power:weight ratio. The Wrights made many contributions, notably a very efficient propeller, I believe. But some of their biggest claims, like wing-warping, succumbed to others ideas like Curtis’ ailerons.
lordnacho 4y ago
I think the reason is best described by Factorio. Yes, with a lot of spaghetti belts and manual crafting, you can make late-stage products. But to do it well, in a way that transcends merely being able to make a handful of items, you need a huge underlying economy. You end up having to re-arrange your whole factory, or you need to clear new land, which means you need to spend some time on diversions like improved military. Translated to the real world, it means you need to rearrange a large amount of the social system (slaves/serfdom) as well as creating markets for a bunch of inputs that build higher and higher in your tech tree. Still a good question though, I don't mean to say things had to happen just as they did.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  A nice explanation for the "rate of progress" is the percentage of the population that is not involved in the production of food. Since the dawn of humanity up until "very recently" in the grand scheme of things, something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were directly involved in food production. There were the odd shamans, priests, tribal leaders, or what have you, but everyone else made themselves busy hunting, fishing, or farming. The current ratio in developed countries is something like 1 to 2 percent of the population directly working in farming, and maybe 20 to 30 percent working in "food production". Think workers at the biscuit factory, or chefs in a restaurant. Everyone else is free to do science, engineering, project management, finance, or whatever. The difference between 2% of the population free to work on non-food activities and 70% is massive. This is why so much progress has happened just in the last few centuries.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    That's true, but you need to unlock the tech for you to have enough food to feed everyone comfortably. Until it's comfy you have a fragile economy that occasionally falls into famine, so everyone would have to make plans to accommodate that, ie they can't build the pyramid too high. Your problem also isn't just inventing better methods, you also have to rearrange society to take advantage of this new possibility.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
nottorp 4y ago
So who uses that newsletter subscribe popup with no intuitive way to close it besides substack? Just so I know to avoid them. [I know where to click and I know there are technical workarounds probably, I just don't want to give them my eyeballs.]
lixtra 4y ago
The follow up was recently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467
- dang 4y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 - July 2022 (304 comments)
audunw 4y ago
This reminds me of James Burke Connections. That show often showed how many different and surprising dependencies there are on the path to any given invention. My favorite example is how the internal combustion engine needed an invention from perfume bottles to spray a good mist of fuel/air-mixture into the cylinder. Might have taken longer to invent ICE if that wasn't already readily available. I really hope that someone remakes a modern version of Connections.
- bilsbie 4y ago
  I thought the carberator did this?
  - andylynch 4y ago
    Yes, but a key development in carburettor design was an 1880s patent by Maybach and Daimler, based on the principles of an atomiser as used for perfume.
    - berkes 4y ago
      Steam locomotives and other steam boilers used the same principle (Bernoulli). Did Daimler and Maybach say they took inspiration from perfume atomizers? Because it would make more sense if theyt took inspiration from steam engine's injectors.
    - bluedino 4y ago
      There are fuel injection patents from the 1870's
  - berkes 4y ago
    Both perfume bottles and the carberator use Bernoulli's principle, which was published in 1738[1]. I'm not sure whether Bernoulli developed this for perfume bottles, but I doubt it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
- aequitas 4y ago
nemo44x 4y ago
We needed calculus first and the formalization of mechanics, both published originally by Isaac Newton. Once mechanics and their calculus were formalized we had the tools to logically build mechanical things and share the abstract concepts with others in our networks which promoted faster iteration.
red_admiral 4y ago
Relevant recent ACOUP (Brett Deveraux) post: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
- macintux 4y ago
  That was a compelling read, and to my untutored eye raises more important points than this one. Economics trumps ingenuity.
  - bsder 4y ago
    Agreed. I never really thought about how you needed a compelling usage of the "crappy" versions of steam engines before you would spend the time and resources to engineer better ones.
- throwawayffffas 4y ago
  Just came here to link this. Tldr: There was no use case for low power steam engines in the ancient/roman world. There was no know-how on building high pressure vessels that would allow higher power steam engines (this know-how was gained by work on cannons). The key use case for the first practical engines was draining coal mines, in the ancient/roman world this was not a big problem because most of their energy was from wood not coal.
  - baking 4y ago
    Also, transportation of fuel by animal power was inefficient so basing the steam engine at the source of the fuel (a coal mine) was the only practical first application. It wasn't until the steam engine was perfected that it made sense to transport fuel.
aurizon 4y ago
The root was zero IP law. People who invented any new thing(say = a widget stamp) could use it to make widgets all day and sell them. If someone looked in a window and say how to made widget presses = he could also make them. If he open sourced it = showed his neighbours = all know the secret and market saturation ensues. That secret was his ' barrier to entry', anyone else had to do the old hard way. Romans were famous for this, rich men would kill inventors of new processes to maintain a monopoly. This led to intense secrecy. Look at Newton's famous secrecy, he was only convinced to publish late in life and, along with others, started the learned journal industry that employed the new printing tech to make many at a low cost. Once an inventor could reveal his secret to employees to make many items AS WELL AS have the original Royal Patent protected fabrication monopoly(later time limited monopolies emerged). Copyright/rant/Disney = another story...
