Well, commenters made some decent points, but the real issue is that you need a reason, a seriously good reason, to legitimize the expense involved in building an engine.
In the case of The Industrial Revolution, this was pumping water out coal mines, and air in to them. Coal was needed as other heat sources had been largely depleted (or nearly so) in Britain. People generally like being warm. This kind of pressure required the existence of a large population, which required the agricultural revolution to have preceded it. The agricultural revolution was also required because you needed some amount of people to be free of working in food production to have the time to improve and build all of the other required things leading up to automation.
Rome had no agricultural revolution, no need for deep coal mines, rather frequent plagues to lower the population, and plenty of heating fuel.
Not to mention the significant amount of technical innovation that had already happened in the Middle Ages. To make a good engine, you need to be able to bore cylinders accurately, which depended on cannons having been manufactured and improved upon for centuries.
Lathes are older than recorded history. The Antikythera mechanism required a lathe for it's construction. Romans clearly had access to metalworking capabilities sophisticated enough for clock making. Engines wouldn't be a huge stretch.
Yes. As the article says, they needed "a use case that could tolerate the inevitable inadequacies of the 1.0 version of the device". A Newcomen engine is a turkey. It's about 0.5% efficient. It's the size of a house with the power of a riding lawnmower. And it took most of a century to advance to a better model.
There's another direction that might have created an industrial revolution. High-quality steel swords were known in Roman times, but they were not mass-produced items. The Roman army did produce swords in quantity, and they had a modest steel-making capability. But the Romans never made it to the Bessemer converter.
The Bessemer converter is a simple, crude device. The Romans could have built one.
But the metallurgy of making steel with it is hard.
Early versions had serious yield problems - much of the time, the steel produced was terrible.
It took over a thousand test runs by one of Bessemer's customers and some knowledge of analytical chemistry to figure out the additives that make the process work reliably.
The demand wasn't there yet. But if someone had developed gunpowder...
I'm not an expert in this, but there were plenty of Romans with plenty of time to innovate. And innovate they did. They had significant achievements in engineering and construction. I mean some of their constructions still stand today. They also spent lots of time on other things and got pretty sophisticated (politics, negotiations, war, poetry).
So I'm not really convinced that their agriculture practices would have been an issue...
Coal was needed because copper was needed because tradeships were eaten by shipworms. The trade with africa, america, india, kickstarted and involuntary financed the industrial revolution.
> Now we can’t cover the entire industrial revolution with all of its complex moving parts but we can briefly go over the core of it to get a sense of the key ingredients. Fundamentally this is a story about coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy. That’s not the whole story, by any means, but it is one of the most important through-lines and will serve to demonstrate the point.
> The specificity matters here because 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. […]
Interesting thought experiment at the end:
> Much of history ends up this way. As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables. If Spain or Portugal, for instance, rather than Britain, had ended up controlling India, would the flow of cotton have been diverted to places where coal usage was not common, cheap and abundant, thereby separating the early steam-powered mine pumps both from the industry they could first revolutionize and also from the vast wealth necessary to support that process (much less if no European power had ever come to dominate the Indian subcontinent)? This question, like so many counter-factuals, is fundamentally unanswerable but useful for illustrating the deeply contingent nature of historical events in a way that data (like the charts of global GDP over centuries) can sometimes fail to capture.
I'd hazard that it was the lack of a printing press and cheap paper. Why? Because that resulted in mass literacy and dissemination of knowledge, meaning a lot of people can be involved in finding solutions.
I've idly thought now and then what would I do if I was magically transported back into Roman times? Printing press and paper. Both can be constructed from what Romans had readily available.
I always wondered how far technology can go without advanced metallurgy. Clearly steam engines require good metallurgy, but the spinning jenny and the flying shuttle don't, do they? How much would those advances have changed the Roman world?
I'm a materials engineer, off the top of my head, the first thing that comes to mind when you mention access to improved metallurgy is lighter, stronger materials and the impact that would have on construction. That could have lead to larger, taller buildings, stronger city walls etc. Then then probably would be flow on effects since stronger walls means need improved artillery to siege a city etc.
But I think the article did a good job of highlighting that technology developments occur out of local circumstances and requirements. I am no history scholar but I understand the Roman empire was expansive, space wasn't necessarily a constraint so there probably wasn't a huge demand to build larger and taller buildings it would have likely been easier to expand cities outwards rather than upwards.
