Also, if we wanted to go back even further, the true roots are probably the Enlightenment. Before Wilkinson and Watt and Darby could think to develop technology, they needed certain political rights that didn't exist to previous humans. The rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, sell across markets - things that lay people didn't have access to in earlier eras. And most importantly, courts that would enforce said rights for you!
And they needed double-entry bookkeeping! Perhaps one of the most underrated human inventions of all. Your wealth was no longer determined by how much stuff physically hoard, but by a record of entitlements.
The Chola merchant guilds had formalized corporate structures that dissipated the risk of long voyages 2000 years ago. Seeing that the Romans traded with the Cholas, the Romans probably had corporate structures too.
Humans have been living in complex societies since the Bronze Age. It’s difficult to run a complex society without some sort of bureaucratic organization.
Romans built blocks of dwelling houses 5-6 stories high, houses with central heating, and running water delivered to their cities (and wealthier homes) by systems of aqueducts and pipes, etc. These are things that we associate with 19th or even 20th century in large parts of Europe.
Sadly, their social institutions, even as famous as the republic, were also not practiced and even forgotten for long centuries. Much of the Enlightenment was fueled by re-reading and re-understanding of classic Greek and Roman works, which felt fresh and mind-expanding at the time.
I mean, the main social institutions that underpinned all the others in Rome were massive human trafficking and looting operations. The enlightened Greeks weren't any better.
My personal guess is that we would've had the industrial revolution thousands of years earlier if these groups we like to glorify in our history books would've laid off the enslaving, murder, and robbery.
I'm not saying the Greeks and Romans didn't have any merits at all. Can we learn some things from them? Sure. Do we have to call them 'great,' and aspire to be like them? Absolutely not.
Life in 700 AD was completely different from life in 1400 AD. Cities, population density, building styles, international trade, weapons and warfare, agricultural methods, secular institutions - almost nothing stayed the same.
People tend to even forget that the official definition of "the Middle Ages" stretches back into the Dark Age, where kings were more like chieftains, castles basically unknown, even most of the clergy struggled to read and write, and a typical member of the elite warrior class looked nothing like a stereotypical knight.
I seem to find that this is still the best way to communicate.
But I still think there was something unique about the legal entitlements in 17th century England that didn't really exist in previous eras. Previous versions of complex structures were still family oriented, or had to put up with local power brokers, or were a fiefdom unto themselves.
Like, you didn't see James Watt build a fort and hire goons to protect his assets. But that would have been a completely normal requirement of establishing an organization in the Roman world.
What was unique about legal entitlements 1600s England that wasn't in, say, 1600s Netherlands?
Like, why doesn't the Dutch East India Company count?
Or quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine#Free_miners :
> The organizational structure of Falun Mine created under the 1347 charter was advanced for its time. Free miners owned shares of the operation, proportional to their ownership of copper smelters. The structure was precursor to modern joint stock companies, and Stora Enso, the modern successor to the old mining company, is often referred to as the oldest joint stock company still operational in the world.[2]
My point isn't that England was first or best at these things, but the chronology of these things coming first was essential for the puzzle pieces coming together.
English is an unusual European language using "did" to express some negatives, like "I didn't want it" instead of "I want it not", and with a relatively insignificant gender system in the grammar.
Maybe that was part of the puzzle.
Or perhaps Anglicanism was part of the puzzle.
Or the wealth from colonial exploitation and slavery that was used to fund these projects.
For that matter, when Watt developed his steam engine, Scottish "colliers and salters [were] in a state of slavery and bondage" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Slavery_and... , so there's another puzzle piece. That surely seems like part of the legal entitlements you refer to, albeit in Scotland instead of England.
Or, as English people 150 years ago argued, the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and Scottish races -- a puzzle piece that biology has conclusively shown does not exist.
How do you know which puzzle piece is relevant enough to the puzzle, vs. a happenstance?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kay_(flying_shuttle)
Weavers rioted against his invention. He hardly collected any royalties from his invention in England, and departed for France persona non grata. The French manufacturers also did not pay royalties on the monopoly to the flying shuttle granted him. He died in poverty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright
He lost a major patent case, which allowed competitors to use his inventions. He did make money because he owned mills himself rather than being a tinkerer like Kay.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hargreaves
He was run out of town because his spinning jenny put too many spinners out of work. He moved to the town that bought thread because they welcomed the lower prices. His patent survived but did not stop others from copying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Crompton
Crompton could not afford to patent the spinning mule, so he open sourced it following promises from manufacturers to pay him a fee. The promises were broken. Crompton never made any money from his invention.
Then, as now, a patent is only worth one's ability to fund litigation.
The Europe science and engineering moved into England much before the economical activity, and as far as I can see, it was mostly because of that one. Some of the greatest minds of the time were literally chased outside of Italy during that move.
Also, it's a right that was missing from most of the world for about a millennium by that time.
interesting- I haven’t heard of this view before. can you give some examples?
