[HN Gopher] Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
___________________________________________________________________
Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
Author : harscoat
Score : 168 points
Date : 2022-07-15 09:57 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (antonhowes.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (antonhowes.substack.com)
| bambax wrote:
| > _Hero_ [Hero of Alexandria, 10-70 AD] _even suggested a
| mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow,
| airtight altar, the heated air within would flow down a tube into
| a sphere full of water, which in turn would be pushed up another
| tube into a hanging bucket. The bucket, when sufficiently heavy
| with water, would then pull on a rope to open some temple doors.
| Crucially, when the fire was extinguished, Hero noted that the
| cooling of the air in the altar would draw the water back into
| the sphere again, lighten the bucket, and so allow the doors to
| be closed by a counterweight._
|
| Put the contraption on a chariot, use the ropes to turn the
| wheels instead of "temple doors" (!) and voila: you have an auto-
| mobile.
|
| Even if it's much less practical than using a horse, it's amazing
| that in almost 2000 years, nobody thought of making that for its
| sheer entertainment value -- or even to convince people that
| ghosts exist!
| masswerk wrote:
| But why would you want to use such a flimsy technology, if you
| have horses?
|
| There is no way an engine like this could outrun a lean and
| speedy chariot with two to four horses. Also, even a primitive
| mechanism like this may have encountered fatal problems with
| dirt, dust and sand. (Mind that steam locomotion was first
| tried for roads, which was a total failure because of the
| quality of roads, even in major city centers like London.)
| kragen wrote:
| There are lots of applications for heat engines that don't
| involve mobility: grinding wheat to flour, threshing and
| winnowing wheat, fulling cloth, sewing cloth together,
| hammering hot iron or annealed cold bronze, blowing the
| bellows on a forge or bloomery, sawing wood, turning wood or
| stone on a lathe, weaving cloth, spinning thread, playing
| music, crushing ore, grinding a new edge on a knife or axe
| with a grindstone, turning a potter's wheel, writing,
| kneading bread, calculating, and, as mentioned, raising water
| (from a well, from a river, into your fields, into a tower,
| into a salt pond, or out of a mine or swamp). All of these
| are things that people were already doing before Heron, in
| many cases devoting their lives to them, but steam power was
| not applied to some of them until less than a century ago.
|
| In medieval times we can add turning metal on a lathe and
| winding crossbows.
|
| Think of the most common German surnames, which are all
| occupational: Muller (grinding wheat), Schmidt (hammering
| iron), Schneider (sewing cloth), Fischer (catching fish),
| Weber (weaving cloth), Meyer (owning land), Wagner (making
| wagon wheels), Becker (baking bread), Schulz (herding
| peasants), Hoffmann (organizing the court), Schafer (herding
| sheep), Koch (cooking food), Bauer (farming), and Richter
| (judging). This is a somewhat skewed sampling of occupations
| of men in Germany at the late-medieval or early-modern time
| surnames were imposed. If you were a Schmidt or a Weber you
| could expect to spend decades doing hard, physical labor
| every day, in a fixed physical location, labor that is now
| mostly done by steam.
| bambax wrote:
| That was answered in my comment? At first it would be much
| less useful than a horse, yes, but it would be so
| entertaining! And magical!
|
| Sell it to kings, make bets...
|
| Or accuse people of sorcery, have them burned...
| masswerk wrote:
| Well, this is an application: sell it to the king, accuse
| him of sorcery, have him burned. Become king (and ride
| horses.) ;-)
| ttyprintk wrote:
| I think Napoleon snickered at the first steam ships.
| Something about requiring precisely-controlled fire on a
| warship. But I bet the ancient Greeks would have killed to
| add a wheel to their quinqueremes.
| terhechte wrote:
| The Greek philosoper Hero of Alexandria actually invented
| something close to a steam engine in the 1st century BE [1].
| Whenever I think about "obvious" inventions which happened quite
| late in our civilization, I remember "The road not taken", a
| fantastic short story that plays with this idea. [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...
| antonhowes wrote:
| Please read both parts I and II. I specifically addressed
| various widely-held myths about Hero's engines, and about
| aeolipiles.