cptaj 4y ago
An important factor seems to be precision engineering. I saw the point made in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester, where they argue that while all the science and experimentation was there, it wasn't until precision parts were widely available that steam engines really solved all their problems and became viable https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectionists https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...
- bitexploder 4y ago
  In particular, the standardization of units and measurements and the lathe. Lathes with accuracy were a tremendously important component of producing steam engines.
  - MeteorMarc 4y ago
    But the first lathes could not be steampowered!
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      Almost any stationary machine that can run on steampower can be run on water power instead. Or by horses trotting in a circle, or humans walking in a treadwheel [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane
    - bluGill 4y ago
      Even after the steam eninge was common foot powered lathes existed. Or you can power a lathe from water.
      - grogenaut 4y ago
        Bow lathes are fun looking and can be made with low tech. The fun thing with lathes is they are able to make things more precise than they are, power of screws really. So they're a bootstrap technology.
mkl95 4y ago
We knew how to make things like Hero's engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) since ancient times, so at least there was some intuition that something like the steam engine could be made, even if it escaped our ability. When it comes to building steam based devices the biggest difference to people back then is probably our knowledge of thermodynamics, which grew explosively (no pun) since the mid 17th century.
Jagerbizzle 4y ago
Another great read along the same vein from Bret Devereaux's blog: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
ThomPete 4y ago
Another question you might ask is why wasn't the computer invented earlier? Babbage and Lovelace came close but they didn't realize they had (almost) invented a computer they just thought they had invented a calculator. They thought they solved a math problem when in fact they had solved a physics problem. We could have been traveling between stars by now.
- rgmerk 4y ago
  But how useful would a mechanical general-purpose digital computer have been? Even if a competent project manager had been in charge, steam-driven mechanical computers would have been extremely expensive, physically large, and very slow. Most of the time, I’d expect special-purpose devices would have been more cost-effective. The technologies to build electronic computers didn’t exist for another half-century at least.
  - ThomPete 4y ago
    Good questions because you are right, there is path dependency, but I do think a lot would have been different if we had understood earlier that computation is about physics not math.
somecommit 4y ago
My take is that they were not seeing the point to do so for the most easy one (like a mill, a press...) and from the other hand for clearly useful and advanced device like a vehicle/train it's the lack of amount of available combustible and iron. Even a train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly "why" it could be useful, do you really need to go so far with that amount of people? There were so much less people in the past, same for merchandise quantity probably. But the response in the article about the knowledge of the "vacuum possibility" is also very interesting, it is not mentioning this but it's crazy to think that we only know that the space emptiness is possible since Einstein theory 100 years ago (and not full of ether). Or that with the first locomotive people feared to die because of the speed.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  > Even a train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly "why" it could be useful, do you really need to go so far with that amount of people? Railways predate steam locomotives by about 250 years [1], or 200 years if you only count overland railways (as opposed to their use in mines). They were mainly used for transporting coal. You could argue that replacing the horses with steam engines was a very straightforward idea as soon as it was technologically feasible. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway
photochemsyn 4y ago
Author has an interesting point of view, I always assumed that the issue was the quality of the steel available at the time was too low to prevent explosive failure under pressure or collapse under vacuum: > "Now, one might suggest that Petty and Kalthoff simply lacked the tools or materials to make sufficiently strong and precisely fitting vessels and pipes. But I highly, highly doubt this." This issue has been historically researched with respect to artillery development, which seems to have been mostly bronze up until the 18th century, when reliable iron/steel artillery was introduced. For example: https://www.billstclair.com/weaponsman.com/index.html%3Fp=32625 https://www.billstclair.com/weaponsman.com/index.html%3Fp=32... Perhaps the pressures and temperatures involved in steam engines weren't as great as those involved with artillery, but the cost of making a bronze steam engine might have been prohibitive.
- rofrol 4y ago
  Similar comment here: The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel. Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment of successful railroads. Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a modest iron and steel industry. A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000 experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough heat and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore, leaving pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a "double carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish mountains" which was iron, 86…25; manganese, 8…50; and carbon, 5…25. Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are thus put back into the molten iron, and steel comes out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611002