(Paywalled, but you may be able to find a copy.)
Private land is almost as old as record history. So is selling across markets.
Double entry book keeping was invented in the late 15th century.
All of these existed for centuries before the steam engine.
Regarding its invention, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping#Histo... says:
> The earliest extant accounting records that follow the modern double-entry system in Europe come from Amatino Manucci, a Florentine merchant at the end of the 13th century.
and lists precursors under "Other claimants".
Hell my own country didn't have any forests left by the 17th century and built ships from Baltic timber. For 300 years the entire world fed European industry with its natural resources. It is why God created Africa.
So which great invention is just around the corner now?
I wouldn't call the industrial revolution "the greatest moment of human progres". I would call it "the moment that sealed our fate". Climate change, un-renewable resources scarcity, biodiversity collapse, etc. We are headed at a breath-taking rate towards a planet that will be hardly inhabitable for us. We may only subsist as nomadic tribes only a few centuries from now.
Yet when you bring up a certain recent improvement to records of entitlement around here, you tend to get crucified. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Cities like London made the switch early on to using coal as a fuel over the course of 1570-1600, but this was for domestic use. Industrial use lagged many decades behind, with iron very much last - long after glassmaking, saltmaking, brewing, and even baking.
When the English iron industry struggled to adapt to rising fuel prices, the overwhelmimg response was just to import it from Sweden. And that was especially the case with the steel industry, which didn’t really take off in England until the breakthroughs of the mid-18thC (long after Newcomen or Savery).
If there’s evidence I’m missing, however, I’d very much like to know.
Basically England was boosted by the energy input from coal.
One thing about Sweden for a long time. They had a lot of trees and very high quality iron ore. Which I think is the reason they were so powerful during that period. Sweden cut down all their trees to make steel.
When I think of steam engines I think also of simple franklin stoves and pressure cookers. People tried to make both of those long before steam engines. They are both much more efficient in terms of the amount of fuel consumed but the cost was too high for that to pencil out.
> But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better.
A Bessemer converter is very simple. It's basically a big iron vessel lined with bricks and mounted on a pivot so it can be tilted and poured. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Inputs are mostly coal, iron ore, and limestone, along with compressed air and some additives, but making good steel from those is tricky. The person who got this right, after about 10,000 tries, was Robert Mushet, who is mostly forgotten.[2]
Could that have been done earlier? Maybe. Probably not before analytical chemistry. The detailed composition of the inputs has a huge influence on what you get out in steelmaking. Before Mushet, the output from steelmaking was kind of random and often bad.
(1830 was when the Liverpool and Manchester Railway started operation. This was when railroads got out of beta and started changing the world. Before then, it was mostly one-off mine-haulage systems and prototypes. The Liverpool and Manchester finally got it right. They had regular service with multiple steam locomotives of a common design, double track lines, stations, signals, timetables, and tickets. At last, a production-ready product. This is what allowed the Industrial Revolution to scale.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw...
People severely underestimate the impact computers have on our society and the dynamism of the current day R&D. Even here on HN.
But certainly, nuclear or renewables could have been developed more and earlier.
Until roughly 8,000 years ago, the only materials available were those found in (near) finished form in nature: stone, wood, bone, grass and fibres, ceramics (requiring firing), concrete (typically also), and metals with low melting points.
There'd have been some glues / resins (bone, tree-sap, and a few other compounds).
A huge part of what creates impressions of times and periods over the past 400 or so years is the gradual introduction of new materials: glass, finished bricks, wrought iron, steel, and in the case of textiles, the emergence of synthetics beginning in the late 19th century (celluloid, viscose, and eventually Nylon and polyester).
The development of cheap high-quality steel, and later aluminium, titanium, and other difficult-to-produce metals, has had a huge impact.
The other thing I heard was battery technology. Just recently a podcast with Matthew Ball, he makes the argument that AR/VR/metaverse technology needs a breakthrough (in part) in battery technology. Right now the best system can run at half the performance you need for 30 minutes and gets really hot.
Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money.
LCD screens did not produce as good of a picture quality as plasma or even HD CRT screens, but they were so cheap and light you can do things like replace signage.
Crypto is weird. Crypto is proving to not be any cheaper than what it supposed to be replacing (currency, securities). But if you think about what crypto is - it's really an escrow service that's so freaking cheap it's being used for dumb things like payments. But I think like how it took a couple decades for people to start figuring out what they could do with cheap steel, I think eventually crypto might genuinely start finding useful applications.
I like this lens, although I'd stop short of saying it's "most" technology revolutions. Rather, it's a counterweight to the common perspective that revolutions are made of radical novelty; the reality is that both forces are important.