| eesmith wrote:
| That's a different sort of steam engine. From the article:
|
| > But when we talk of the breakthrough "steam engine" in the
| eighteenth-century sense, we don't mean a machine that exploits
| steam's expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a machine
| that does the exact opposite, exploiting the apparent sucking
| power that occurs when hot steam is rapidly condensed with a
| spray of cold water. It's the relative weight of the
| atmosphere, compared to the sudden vacuum from condensing
| steam, that does all the work.
|
| This article connects that sort of engine to (among others)
| Hero of Alexandria's temple doors, rather than the aeolipile,
| though suggests that it might have been known to "at least a
| few aeolipile-users" as a way to fill the aeolipile with water.
| antonhowes wrote:
| Thank you! It's extremely gratifying to know that HN readers
| like yourself do actually go and read the posts. :D
| tialaramex wrote:
| Chris Robertson's "O One" has a British man present the Chinese
| Emperor (well, Emperor of the World, China having conquered the
| rest of the globe) with his primitive Analytical Engine, a
| machine which can perform arithmetic. The many human Computers
| employed in the Emperor's House of Computation are keen that
| this idea shouldn't go anywhere...
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder what are the characteristics of that sort of engine.
| Like torque for one? How much power scaled up it could
| generate? How would you connect sensibly and efficiently
| anything to it? How to supply water to it for long enough duty
| cycle? Would this new gold water have effect on efficiency?
| etc.
| qikInNdOutReply wrote:
| So why did it not win? The answer.
|
| Slaves. Slaves in the mines, slaves in the home, slave driving
| the rowboats and all services.
|
| Labour was cheap and plenty, also intelligent - with entrenched
| "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed.
| Which goes to show, that technology stratifyng society
| strangles itself, by producing a servant class outcompeting all
| technology. Give it a hundred years and the "natural" order of
| things seaps into relgion and culture such that to perform
| science is to dare the gods.
|
| PS: There are tons of good alternate history ..
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt
| mannykannot wrote:
| Slavery is a big part of the answer, but Hero's device can
| not be scaled up to do useful work without consuming vast
| quantities of fuel, even in comparison to the low standard of
| efficiency set by Newcomen's engine.
| notahacker wrote:
| Slaves might explain lack of interest in labour saving
| technology in general, but the steam engine in particular
| mostly excels at stuff which slaves couldn't do (high speed
| transport) or enabled production processes particularly well
| suited to slave labour (textile mills vs craft-textile
| production). The UK's Industrial Revolution began with slave-
| picked cotton being spun on machines attended by abundant
| unskilled labour and powered by watermills, a technology the
| Romans (and many other non-industrial civilisations)
| exploited with smaller scale machinery.
|
| The Romans valued research and engineering highly enough to
| be way ahead of both contemporary and successor civilisations
| in many aspects of it and have people willing to document
| their pure research into steam (which as the article
| acknowledges, turned out to be at best orthogonal to the pure
| research that got us pistons and condensing engines), they
| just didn't have all the intermediate inventions like high
| quality iron, rail lines and spinning jennies to make large
| scale use of steam that the British did 1500 years later, the
| same level of demand and competition for new products etc
| etc. But the abundance of cheap labour was something they
| actually had in common with the British Empire; it's just the
| British Empire used it differently (and displaced even more
| cheap labour by killing off craft industries as a result)
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _Labour was cheap and plenty_
|
| That is a misconception. Slaves were expensive: one slave was
| about a soldier's pay for an entire year; and things made
| using manual labor, too, were very expensive - if you had to
| buy them, of course.
| el_nahual wrote:
| > with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are
| actually needed.
|
| Which is why our word for the ultimate automaton--the
| "robot," comes from the Czech _robotnik_ , or forced
| laborer/slave.
| qsort wrote:
| Isn't that kind of the other way around?
|
| Ignoring the obvious moral question, in a primarily agrarian
| economy slave labor is useful because it's relatively easy to
| control and there is no need for specialization. OTOH in an
| industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you
| could have them.
| ghaff wrote:
| >OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves
| even if you could have them.