  - hef19898 4y ago
jmyeet 4y ago
Early steam engines were developed well before the locomotive steam engine, which is generally what we associate with the term "steam engine". I don't think you can overstate the importance of the technological development in the 19th century on these developments. The US presented a new need that I don't think really existed before: crossing vast distances over land, eventually all the way from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. IIRC the population of the US was 2 million in 1800 and 50 million in 1900. Others have mentioned precision engineering. This was an important factor and had its origin in manufacturing cannon bores. But a bigger factor (IMHO) was steel. Steel existed before the mid-19th century but it was incredibly expensive (more expensive than gold) and relatively low volume. This all changed with the Bessemer process that allowed the mass production of inexpensive steel. It made Andrew Carnegie in particular incredibly wealthy in the process. Trains existed before cheap steel but builds of railroads and trains absolutely exploded in the wake of cheap steel. This also led to the shift from wooden sailing ships to (ultimately) steel-hulled boats with engines. So prior to trains, what were the potential use cases for a steam engine? Automobiles seem unlikely (given weight and size and the ubiquity and utility of horses). Ships? Maybe. But sailing is effective and fires tend to be bad news for ships. So that really leaves factories, mills, etc. Mills in particular often used hydro power (ie a river turning a wheel). You could build them in locations with such features. Labor was also relatively cheap (and largely free in some cases ie slaves). Ultimately I don't think it's one thing and it's hard to separate these factors cleanly. It becomes a chicken and egg problem. Advancement can often fuel each other. It does seem like long distance transportation ultimately led to at least popularizing and mass producing steam engines.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  The original "tractors" were called "steam traction engines", to distinguish them from the steam engines you would pull around with a team of horses to where you needed them. There were a variety of earlier pieces of farm machines that could be driven by treadmills and belts; steam engines could naturally slot in as a drop-in replacement for the treadmills to power all of your equipment.
- andrewla 4y ago
  This article is very specifically not talking about locomotive steam engines, but the early, even pre-Newcomen, pre-Watt, low-pressure steam engines developed by Thomas Savery in the 1690s.
fortran77 4y ago
I always wondered why the phonograph wasn't invented earlier! As soon as people were able to build geared mechanisms, they should have had the machining skills to build a simple cylinder photograph.
- retrac 4y ago
  It almost was! In the mid-1850s a French inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, was studying sound, and he invented a device that could record it [1]. It was a diaphragm attached to a very lightweight pen, and when paper was drawn through it at high speed as sound was produced, it basically drew the waveform. He used it in his study of phonology. So close! And yet no way to play it back. And trying to come up with some way to play it back seems to have eluded him, and others for a couple decades. Some of de Martinville's recordings have survived, and today software can reconstruct them into almost-intelligible speech and music. They're the oldest known recordings of a human voice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph
Aloha 4y ago
The one that makes me think is either the galvanic or visual telegraph.
effnorwood 4y ago
dboreham 4y ago
Watt needed to get a set of technologies developed to make a workable efficient steam engine. E.g. how to bore a straight cylinder in a material that withstands high pressure and temperature. Another aspect is that solutions tend to occupy a niche within the existing environment. E.g. an iPhone is no use to a Babylonian because they have no 5G infrastructure. A Lamborghini is no use to a Roman because a) no gas stations, although they could probably run it on alcohol, and b) it'd get stuck behind all the ox carts already on the road.
- marktangotango 4y ago
  > it'd get stuck behind all the ox carts already on the road. Lol, that's pretty much the case today, as anyone who's driven a sports car in traffic, on public streets can attest! In my public education the steam engine received zero coverage which is a pity because it's development and application spurred so much science and understanding. I've often thought a science curriculum based on the study of steam and work would be particularly enlightening.
  - bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
    In the US, I believe that’s AP physics B, whose topic is thermodynamics and “integration without integration” (i.e., the work done is the area under a PV graph)
ljnelson 4y ago
I also like https://technicshistory.com/2021/02/18/the-age-of-steam-introduction/ https://technicshistory.com/2021/02/18/the-age-of-steam-intr..., which points in part to metal purity and engineering tolerances.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
minraws 4y ago
I think this question is very intriguing and weird in the same breath, like why was X not invented a few decades earlier. I would honestly like to read papers on it both from sociology and scientific discovery point of view to contrast what justification are we provided for this. Which IMHO seems like a problem of pure chance, basically invention of X-1 pushes invention of X ahead and so on. Really curious how people would explain aberrations and delay in theoritical discoveries against physical inventions in this respect as well. Cause I don't think relatively would have required gravitational theory but I would wager it would have definitely helped. I am most certainly very intrigued, good job author you have me hooked. No pun intended.
tibbydudeza 4y ago
Rubber was needed for gaskets and seals ???.
tomohawk 4y ago
Slaves and serfs.

