Re:Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
by Animats on Friday July 15, 2022 @05:47PM
(#32113163)
Railroads were widely deployed without steel. Serious railroad deployment started in 1830 [1], using cast and wrought iron. Not until the 1880s was steel available at low cost. It's amazing how far they got with crappy materials.
> 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.)
> 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...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forester_Mushet