|
| Really? Leaving aside the moral issues most associated with
| slavery specifically, there is a huge demand in modern
| industrialized society for all sorts of low cost human
| labor. If middle class-ish people in the West could hire
| more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour
| many would absolutely do so.
| qsort wrote:
| It's very unlikely that slaves would be able to cover any
| present-day jobs except very menial service tasks.
|
| Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't
| even get as far as a taxi/truck driver, which is one of
| the least qualified jobs today.
| bluGill wrote:
| Slaves did many skilled labor jobs back in the day. In
| Uncle Tom's Cabin (a book you really should read, but
| beware the purpose was to make you pick up your gun and
| march, so if you have those tendencies...) on of the
| important slaves held a good factory job.
|
| Of course most slaves were just hard labor, but they did
| hold other positions. I think you can find examples of
| slaves holding every position in society other than
| government leader.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I think the point is more that you can't give a slave a
| truck with a tank of gas and expect to see either again.
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure you can - so long as you have a police force that
| will check up on things once in a while. Or at least you
| have convinced the slaves that the police force will
| catch them and life will be worse after they are caught.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Up to a point, sure.
|
| But I think there is a point when it makes more sense to
| just pay the guy a wage, instead of running a big
| expensive police state controlling everything...
| qsort wrote:
| That you can find some examples of a tiny minority slaves
| doing some highly-skilled jobs does not contradict the
| statement that it's unlikely that slavery as an
| institution would be compatible with a modern economy,
| _even ignoring the obvious moral evil it represents_.
|
| Also, just by the way, we ought to be able to talk
| without implying that other people have "those
| tendencies". There is simply no reasonable way a comment
| about the structure of an industrialized economy can be
| constructed as "having those tendencies". Appending
| "slavery = bad" to every comment is tiresome, there is
| such a thing as context.
| davidgay wrote:
| > I think you can find examples of slaves holding every
| position in society other than government leader.
|
| Even that one seems available:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokollu_Mehmed_Pasha
| snapcaster wrote:
| This is actually completely incorrect. Slavery has and
| always will be profitable and it is still something being
| experienced by millions of people today.
|
| >Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't
| even get as far as a taxi/truck driver
|
| Again I see how one might expect this to be true but it
| isn't.
|
| some industries where slavery is widespread:
|
| - Sex work - ocean fishing - mining
|
| I'm sure there are others
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| Just because someone is born into poor circumstances
| without many options for upward mobility doesn't make
| them stupid. Furthermore, truck driver isn't a
| particularly low skill occupation. I couldn't drive an
| 18-wheeler. Can you? And something like taxi driving
| mostly seems low skill because most adults in
| industrialized society have been driving since they were
| relatively young.
| qsort wrote:
| It's not a reasonable interpretation of what I wrote that
| I'm implying they're stupid.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I think it is. That was pretty much the impression it
| gave me.
| wrycoder wrote:
| The skill was in having a map of London in your head.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more
| people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour
| many would absolutely do so.
|
| They absolutely could if there was any political desire
| to allow temporary low skilled immigration. In practice
| this doesn't seem to be compatible with democracy.
| Singapore is not a shining light of labour rights or
| democracy but their government does have to pay attention
| to public opinion which is why they use less migrant
| labor than the Gulf monarchies.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly. Once you're talking about a massive underclass
| with no real agency--whether literal slaves or not--there
| are all sorts of implications for the structure of that
| society. See SM Stirling's Draka books for example.
| fellellor wrote:
| What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under
| compensating someone for their work? Modern industrialised
| economies have plenty of tools to simulate the effects of
| slavery. Although without the fun stuff like whipping and
| other forms of gratuitous cruelty.
|
| In its essence slavery is an exchange of labor deal where
| the buying party has it way better than the selling party.
| jhgb wrote:
| > What is slavery if not systematically, grossly under
| compensating someone for their work?
|
| No, it's the notion that you have second-class citizens
| or even non-citizens with limited legal rights enforced
| by the state, said limitations usually being in the realm
| of property rights, personal freedoms, etc. At least that
| is fairly easy to define, whereas "grossly under
| compensating someone" is a vastly more nebulous term (who
| decides what is and isn't "under-compensating"?)