142 points by barry-cotter 4y ago

> So why did it then take almost another half a century, even with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery’s to appear? > The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked on thermometers, weather-glasses, egg incubators, solar-activated fountains, and perpetual motion machines. But because people so rarely try to improve or invent things, the low-hanging fruit can be left on the tree for decades or even centuries.

midoridensha 4y ago
I thought the other reason was the availability of cheap labor (including slavery).
ramesh31 4y ago
I was having this argument the other day with regards to the post-WW2 Nazi rocket scientists who took the US to the moon. There's a very real possibility that liquid rockets would have remained a novelty, just another "Nazi Wunderwaffe" had they all been tried and hung for their crimes instead of pardoned and put to work. Solid rockets were (and are) more than sufficient for all military applications. But to get people into space, you need liquid engines. Would we have ever invented them independently? Very possibly not.

UncleSlacky 4y ago

Often multiple inventors arrive at the same idea at almost the same time, for example Edison and Swan for the light bulb, Meucci and Bell (among others) for the telephone, Tesla and Marconi for radio, the Wrights and many others for the airplane etc. possibly because the technological and social level of society has reached a certain point in its development when the "time is ripe" for a given invention. As Charles Fort put it: > A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.

JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Not sure I buy that. I've never found users (culture) knows what it wants next. In software, users will suggest incremental improvements but never a whole new tool. I think it's steam-engine-time, when the steam engine arrives. And gets successfully marketed.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Some things are obvious - people have talked about "self-driving cars" for almost as long as there have been cars. Pirates and porn-lovers were watching entire movies on their computers, via broadband internet, 5+ years before Netflix launched their first streaming service. Electric cars - around since the 1880s. Other things are completely non-obvious. Politicians and journalists falling in love with a platform that only allows 140-character messages? Very much unexpected.
perilunar 4y ago
The Wright Brothers didn't come up with the idea of the airplane at all — people had been working on it for over 100 years.
- bumby 4y ago
  There’s an argument that heavier than air flight was mainly due to Curtis who was able to help the Wrights get an engine with a much better power:weight ratio. The Wrights made many contributions, notably a very efficient propeller, I believe. But some of their biggest claims, like wing-warping, succumbed to others ideas like Curtis’ ailerons.

lordnacho 4y ago

I think the reason is best described by Factorio. Yes, with a lot of spaghetti belts and manual crafting, you can make late-stage products. But to do it well, in a way that transcends merely being able to make a handful of items, you need a huge underlying economy. You end up having to re-arrange your whole factory, or you need to clear new land, which means you need to spend some time on diversions like improved military. Translated to the real world, it means you need to rearrange a large amount of the social system (slaves/serfdom) as well as creating markets for a bunch of inputs that build higher and higher in your tech tree. Still a good question though, I don't mean to say things had to happen just as they did.