There was a good documentary series I watched years ago called "Engineering an Empire" they had an episode about the technology of Carthage (Rome's great rival), the series pointed out the city of Carthage had large multi-story buildings shared by several families, kind of pseduo-apartment buildings from what the documentary explained there was much more constraints on space in Carthage as it was very desirable to live inside the city walls this led to the development of this type of construction style. Because of these tall buildings there were more advances in things like plumbing, which was different to what the Romans had at the time. The show also pointed out that Carthage placed more emphasis on Naval power so they had relatively sophisticated harbor design, shipbuilding industries etc.
The Roman housing blocks (which a quick search tells me are called 'insulae') were several stories high, up to perhaps nine stories, although the higher stories would have been extremely undesirable (and almost certainly poor quality), so it's not like Rome itself lacked large multi-story buildings.
The Romans tried to build tall buildings, but they kept falling down, and a decree eventually stopped further attempts. They lacked the engineering knowledge and mathematics necessary, not the desire. Similar story with ship sizes. I think the book "Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down" covers some of it...
you can definitely build digital computers out of wood, and probably out of yarn as well. they won't be as fast as electronic computers, but being an order of magnitude faster than hand calculation is easily achievable, and ought to be enough to give them an overwhelming advantage at calulation — if you have something to apply that calculation to
(by 'digital computers' i mean the conventional, turing-complete kind, not special-purpose machines like the pascaline)
the romans (and the lydians before them) were routinely making a silver halide in order to refine gold from electrum; they used common salt, so they got silver chloride, which is a rather poor photographic material, but adequate to the purpose if your exposure is long enough. so photography was tantalizingly close for over 2000 years before it was finally achieved
because the first record of it is from pseudo-geber, evidently the romans didn't have sulfuric acid, which would have been quite useful for many things. but they had lead, glazed pottery, and nitrates, so they could have engaged in the chamber process
screws for actuating motion were documented by heron of alexandria in the early roman empire, and the screw press dates back further, so you could have built a micrometer
i don't know if you count iron smelting as 'advanced metallurgy', but electroplating was also tantalizingly close since the opening of the iron age; wire, iron, glazed pottery, vinegar, salt water, and copper were all available in every city, so you could easily have built a voltaic pile by putting a bunch of low-voltage cells in series — as some have speculated without evidence was done with the so-called 'baghdad battery', which dates from the sassanid period. but it's not clear what you'd plate onto what; perhaps you could tin-plate some iron, and then copper-plate the tin plating? gold and silver plating would have been out of reach
to me the most interesting aspect of this question is this: what advances could we make today, which in retrospect will puzzle our successors as to why we didn't make them for such a long time?
If we ignore the ‘minor’ issues of efficiency and longevity which would ‘only’ affect how practical the device would be I am not sure about that ‘clearly’.
So, let’s ignore all practical issues, and just try and build a steam engine that would provide some power for a decent period, ignoring efficiency.
Tensile strength to prevent pipes and the boiler getting torn apart by the steam pressure would be a main problem, I think.
There’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_cannon: “Wooden cannons have been manufactured and used in wars in many countries. The wooden parts were invariably strengthened with metal fittings or even rope.”, and (from World War One) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_mortar#Design: “The Albrecht mortars […] consisted of a muzzle loaded smooth bore barrel built from wooden staves and wound with galvanized wire for reinforcement”
Those likely didn’t work for long periods, but they did withstand fairly high pressures repeatedly.
So maybe, a boiler and pipes built with wood or bamboo, strengthened by rope could be made to ‘work’ at relatively low pressure for a while.
I would try to line the piping on the inside with clay to prevent steam from weakening the wood.
Next major problem: wood catches fire relatively easily. That’s at about 250°C, though, so there’s a range (about 520K vs 370K or 40% of room) at which steam can be created, but wood doesn’t burn yet.
It also provides a ‘solution’ for another major problem, that of sealing the cylinder to prevent steam from getting out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine#Te...: “The piston was surrounded by a seal in the form of a leather ring, but as the cylinder bore was finished by hand and not absolutely true, a layer of water had to be constantly maintained on top of the piston.”
So, I suspect you could build a steam engine without metals. It wouldn’t be efficient and would be prone to catching fire, though.
Slavery was my first guess, and the article seems to confirm this. The antebellum South was behind the North in technology-driven economy for this same reason.
But in practice it seemed to go the other way around. Once the industrial revolution came, slavery was out-competed by automation.
