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I agree that there are non-technological factors for why they didn't invent semaphore, but I seriously doubt that a lack of capital had anything to do with it.

by nkoren 14y ago

I agree that there are non-technological factors for why they didn't invent semaphore, but I seriously doubt that a lack of capital had anything to do with it. Have you seen the sort of things the Romans _did_ try? Stupendously grandiose and expensive things. Rome was awash in capital. A half-decent semaphore network would've been a rounding error in their budget.

bunderbunder 14y ago
Rome was awash in capital, but it was missing other economic structures that help support innovation, such as the corporation. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, or later Italian Renaissance, the accumulations of capital that existed were somewhat hamstrung by the fact that they were concentrated in the hands of individuals and families. So personal aggrandizement was a huge motivating factor in deciding how the money would get spent, hence the large mount of art and monumental construction projects we see at those times. I'd suggest that corporations are much better for producing technological innovation. As compared to what things were like in Rome, their key characteristic was that decisions about how money would get spent are generally made by groups of people who don't actually own the money themselves. That cuts way back on the motivation to just blow it all on yet another temple in one's own name.
- nkoren 14y ago
  This is a really excellent point, and I think cuts much closer to the truth than a simple lack of technology or capital. If you think about the great infrastructure accomplishments of Rome: roads, aqueducts and sewer systems, rapid large-scale concrete construction, hypocausts, etc., then it seems to me that almost all of them were essentially scaled-up versions of domicile-level or urban-level technologies. These technologies could be piloted at a small scale and then scaled up if they proved to be worthwhile. The institutional mindset was almost totally civic rather than imperial. The military was something of an exception to this, and of course individual merchants and merchant companies would have been very much focused on keeping the gears of the empire turning. The roads and the granary systems were scaled-up urban technologies that helped the empire to function, but I'm not aware of any innovations at the empire level which didn't have some kind of urban precedent. Presumably there were no political or commercial institutions which were structured to support that kind of investment -- or even to ask those kind of questions. The British thinking around empires was fundamentally very different. They genuinely thought AS an empire -- a highly distributed network rather than an overgrown city-state. This gave them the insight to support the creation of the semaphore system. Perhaps a more interesting question, in my opinion, is why didn't the Chinese didn't invent the Internet? I'm not as knowledgeable about Chinese history, but my impression is that they were vastly better at thinking and acting like an empire -- not in the expansionist sense, but in the administrative sense. Presumably they would have had the kind of institutional basis to develop a network of semaphore towers. So what was the obstacle for them?

by nkoren 14y ago

bunderbunder 14y ago

Rome was awash in capital, but it was missing other economic structures that help support innovation, such as the corporation. Even at the height of the Roman Empire, or later Italian Renaissance, the accumulations of capital that existed were somewhat hamstrung by the fact that they were concentrated in the hands of individuals and families. So personal aggrandizement was a huge motivating factor in deciding how the money would get spent, hence the large mount of art and monumental construction projects we see at those times. I'd suggest that corporations are much better for producing technological innovation. As compared to what things were like in Rome, their key characteristic was that decisions about how money would get spent are generally made by groups of people who don't actually own the money themselves. That cuts way back on the motivation to just blow it all on yet another temple in one's own name.

nkoren 14y ago
This is a really excellent point, and I think cuts much closer to the truth than a simple lack of technology or capital. If you think about the great infrastructure accomplishments of Rome: roads, aqueducts and sewer systems, rapid large-scale concrete construction, hypocausts, etc., then it seems to me that almost all of them were essentially scaled-up versions of domicile-level or urban-level technologies. These technologies could be piloted at a small scale and then scaled up if they proved to be worthwhile. The institutional mindset was almost totally civic rather than imperial. The military was something of an exception to this, and of course individual merchants and merchant companies would have been very much focused on keeping the gears of the empire turning. The roads and the granary systems were scaled-up urban technologies that helped the empire to function, but I'm not aware of any innovations at the empire level which didn't have some kind of urban precedent. Presumably there were no political or commercial institutions which were structured to support that kind of investment -- or even to ask those kind of questions. The British thinking around empires was fundamentally very different. They genuinely thought AS an empire -- a highly distributed network rather than an overgrown city-state. This gave them the insight to support the creation of the semaphore system. Perhaps a more interesting question, in my opinion, is why didn't the Chinese didn't invent the Internet? I'm not as knowledgeable about Chinese history, but my impression is that they were vastly better at thinking and acting like an empire -- not in the expansionist sense, but in the administrative sense. Presumably they would have had the kind of institutional basis to develop a network of semaphore towers. So what was the obstacle for them?