jiggawatts 4y ago
A nice explanation for the "rate of progress" is the percentage of the population that is not involved in the production of food. Since the dawn of humanity up until "very recently" in the grand scheme of things, something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were directly involved in food production. There were the odd shamans, priests, tribal leaders, or what have you, but everyone else made themselves busy hunting, fishing, or farming. The current ratio in developed countries is something like 1 to 2 percent of the population directly working in farming, and maybe 20 to 30 percent working in "food production". Think workers at the biscuit factory, or chefs in a restaurant. Everyone else is free to do science, engineering, project management, finance, or whatever. The difference between 2% of the population free to work on non-food activities and 70% is massive. This is why so much progress has happened just in the last few centuries.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  That's true, but you need to unlock the tech for you to have enough food to feed everyone comfortably. Until it's comfy you have a fragile economy that occasionally falls into famine, so everyone would have to make plans to accommodate that, ie they can't build the pyramid too high. Your problem also isn't just inventing better methods, you also have to rearrange society to take advantage of this new possibility.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

nottorp 4y ago

So who uses that newsletter subscribe popup with no intuitive way to close it besides substack? Just so I know to avoid them. [I know where to click and I know there are technical workarounds probably, I just don't want to give them my eyeballs.]

lixtra 4y ago

The follow up was recently discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467

dang 4y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 - July 2022 (304 comments)

audunw 4y ago

This reminds me of James Burke Connections. That show often showed how many different and surprising dependencies there are on the path to any given invention. My favorite example is how the internal combustion engine needed an invention from perfume bottles to spray a good mist of fuel/air-mixture into the cylinder. Might have taken longer to invent ICE if that wasn't already readily available. I really hope that someone remakes a modern version of Connections.

bilsbie 4y ago
I thought the carberator did this?
- andylynch 4y ago
  Yes, but a key development in carburettor design was an 1880s patent by Maybach and Daimler, based on the principles of an atomiser as used for perfume.
  - berkes 4y ago
    Steam locomotives and other steam boilers used the same principle (Bernoulli). Did Daimler and Maybach say they took inspiration from perfume atomizers? Because it would make more sense if theyt took inspiration from steam engine's injectors.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    There are fuel injection patents from the 1870's
- berkes 4y ago
  Both perfume bottles and the carberator use Bernoulli's principle, which was published in 1738[1]. I'm not sure whether Bernoulli developed this for perfume bottles, but I doubt it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
aequitas 4y ago

nemo44x 4y ago

We needed calculus first and the formalization of mechanics, both published originally by Isaac Newton. Once mechanics and their calculus were formalized we had the tools to logically build mechanical things and share the abstract concepts with others in our networks which promoted faster iteration.

red_admiral 4y ago

Relevant recent ACOUP (Brett Deveraux) post: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

macintux 4y ago
That was a compelling read, and to my untutored eye raises more important points than this one. Economics trumps ingenuity.
- bsder 4y ago
  Agreed. I never really thought about how you needed a compelling usage of the "crappy" versions of steam engines before you would spend the time and resources to engineer better ones.
throwawayffffas 4y ago
Just came here to link this. Tldr: There was no use case for low power steam engines in the ancient/roman world. There was no know-how on building high pressure vessels that would allow higher power steam engines (this know-how was gained by work on cannons). The key use case for the first practical engines was draining coal mines, in the ancient/roman world this was not a big problem because most of their energy was from wood not coal.
- baking 4y ago
  Also, transportation of fuel by animal power was inefficient so basing the steam engine at the source of the fuel (a coal mine) was the only practical first application. It wasn't until the steam engine was perfected that it made sense to transport fuel.

aurizon 4y ago

The root was zero IP law. People who invented any new thing(say = a widget stamp) could use it to make widgets all day and sell them. If someone looked in a window and say how to made widget presses = he could also make them. If he open sourced it = showed his neighbours = all know the secret and market saturation ensues. That secret was his ' barrier to entry', anyone else had to do the old hard way. Romans were famous for this, rich men would kill inventors of new processes to maintain a monopoly. This led to intense secrecy. Look at Newton's famous secrecy, he was only convinced to publish late in life and, along with others, started the learned journal industry that employed the new printing tech to make many at a low cost. Once an inventor could reveal his secret to employees to make many items AS WELL AS have the original Royal Patent protected fabrication monopoly(later time limited monopolies emerged). Copyright/rant/Disney = another story...

cptaj 4y ago

An important factor seems to be precision engineering. I saw the point made in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester, where they argue that while all the science and experimentation was there, it wasn't until precision parts were widely available that steam engines really solved all their problems and became viable https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectionists https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...