The only parts of agriculture still done by hand are the parts nobody has invented a machine that can do better. Nobody is out there planting seeds by hand or watering the fields with a garden hose anymore. Whereas the modern replacement (immigrant labor) is still used, but only for the things machines can't do (yet).
>But in practice it seemed to go the other way around. Once the industrial revolution came, slavery was out-competed by automation.
Only after it was invented and successfully deployed. To get to that point, someone needed a reason to go to the expense and trouble of inventing that stuff. The slavery-dependent economies weren't going to do it: why would they need to?
I think the person you're replying to implied what you are saying. Technology was a substitute for slavery so it's meant to replicate it at first but unlike human machines, industrial machines can constantly improve
I read an essay long ago that suggested the Egyptians could have built gliders in the fashion of Otto Lilienthal out of papyrus. And that could have stimulated the idea of propulsion in them or in other subsequent societies.
EDIT: I wonder if a Rogallo wing could be made out of papyrus...I'm having a Thor Heyerdahl moment.
May be apocryphal, but I thought I remembered reading that Rome never implemented a real census. Curious about the relationship between statistical management of logistics and industrial development
Funnily, the blog author has an article all about how demography of ancient Rome was determined - https://acoup.blog/2023/12/22/collections-how-many-people-an... By our standards they did not conduct a true census, where you counted everyone, but varied if counting heads of households, or men of military age, or men, women, and children.
Readit News
In the case of The Industrial Revolution, this was pumping water out coal mines, and air in to them. Coal was needed as other heat sources had been largely depleted (or nearly so) in Britain. People generally like being warm. This kind of pressure required the existence of a large population, which required the agricultural revolution to have preceded it. The agricultural revolution was also required because you needed some amount of people to be free of working in food production to have the time to improve and build all of the other required things leading up to automation.
Rome had no agricultural revolution, no need for deep coal mines, rather frequent plagues to lower the population, and plenty of heating fuel.
There's another direction that might have created an industrial revolution. High-quality steel swords were known in Roman times, but they were not mass-produced items. The Roman army did produce swords in quantity, and they had a modest steel-making capability. But the Romans never made it to the Bessemer converter.
The Bessemer converter is a simple, crude device. The Romans could have built one. But the metallurgy of making steel with it is hard. Early versions had serious yield problems - much of the time, the steel produced was terrible. It took over a thousand test runs by one of Bessemer's customers and some knowledge of analytical chemistry to figure out the additives that make the process work reliably.
The demand wasn't there yet. But if someone had developed gunpowder...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio...
I'm not an expert in this, but there were plenty of Romans with plenty of time to innovate. And innovate they did. They had significant achievements in engineering and construction. I mean some of their constructions still stand today. They also spent lots of time on other things and got pretty sophisticated (politics, negotiations, war, poetry).
So I'm not really convinced that their agriculture practices would have been an issue...
> Now we can’t cover the entire industrial revolution with all of its complex moving parts but we can briefly go over the core of it to get a sense of the key ingredients. Fundamentally this is a story about coal, steam engines, textile manufacture and above all the harnessing of a new source of energy in the economy. That’s not the whole story, by any means, but it is one of the most important through-lines and will serve to demonstrate the point.
> The specificity matters here because 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. […]
Interesting thought experiment at the end:
> Much of history ends up this way. As much as we might want to imagine that the greater currents push historical events largely on a predetermined path with but minor variations from what must always have been, in practice events are tremendously contingent on unpredictable variables. If Spain or Portugal, for instance, rather than Britain, had ended up controlling India, would the flow of cotton have been diverted to places where coal usage was not common, cheap and abundant, thereby separating the early steam-powered mine pumps both from the industry they could first revolutionize and also from the vast wealth necessary to support that process (much less if no European power had ever come to dominate the Indian subcontinent)? This question, like so many counter-factuals, is fundamentally unanswerable but useful for illustrating the deeply contingent nature of historical events in a way that data (like the charts of global GDP over centuries) can sometimes fail to capture.
Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39061287 - Jan 2024 (1 comment)
Why no Roman industrial revolution? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36913766 - July 2023 (different article, 79 comments)
Why no Roman industrial revolution? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187 - Aug 2022 (516 comments)
Britain wasn't unique in this respect.
But I think the article did a good job of highlighting that technology developments occur out of local circumstances and requirements. I am no history scholar but I understand the Roman empire was expansive, space wasn't necessarily a constraint so there probably wasn't a huge demand to build larger and taller buildings it would have likely been easier to expand cities outwards rather than upwards.