My favorite example of this is the home computer. When they came out, they barely did anything; in a world where a "computer" already meant (in some cases) a nice Unix system with editors and compilers and preemptive multitasking and all the sorts of things we still take for granted, they were more like Arduinos. Absolute rubbish. And yet, university researchers abandoned their mainframes in droves to do their data processing on silly little home PCs. Why? Because crappy though they were, they represented freedom. You didn't have to plead to be allowed time on one, or worse hand over your batch FORTRAN program on a giant stack of punched cards (don't drop them) to some overworked secretary in "data processing" and wait a whole business day to get your printout of "error on line 5". Buy a microcomputer, and your allocated time was 24h/day, and your data turnaround was instant. You could even write your thesis on one - bye bye typewriter!
Worse (i.e. cheaper) is better.
Am I missing something? It looks like hundreds of diesel-electric locomotives are more powerful than the most powerful steam engines ever made.
I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_locomotives then sorted by tractive effort/force and looked for the most powerful diesel and most powerful steam.
EMD SD70ACe-T4 - diesel-electric - 200,000 pounds-force (890 kN) starting, 175,000 pounds-force (778 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC (478 built)
GE AC6000CW - diesel-electric - 188,000 pounds-force (836 kN) starting; 166,000 pounds-force (738 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_AC6000CW (317 built)
by comparison:
Erie Class P-1 - steam - 176,256 pounds-force (784 kN) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplex_locomotive (10 built) ("high tractive effort, but low speed, about 10 mph, over short distances" .. "the Triplexes produced huge amounts of tractive effort (TE) that may have been the highest of any steam locomotives before or since").
XA Triplex - steam - 166,600 pounds-force (741 kN) compound - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-8-8-4 (1 built) ("unable to sustain a speed greater than five miles an hour, since the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce")
Power isn't the only factor. Steam engines produce the most power when just starting, which helps explain why the most power steam engines were also so slow.
(Something like the Union Pacific Big Boy had less tractive force, at 135,375 lbf, much higher speeds, topping out at 80mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy)
Going back to your thesis, in researching this I came across the Kaufman Act, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_Act , which banned steam engines in New York city due to pollution problems. Originally it required electric propulsion, but was amended to allow diesel when that proved viable, and that in turn provided a stepping stone toward dieselization of US trains.
Diesel trains are not worse polluters than steam, so your thesis doesn't really seem applicable.
It fits with their other examples much better.
That doesn't fit OP's thesis at all.
Take the 2-8-0, which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-0 comments:
> From its introduction in 1866 and well into the early 20th century, the 2-8-0 design was considered to be the ultimate heavy-freight locomotive. The 2-8-0's forte was starting and moving "impressive loads at unimpressive speeds" and its versatility gave the type its longevity. The practical limit of the design was reached in 1915, when it was realised that no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement. ...
> During World War II, 14 of these locomotives were equipped with superheaters, which raised their tractive effort from 28,777 lbf (128.0 kN) to 33,557 lbf (149.3 kN)
Then compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_E3 , a diesel from 1938 with "Tractive effort Starting: 56,500 lbf".
That's from time when people became convinced that diesel was better than steam. Why? Quoting https://www.american-rails.com/diesel.html
> This changed after General Motors successfully demonstrated the diesel's viability during testing of its FT freight design in 1939.
> The demonstrator set toured the country, convincing skeptic after skeptic that diesels were not only efficient and reliable but could also outperform the iron horse.
Not simply because it was dirt cheap.
Stats at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_FT . The top speed of 95 mph is 15 mph higher than the Union Pacific Big Boy.
Note also "Steam locomotives could be built with fewer precious materials, and with less conflict with military needs.", which is yet another factor that OP's thesis didn't consider.
Did you catch things like "no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement" and from earlier "the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce". These designs were pushing the limit of what steam could do, and diesel looked like it could pass those limits. And did.
So of course cryptocurrency hasn't led to much beyond speculation. Not to say that it will lead to anything more, but it would be erroneous to discount that possibility off hand. At the very least IMO it will lead to a social revolution, of what magnitude I don't know.
Also I'd note, the industrial revolution really came to the dirty masses with the assembly line, not the invention of the steam engine or the automobile. So analogously with regard to cryptocurrencies, maybe they are the car in this scenario, and the real revolutionary technological advancement that leverages them has yet to be invented. Or, maybe not.
Personally, I think that much like the apparently dire state of the world at the dawn of the industrial revolution led directly to it, the things we think now of as symptoms of Armageddon are probably going to play a large and in hindsight constructive role in whatever comes next. Maybe climate change becomes a crash course in terraforming, or genetic and biome engineering. Trying to predict what happens next is a fools errand but these are fun possibilities to think about.
I've always wondered why some fantasy stories seem to be perpetually locked in pre-industrial technology. This does seem like a plausible canonical explanation if they had fast replenishing resources due to magic.
I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided.
However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available forests that they were forced to turn to inferior coal fired steel.
But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better. In the end, you had steel that was drastically cheaper than before. Cheap enough to build boilers.
I think people make the mistake of thinking the steam engine kicked off the industrial revolution. But I believe the spark was cheap metal. And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.