bitexploder 4y ago
In particular, the standardization of units and measurements and the lathe. Lathes with accuracy were a tremendously important component of producing steam engines.
- MeteorMarc 4y ago
  But the first lathes could not be steampowered!
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Almost any stationary machine that can run on steampower can be run on water power instead. Or by horses trotting in a circle, or humans walking in a treadwheel [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane
  - bluGill 4y ago
    Even after the steam eninge was common foot powered lathes existed. Or you can power a lathe from water.
    - grogenaut 4y ago
      Bow lathes are fun looking and can be made with low tech. The fun thing with lathes is they are able to make things more precise than they are, power of screws really. So they're a bootstrap technology.

mkl95 4y ago

We knew how to make things like Hero's engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) since ancient times, so at least there was some intuition that something like the steam engine could be made, even if it escaped our ability. When it comes to building steam based devices the biggest difference to people back then is probably our knowledge of thermodynamics, which grew explosively (no pun) since the mid 17th century.

Jagerbizzle 4y ago

Another great read along the same vein from Bret Devereaux's blog: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

ThomPete 4y ago

Another question you might ask is why wasn't the computer invented earlier? Babbage and Lovelace came close but they didn't realize they had (almost) invented a computer they just thought they had invented a calculator. They thought they solved a math problem when in fact they had solved a physics problem. We could have been traveling between stars by now.

rgmerk 4y ago
But how useful would a mechanical general-purpose digital computer have been? Even if a competent project manager had been in charge, steam-driven mechanical computers would have been extremely expensive, physically large, and very slow. Most of the time, I’d expect special-purpose devices would have been more cost-effective. The technologies to build electronic computers didn’t exist for another half-century at least.
- ThomPete 4y ago
  Good questions because you are right, there is path dependency, but I do think a lot would have been different if we had understood earlier that computation is about physics not math.

somecommit 4y ago

My take is that they were not seeing the point to do so for the most easy one (like a mill, a press...) and from the other hand for clearly useful and advanced device like a vehicle/train it's the lack of amount of available combustible and iron. Even a train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly "why" it could be useful, do you really need to go so far with that amount of people? There were so much less people in the past, same for merchandise quantity probably. But the response in the article about the knowledge of the "vacuum possibility" is also very interesting, it is not mentioning this but it's crazy to think that we only know that the space emptiness is possible since Einstein theory 100 years ago (and not full of ether). Or that with the first locomotive people feared to die because of the speed.

wongarsu 4y ago
> Even a train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly "why" it could be useful, do you really need to go so far with that amount of people? Railways predate steam locomotives by about 250 years [1], or 200 years if you only count overland railways (as opposed to their use in mines). They were mainly used for transporting coal. You could argue that replacing the horses with steam engines was a very straightforward idea as soon as it was technologically feasible. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway

photochemsyn 4y ago

Author has an interesting point of view, I always assumed that the issue was the quality of the steel available at the time was too low to prevent explosive failure under pressure or collapse under vacuum: > "Now, one might suggest that Petty and Kalthoff simply lacked the tools or materials to make sufficiently strong and precisely fitting vessels and pipes. But I highly, highly doubt this." This issue has been historically researched with respect to artillery development, which seems to have been mostly bronze up until the 18th century, when reliable iron/steel artillery was introduced. For example: https://www.billstclair.com/weaponsman.com/index.html%3Fp=32625 https://www.billstclair.com/weaponsman.com/index.html%3Fp=32... Perhaps the pressures and temperatures involved in steam engines weren't as great as those involved with artillery, but the cost of making a bronze steam engine might have been prohibitive.

rofrol 4y ago
Similar comment here: The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel. Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment of successful railroads. Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a modest iron and steel industry. A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000 experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough heat and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore, leaving pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a "double carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish mountains" which was iron, 86…25; manganese, 8…50; and carbon, 5…25. Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are thus put back into the molten iron, and steel comes out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611002
- hef19898 4y ago

jmyeet 4y ago

Early steam engines were developed well before the locomotive steam engine, which is generally what we associate with the term "steam engine". I don't think you can overstate the importance of the technological development in the 19th century on these developments. The US presented a new need that I don't think really existed before: crossing vast distances over land, eventually all the way from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. IIRC the population of the US was 2 million in 1800 and 50 million in 1900. Others have mentioned precision engineering. This was an important factor and had its origin in manufacturing cannon bores. But a bigger factor (IMHO) was steel. Steel existed before the mid-19th century but it was incredibly expensive (more expensive than gold) and relatively low volume. This all changed with the Bessemer process that allowed the mass production of inexpensive steel. It made Andrew Carnegie in particular incredibly wealthy in the process. Trains existed before cheap steel but builds of railroads and trains absolutely exploded in the wake of cheap steel. This also led to the shift from wooden sailing ships to (ultimately) steel-hulled boats with engines. So prior to trains, what were the potential use cases for a steam engine? Automobiles seem unlikely (given weight and size and the ubiquity and utility of horses). Ships? Maybe. But sailing is effective and fires tend to be bad news for ships. So that really leaves factories, mills, etc. Mills in particular often used hydro power (ie a river turning a wheel). You could build them in locations with such features. Labor was also relatively cheap (and largely free in some cases ie slaves). Ultimately I don't think it's one thing and it's hard to separate these factors cleanly. It becomes a chicken and egg problem. Advancement can often fuel each other. It does seem like long distance transportation ultimately led to at least popularizing and mass producing steam engines.

saalweachter 4y ago
The original "tractors" were called "steam traction engines", to distinguish them from the steam engines you would pull around with a team of horses to where you needed them. There were a variety of earlier pieces of farm machines that could be driven by treadmills and belts; steam engines could naturally slot in as a drop-in replacement for the treadmills to power all of your equipment.
andrewla 4y ago
This article is very specifically not talking about locomotive steam engines, but the early, even pre-Newcomen, pre-Watt, low-pressure steam engines developed by Thomas Savery in the 1690s.

fortran77 4y ago

I always wondered why the phonograph wasn't invented earlier! As soon as people were able to build geared mechanisms, they should have had the machining skills to build a simple cylinder photograph.

retrac 4y ago
It almost was! In the mid-1850s a French inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, was studying sound, and he invented a device that could record it [1]. It was a diaphragm attached to a very lightweight pen, and when paper was drawn through it at high speed as sound was produced, it basically drew the waveform. He used it in his study of phonology. So close! And yet no way to play it back. And trying to come up with some way to play it back seems to have eluded him, and others for a couple decades. Some of de Martinville's recordings have survived, and today software can reconstruct them into almost-intelligible speech and music. They're the oldest known recordings of a human voice. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph

Aloha 4y ago

The one that makes me think is either the galvanic or visual telegraph.

effnorwood 4y ago

dboreham 4y ago

Watt needed to get a set of technologies developed to make a workable efficient steam engine. E.g. how to bore a straight cylinder in a material that withstands high pressure and temperature. Another aspect is that solutions tend to occupy a niche within the existing environment. E.g. an iPhone is no use to a Babylonian because they have no 5G infrastructure. A Lamborghini is no use to a Roman because a) no gas stations, although they could probably run it on alcohol, and b) it'd get stuck behind all the ox carts already on the road.

marktangotango 4y ago
> it'd get stuck behind all the ox carts already on the road. Lol, that's pretty much the case today, as anyone who's driven a sports car in traffic, on public streets can attest! In my public education the steam engine received zero coverage which is a pity because it's development and application spurred so much science and understanding. I've often thought a science curriculum based on the study of steam and work would be particularly enlightening.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  In the US, I believe that’s AP physics B, whose topic is thermodynamics and “integration without integration” (i.e., the work done is the area under a PV graph)

ljnelson 4y ago

I also like https://technicshistory.com/2021/02/18/the-age-of-steam-introduction/ https://technicshistory.com/2021/02/18/the-age-of-steam-intr..., which points in part to metal purity and engineering tolerances.

deleted 4y ago

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minraws 4y ago

I think this question is very intriguing and weird in the same breath, like why was X not invented a few decades earlier. I would honestly like to read papers on it both from sociology and scientific discovery point of view to contrast what justification are we provided for this. Which IMHO seems like a problem of pure chance, basically invention of X-1 pushes invention of X ahead and so on. Really curious how people would explain aberrations and delay in theoritical discoveries against physical inventions in this respect as well. Cause I don't think relatively would have required gravitational theory but I would wager it would have definitely helped. I am most certainly very intrigued, good job author you have me hooked. No pun intended.

tibbydudeza 4y ago

Rubber was needed for gaskets and seals ???.

tomohawk 4y ago

Slaves and serfs.