There was a good documentary series I watched years ago called "Engineering an Empire" they had an episode about the technology of Carthage (Rome's great rival), the series pointed out the city of Carthage had large multi-story buildings shared by several families, kind of pseduo-apartment buildings from what the documentary explained there was much more constraints on space in Carthage as it was very desirable to live inside the city walls this led to the development of this type of construction style. Because of these tall buildings there were more advances in things like plumbing, which was different to what the Romans had at the time. The show also pointed out that Carthage placed more emphasis on Naval power so they had relatively sophisticated harbor design, shipbuilding industries etc.
(by 'digital computers' i mean the conventional, turing-complete kind, not special-purpose machines like the pascaline)
the romans (and the lydians before them) were routinely making a silver halide in order to refine gold from electrum; they used common salt, so they got silver chloride, which is a rather poor photographic material, but adequate to the purpose if your exposure is long enough. so photography was tantalizingly close for over 2000 years before it was finally achieved
because the first record of it is from pseudo-geber, evidently the romans didn't have sulfuric acid, which would have been quite useful for many things. but they had lead, glazed pottery, and nitrates, so they could have engaged in the chamber process
screws for actuating motion were documented by heron of alexandria in the early roman empire, and the screw press dates back further, so you could have built a micrometer
i don't know if you count iron smelting as 'advanced metallurgy', but electroplating was also tantalizingly close since the opening of the iron age; wire, iron, glazed pottery, vinegar, salt water, and copper were all available in every city, so you could easily have built a voltaic pile by putting a bunch of low-voltage cells in series — as some have speculated without evidence was done with the so-called 'baghdad battery', which dates from the sassanid period. but it's not clear what you'd plate onto what; perhaps you could tin-plate some iron, and then copper-plate the tin plating? gold and silver plating would have been out of reach
to me the most interesting aspect of this question is this: what advances could we make today, which in retrospect will puzzle our successors as to why we didn't make them for such a long time?
If we ignore the ‘minor’ issues of efficiency and longevity which would ‘only’ affect how practical the device would be I am not sure about that ‘clearly’.
So, let’s ignore all practical issues, and just try and build a steam engine that would provide some power for a decent period, ignoring efficiency.
Tensile strength to prevent pipes and the boiler getting torn apart by the steam pressure would be a main problem, I think.
There’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_cannon: “Wooden cannons have been manufactured and used in wars in many countries. The wooden parts were invariably strengthened with metal fittings or even rope.”, and (from World War One) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albrecht_mortar#Design: “The Albrecht mortars […] consisted of a muzzle loaded smooth bore barrel built from wooden staves and wound with galvanized wire for reinforcement”
Those likely didn’t work for long periods, but they did withstand fairly high pressures repeatedly.
So maybe, a boiler and pipes built with wood or bamboo, strengthened by rope could be made to ‘work’ at relatively low pressure for a while.
I would try to line the piping on the inside with clay to prevent steam from weakening the wood.
Next major problem: wood catches fire relatively easily. That’s at about 250°C, though, so there’s a range (about 520K vs 370K or 40% of room) at which steam can be created, but wood doesn’t burn yet.
Water boils at higher temperatures at higher pressure (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/boiling-point-water-d_926...), but that need not be a showstopper. The Newcomen engine doesn’t run on high pressure.
It also provides a ‘solution’ for another major problem, that of sealing the cylinder to prevent steam from getting out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine#Te...: “The piston was surrounded by a seal in the form of a leather ring, but as the cylinder bore was finished by hand and not absolutely true, a layer of water had to be constantly maintained on top of the piston.”
So, I suspect you could build a steam engine without metals. It wouldn’t be efficient and would be prone to catching fire, though.
The only parts of agriculture still done by hand are the parts nobody has invented a machine that can do better. Nobody is out there planting seeds by hand or watering the fields with a garden hose anymore. Whereas the modern replacement (immigrant labor) is still used, but only for the things machines can't do (yet).
Only after it was invented and successfully deployed. To get to that point, someone needed a reason to go to the expense and trouble of inventing that stuff. The slavery-dependent economies weren't going to do it: why would they need to?
In the US North, around the time of independence is when slavery there was banned.
In both places the "IR" started not long afterwards, with the UK starting first.
Probably because labor was not cheap anymore, people had to find a new way of production.
EDIT: I wonder if a Rogallo wing could be made out of papyrus...I'm having a Thor Heyerdahl moment.