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Not even close!
|
| At its essence slavery is complete ownership of another
| person. Whether or not you put that person to "work" is a
| separate issue.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| This begs a question: what technologies are inhibited by a
| looser definition of slavery? What inventions would arise if
| a global minimum wage was enforced?
| lizknope wrote:
| Mr Wizard had a Hero's engine on an episode back in the 80's
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_NTifmG8TM
| a_bonobo wrote:
| Just 4 days ago Nature Genetics had a really cool perspective on
| why nobody else did the experiments on inheritance Gregor Mendel
| did: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01109-9
| Beltalowda wrote:
| This seems interesting, but unfortunately I can't find the full
| text anywhere and I'm not about to pay $32 for an article.
| zcw100 wrote:
| This question reminded me of a show that I used to love watching,
| Connections with James Burke. I'm sure there are aspects that it
| is missing but it's a very well told story of what needed to come
| together for the invention of the steam engine.
|
| https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68mfbf
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Maybe put the engineering discussion aside for a moment and think
| about the developments in economics and capitalism at the same
| time?
|
| A cheaper way to do work? Invest in developing it!
| zackmorris wrote:
| Subjugation.
|
| Almost the entirety of the human population has been under some
| form of servitude or bondage since the beginning. Only a handful
| of experiments in democracy like the USA managed to exist for
| more than a few hundred years. And those owed their existence to
| either slavery or the oppression of women. For every James Watt,
| there are 10,000 people just as smart who spent the entirety of
| their lives toiling to make someone else rich.
|
| As long as we view progress through the lens of our own merit,
| nothing will ever change. Which is perhaps my greatest
| disappointment with how the 21st century has played out vs the
| original vision of the internet as a great equalizer providing
| knowledge and resources for everyone in an egalitarian fashion.
| We all got sold a bill of goods by the wealthy financiers who own
| everything now, including HN which was quickly coopted sadly.
| zabzonk wrote:
| What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight
| was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded
| paper (or your material here) airplane invented, and by whom?
| Then, why not make it bigger?
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| What amazes me about heavier than air flight is that it was
| invented all over the planet at virtually the same time by all
| kinds of unrelated people who had no connection or
| communication with or little knowledge of one another. Sure
| here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event
| of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of
| nowhere. But in reality, heavier than air flight was invented
| simultaneously (by the standards of the time) at multiple
| places all over the world from New Zealand (March 1903) [1] to
| the USA (December 1903) [2]. It's as if human consciousness
| just exploded with a new-found ability to fly all over the
| earth all at once.
|
| Closer examination shows that like most human inventions, these
| breakthrough moments are the final incremental accumulation of
| ideas that were a long-time coming. In the case of flight,
| there were centuries of lighter than air flying methods based
| on buoyancy and displacement [3]. Then gradually an
| understanding of fixed wing aerodynamics evolved (e.g. the
| impressive work of people like George Cayley [4] and Otto
| Lilienthal [5]). It was the parallel development of combustion
| engines that made the Kitty Hawk and Waitohi moments eventually
| possible (which I think might really the answer to your
| question "why heavier-than-air flight was not invented
| earlier?"). While the invention of the steam engine gave rise
| to the entire industrial revolution, piston steam engines of
| the time were too heavy to power flight. The internal
| combustion engine was finally applied to the automobile by Karl
| Benz in 1885 [6] and within the relatively short span of 18
| years had evolved to the point where powering an aerodynamic
| surface was feasible. Just 66 years later man walked on the
| moon.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal
|
| [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
| eesmith wrote:
| > who had no connection or communication with or little
| knowledge of one another
|
| There was a large enthusiastic group of people working on
| heavier-than-air flight, with with meetings and newspaper
| publications. The Spectator has an article titled "Flying
| Motor-Cars" at https://archive.org/details/sim_spectator-
| uk_1901-08-31_87_3... which comments:
|
| ] The mechanical skill of the world, which is very great,
| greater perhaps than its originality in scientific
| investigation, is directing itself for the moment to two
| definite ends, -- the construction of an efficient submarine
| boat, and the invention of a machine that can travel with at
| least two persons on board through the air.
|
| That the Wright Brothers didn't know Pearse is besides the
| point - both drew from shared materials, and a _lot_ of
| people were trying. Here 's a couple of reports from the New
| York Times:
|
| "TO FLY FROM PIKE'S PEAK.; W.F. Felts Tries His New Aeroplane
| at Different Altitudes. [Aug. 4, 1897] (followed soon by
| SNOWSTORM ON PIKE'S PEAK.; W. B. Felts Did Not Attempt His
| Aeroplane Flight Yesterday.)"
|
| Or "EXPECTS TO BE ABLE TO FLY.; Prof. Bell Believes He Has
| Mastered the Two Great Difficulties of Aerial Navigation.".
| That's Alexander Graham Bell.
|
| Your [4] even mentions 'The Wright brothers acknowledged
| [Cayley's] importance to the development of aviation'.
|
| > here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk
| event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum
| out of nowhere
|
| Where do you get that impression?
|
| Here's a children's book from the US about the Wright
| Brothers. https://archive.org/details/letsflywilburorv00roop/
| page/36/m...
|
| ] In 1896, when he was twenty-five years old, Orville was
| very sick with typhoid fever and almost died. Wilbur and
| Katharine cared for him. Wilbur read while sitting with
| Orville. He read about Otto Lilienthal, who was trying to
| fly. Lilienthal built gliders and had flown farther than
| anyone else in the world. But Otto Lilienthal had a gliding
| accident and died. The Wright brothers were saddened by this
| news because they admired Mr. Lilienthal and his attempts to
| fly.
|
| ] ... In England, France, the United States, and other
| countries, people were trying to unlock the mystery of
| flight.
|
| ] ... Wilbur learned all he could about flying. He took every
| book about it out of the Dayton library. Samuel Langley the
| head of the Smithsonian Institution, was trying to learn how
| to fly Wilbur decided to write the Smithsonian. A man there
| sent Wilbur information.
|
| ] The famous engineer Octave Chanute was also experimenting
| with gliders. Wilbur wrote him, too. Mr. Chanute quickly
| became a friend of the Wright brothers.
|
| Hardly a vacuum!
| zabzonk wrote:
| Some of Bell's kites here:
| https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/alexander-graham-bell-
| tetra...
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's pretty common for things like that to happen. There are
| many other cases. Calculus from Newton and Leipzig being
| another example. There is even a wikipedia page delving into
| the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
|
| Basic hypothesis is that once enough precondition for an
| invention are there then the leap can be made.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I stared for a long time at your third sentence before I
| remembered that Leibniz is the correct name of the German
| mathematician you are referring to, and Leipzig is a German
| city (where, coincidentally, he was born).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig
| rowanG077 wrote:
| Haha Autocorrect I think. I indeed meant to write
| Leibniz. Pretty embarrassing considering my high school
| was named after him.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I think that what you say is probably true, but things like
| thermal-riding or slope-soaring gliders would have been very
| useful (for the military, if nothing else) before the
| invention of the IC engine.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| As discussed further down, kites were indeed seen as useful
| for the military in the late 19th century. Wikipedia
| says[0]
|
| > In the early 1890s, Captain B.F.S Baden-Powell ...
| developed his "Levitor" kite, a hexagonal-shaped kite
| intended to be used by the army in order to lift a man for
| aerial observation or for lifting large loads such as a
| wireless antenna.
|
| A glider may not have been suitable for carrying an
| antenna, but aerial observation via glider is an idea that
| must have occurred to people in the army, even before the
| invention of the IC engine.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-lifting_kite
| Ekaros wrote:
| Big questions is getting those to air, what you actually do
| with them and then how to solve communicating from them.
| Just think of how very early WW1 planes were actually used.
| zabzonk wrote:
| At the speed armies moved back in the (say) 15th century,
| this would probably not been such a problem, but I take
| your point.
| qubex wrote:
| It's pretty common that "breakthrough inventions" are
| arrived-at pretty much simultaneously by apparently disparate
| sources at approximately the same moment in time.
|
| Consider the telephone, which is attributed to Alexander
| Graham Bell in most of the world and to Antonio Meucci in my
| native Italy. Or radio, which is broadly attributed to
| Marconi or Tesla. In hindsight it seems like one person
| triumphed upon others, but really if you look at it from
| their point of view they work with urgency and secrecy
| because they perceive themselves to be in neck-to-neck
| competition with their cohorts. They perceive their
| technological environ very differently from how we do ex post
| facto.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Agreed. Definitely makes you wonder about the fairness of
| intellectual property.
| jaclaz wrote:
| >which is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in most of
| the world and to Antonio Meucci in my native Italy.
|
| The US congress did vote a resolution that cleared the
| matter (in 2002, a bit late I would say):
|
| https://www.congress.gov/congressional-
| record/volume-148/iss...
|
| But in this case Bell and Meucci weren't much disparate
| sources.
| qubex wrote:
| I'm honestly stunned because I had no idea this issue had
| been raised, much less addressed.
| vimy wrote:
| Don't forget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberto_Santos-
| Dumont
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind Eilmer of Malmesbury, first flight between 995 and 1010
| CE.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury
| masswerk wrote:
| P.S.: The story of Eilmer also hints at what may have been
| the real problem, which may have haunted early fliers, not so
| much flying/gliding, but safe landing.
|
| Another thing is topography: Either you have (steep) local
| elevations as a natural starting point for gliding, but then
| there is usually not much of an open space to go for a real
| application. Or there are wide open spaces, but no natural
| elevations. (Mind Eilmer starting from a tower.) So, even if
| you know about the principles, there's not much application
| for human flight, rendering it rather for use as a toy.
| (There are hints for bird-shaped gliding toys in ancient
| Egypt. But was there really a human-flight scale application
| in an all flat landscape like this?)
| zabzonk wrote:
| Annecdote time: I live in Lincoln, UK - to the East
| everything is flat as a pancake until you get to the Wolds,
| and to the west we have the similarly flat floodplain of
| the Trent river. In between, we have the very steep
| Lincolnshire Edge
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cliff) and the
| prospective aeronaut could have jumped off Lincoln
| Cathedral (https://lincolncathedral.com)- way back when the
| highest building in the world. So ideal for developing a
| useful glider.
|
| And of course Lincolnshire is famous for being "bomber
| country" in WW2 - weather and geography helping to get the
| horribly overladen beasts airborn.
| random314 wrote:
| Michael faraday invented the motor in the 1820s. Successive
| refinements to the motor and the gas engine and electricity
| distribution projects led to electrification, the motor car and
| the powered airplane as an immediate consequence.
| antonhowes wrote:
| Fantastic question, which is some way down on my to-do list
| after the steam engine. The discussion this prompted is a real
| goldmine, so thank you.
| pirate787 wrote:
| In European culture, there's the myth of Icarus, whose wings
| failed in flight. I wonder if there's a real-life basis for
| this tradition.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus
| goto11 wrote:
| Probably because sustained heavier-than-air flight requires an
| engine. So same reason the car was not invented earlier - a
| coal-powered steam engine is too heavy.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I does not have to be "sustained" for more than a few minutes
| to be called a flight.
|
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltaplane
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Steam has other disadvantages.
|
| It's quite good at steady-power output. Throttle response is
| poor.
|
| Both automobiles and aircraft operate with quite variable
| power requirements. Though at least for long-range air
| travel, once the take-off / climb portion of flight has been
| completed, cruise is typically at a fairly constant setting.
| morelisp wrote:
| Kites are prehistorical. You can't really get earlier than
| that, unless we find some pre-human primates making them.
|
| (parent edited)
|
| > Then, why not make it bigger?
|
| To what end? They were lifting bombs on kites as early as the
| 7th century, as well as humans as novelties (and punishments -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Huangtou).
|
| If you want a lift a human _to do something_ , you also need
| some better steering and safe landing, and those require more
| reliable engineering besides just the basic lift possibility.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Kind of supports my question - if tethered kites, why not
| untethered ones (i.e. aircraft)? And man-lifting kites have,
| of course been a thing for ages.
| morelisp wrote:
| Reliable steering requires aerodynamics requires quite a
| lot of mathematical development, plus considerable
| precision engineering. And it's extremely dangerous, a lot
| of people did die trying to make steerable kites.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Hang gliders seem quite imprecise,
| https://www.google.com/search?q=bamboo+framed+hang+glider
| zabzonk wrote:
| > quite a lot of mathematical development, plus
| considerable precision engineering
|
| Not sure the Wright brothers would be with you on this -
| neither were maths guys and their aircraft were hardly
| precision-built.
| [deleted]
| slightknack wrote:
| > He identified the four forces which act on a heavier-
| than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust.
| [...] He also designed the first glider reliably reported
| to carry a human aloft. He correctly predicted that
| sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight
| engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift.
| The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the
| development of aviation.
|
| -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley
|
| I think by the time the Wright brothers came around, the
| general theory for powered flight was in place. The
| Wright Flyer was precision engineered, compared to most
| 'kites' that came before it. It's not every day you see
| an internal combustion engine on a kite.
| notahacker wrote:
| > It's not every day you see an internal combustion
| engine on a kite.
|
| Yup. The engine was more important than the understanding
| of the principles of propulsion too: even if the four
| forces had been identified by Aristotle, that wouldn't
| have been much use in achieving sustained powered flight
| to civilisations whose closest approximation of a
| propellor powered by a turbine engine was a waterwheel.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The Wrights did extensive experimentation, on both models
| an full-sized prototypes. They built the first wind
| tunnel and developed calculations for lift and propeller
| thrust.
|
| They also practiced fairly rapid design iteration, trying
| out ideas and adapting to actual experience. What they
| arrived at _worked_ , though it was far from ideal and
| doesn't much resemble modern aircraft (beyond the notion
| of wings and the rough principles of control surfaces).
| Once other designers / engineers entered the field, and
| with more reliable engines, further iteration advanced
| rapidly.
|
| Military aircraft played a significant role in WWI, only
| a decade after the Wright's first powered flight.
| morelisp wrote:
| And what, there's nobody between Archimedes and the
| Wright Brothers I could have been referring to?
| Whatever...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Powered_ flight came about virtually the moment a high power-
| to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed.
|
| Once rapid design-build-test cycles were practial, the initial
| Wright design rapidly shifted to a monocoque fuselage with
| forward wings and empennage, emerging within a decade.
|
| In just over 30 years after the Wright's first powered flight,
| the DC-3, _an aircraft still in commercial operation_ was
| flying. It has been described as the perfection of aircraft
| design, and the major elements of its design are still present
| on contemporary aircraft, though of course jet engines have
| largely replace reciprocating piston engines.
|
| Major factors in successful powered _or unpowered_ flight have
| been understanding aerodynamics (largely through
| experimentation and test flights, increasingly through
| modelling), materials (pre-industrial materials are poorly
| suited to human-scale aircraft or gliders), controls (both
| theory and interfaces), powerplants (on powered aircraft).
|
| Ultralights, hang gliders, and sailplanes all benefit greatly
| from specific materials: Nylon for wings, aluminium for
| structural members, plastics, and steel for wires and cables.
| Instrumentation, navigation, communications, transponders
| (safety) and radar (collision detection) also factor in.
|
| Virtually all of these are dependent on earlier stages of
| industrialisation: smelting of iron and aluminium, petroleum
| chemistry and textiles fabrication for Nylon and plastics,
| earlier aviation engineering for general flight handling and
| control theory, electronics for instrumentation, radio, and
| radar, plus domain knowledge from other fields such as physics
| (instrumentation, controls, etc.).
|
| TL;DR: Prerequisites and path dependencies.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Could have used a rocket? They've been around for ages.
|
| It seems to me that for flight the construction materials
| (silk, bamboo, string, glue - what the early WW1-era aircraft
| were made from) and the propulsion (solid-fuel rocket) have
| been around for over a thousand years.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Rockets require suitable fuels.
|
| The original Chinese designs relied on gunpowder. This is
| self-oxydising and burns rapidly, but has a comparatively
| low power density, roughly 1/10th that of liquid petroleum
| fuels.
|
| