5 ms·

Exactly. We have plenty of examples of past civilizations experiencing similar economic conditions, slavery, etc. So why didn't e.g. the Romans have an industri

Exactly. We have plenty of examples of past civilizations experiencing similar economic conditions, slavery, etc. So why didn't e.g. the Romans have an industrial revolution of this scale? Coal (and exploitation of fossil fuels more generally) is the singular factor that differentiates the industrial revolution from everything before it.

akiselev 4y ago
The Romans had coal [1]. The Greeks had even come up with a design that (remotely) resembles a steam engine [2]. What they didn’t have was the rest of the “tech tree” leading up to a usable steam engine, mostly metallurgy and the physics of work/energy. We can point to the first industry to truly mechanize as the beginning of the revolution but the technologies that got us there were legion. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
- goatlover 4y ago
  So did Ancient China, prior to the Romans.
  - runsWphotons 4y ago
    China had steam engines?
    - ska 4y ago
      Sort of; so did Egypt - but these were more steam devices not engines per se. I think the limiting factor was metallurgy & pressure vessel design before you can do something like Watt did.
      - woolion 4y ago
        Do you have references? I'd be interested to learn about the subject. Quick search gave me [0] for Egypt and [1] for China, and both answers seem to be "not really". [0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-engine-really-known-in-ancient-egypt https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-e... [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chinese-develop-steam-engines-prior-to-the-17th-century https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chi...
- marcusverus 4y ago
  The Aeolipile has got to be one of the greatest "what if" moments in human history. I can't help but look at it and feel like humanity was one serendipitous moment away from kicking off the industrial revolution 1700 years earlier. And what would the world look like if Egypt had been the first to industrialize?! It boggles the mind.
sinuhe69 4y ago
Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start.
- mikewarot 4y ago
  There was a workshop turning out the Antikythera mechanism, it wasn't a one-off device. It had a user manual. Lathes go ever further back. Whoever built the pyramids had sufficient precision to make flat surfaces similar to modern surface plates. The machines have been around for a very long time, powering them with other machines was part of it. There's a lot to untangle here.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start. you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :) I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.
  - coremoff 4y ago
    analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by people who had the ability to change things, there wasn't much incentive to make such change - "just buy more slaves"/"just work the slaves harder"
- vixen99 4y ago
  https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-concepts-still-used-today/22/ https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-co...
dhconnelly 4y ago
from a previous HN submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187): https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
Archelaos 4y ago
Bret C. Devereaux's wrote a very interesting article on this topic in his blog. See: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... His central observation is that the Industrial Revolution involves "coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy", but that "each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact." Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine from 1712 were so inefficient that it made only economic sense in circumstances where energy source is very, very cheap. That was inside of coal mines (not in any other kind of mine), because there coal was cheapest. So the Industrial Revolution required as a starting point that all other kinds of energy sources were so expensive that coal mines made sense, and not any kind of coal mines, but deep coal mines that required a lot of effort to pump water out of them. In other kinds of mines horses would have been cheaper than an atmospheric steam engine. In other words, intensive coal mining had to come first and then the Industrial Revolution followed, not the other way round. It took over half a century, until 1776, that the steam engine in James Watt's desing had been improved so much that its use made economic sense outside of coal mines, namely in the textile industry. It was in the 1700s that looms and especially spinning machines had improved so much that their combination with Watt's steam engine made sense. Then there was the combination of steam engines with new methods for drilling cannons. The cylinders needed for steam engines used technologies that had been improved over a long period of time in gun production. Then the steam engine itself was combined with the new invention of drilling cannon barrels (instead of casting them). This resulted in better cannons and also helped to further improve the cylinders for the steam engines. So why not the Romans? -- Devereaux writes: "_none_ of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn’t; they’re still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn’t have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce." "And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to." "All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent."

akiselev 4y ago

The Romans had coal [1]. The Greeks had even come up with a design that (remotely) resembles a steam engine [2]. What they didn’t have was the rest of the “tech tree” leading up to a usable steam engine, mostly metallurgy and the physics of work/energy. We can point to the first industry to truly mechanize as the beginning of the revolution but the technologies that got us there were legion. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Roman_Britain#Coal [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

goatlover 4y ago
So did Ancient China, prior to the Romans.
- runsWphotons 4y ago
  China had steam engines?
  - ska 4y ago
    Sort of; so did Egypt - but these were more steam devices not engines per se. I think the limiting factor was metallurgy & pressure vessel design before you can do something like Watt did.
    - woolion 4y ago
      Do you have references? I'd be interested to learn about the subject. Quick search gave me [0] for Egypt and [1] for China, and both answers seem to be "not really". [0] https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-engine-really-known-in-ancient-egypt https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/1991/was-the-steam-e... [1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chinese-develop-steam-engines-prior-to-the-17th-century https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/2012/did-the-chi...
marcusverus 4y ago
The Aeolipile has got to be one of the greatest "what if" moments in human history. I can't help but look at it and feel like humanity was one serendipitous moment away from kicking off the industrial revolution 1700 years earlier. And what would the world look like if Egypt had been the first to industrialize?! It boggles the mind.

sinuhe69 4y ago

Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start.

mikewarot 4y ago
There was a workshop turning out the Antikythera mechanism, it wasn't a one-off device. It had a user manual. Lathes go ever further back. Whoever built the pyramids had sufficient precision to make flat surfaces similar to modern surface plates. The machines have been around for a very long time, powering them with other machines was part of it. There's a lot to untangle here.
fsckboy 4y ago
> Industrial Revolution of course requires industrial machines. So as long as the machines are not invented, no revolution can start. you clearly are not giving enough credit to slavery which is the whole point of this exercise. How are we going to build a case for reparations with you talking like that? :) I'm not defending anything about slavery, but just as impoverished working class Britons contributed little to the British industrial revolution, but did both suffer and benefit from it, the same goes for slaves. The industrialization of industry would not have been possible without the industrialization of agriculture which created an unemployed labor pool available for urban industrial revolutionary work, just as we saw play out in the recent history of China.
- coremoff 4y ago
  analaguously, I got the impression from the article and the discussion here that slavery was a dead-end trap; a local maxima - without pain being experienced by people who had the ability to change things, there wasn't much incentive to make such change - "just buy more slaves"/"just work the slaves harder"
vixen99 4y ago
https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-concepts-still-used-today/22/ https://sciencesensei.com/40-ancient-greek-technology-and-co...

dhconnelly 4y ago

from a previous HN submission (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187): https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

Archelaos 4y ago

Bret C. Devereaux's wrote a very interesting article on this topic in his blog. See: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... His central observation is that the Industrial Revolution involves "coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy", but that "each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact." Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric steam engine from 1712 were so inefficient that it made only economic sense in circumstances where energy source is very, very cheap. That was inside of coal mines (not in any other kind of mine), because there coal was cheapest. So the Industrial Revolution required as a starting point that all other kinds of energy sources were so expensive that coal mines made sense, and not any kind of coal mines, but deep coal mines that required a lot of effort to pump water out of them. In other kinds of mines horses would have been cheaper than an atmospheric steam engine. In other words, intensive coal mining had to come first and then the Industrial Revolution followed, not the other way round. It took over half a century, until 1776, that the steam engine in James Watt's desing had been improved so much that its use made economic sense outside of coal mines, namely in the textile industry. It was in the 1700s that looms and especially spinning machines had improved so much that their combination with Watt's steam engine made sense. Then there was the combination of steam engines with new methods for drilling cannons. The cylinders needed for steam engines used technologies that had been improved over a long period of time in gun production. Then the steam engine itself was combined with the new invention of drilling cannon barrels (instead of casting them). This resulted in better cannons and also helped to further improve the cylinders for the steam engines. So why not the Romans? -- Devereaux writes: "_none_ of these precursors were in place. The Romans made some use of mineral coal as a heating element or fuel, but it was decidedly secondary to their use of wood and where necessary charcoal. The Romans used rotational energy via watermills to mill grain, but not to spin thread. Even if they had the spinning wheel (and they didn’t; they’re still spinning with drop spindles), the standard Mediterranean period loom, the warp-weighted loom, was roughly an order of magnitude less efficient than the flying shuttle loom, so the Roman economy couldn’t have handled all of the thread the spinning wheel could produce." "And of course the Romans had put functionally no effort into figuring out how to make efficient pressure-cylinders, because they had absolutely no use for them. Remember that by the time Newcomen is designing his steam engine, the kings and parliaments of Europe have been effectively obsessed with who could build the best pressure-cylinder (and then plug it at one end, making a cannon) for three centuries because success in war depended in part on having the best cannon. If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to." "All of which is why simple graphs of things like ‘global historical GDP’ can be a bit deceptive: there’s a lot of particularity beneath the basic statistics of production because technologies are contingent and path dependent."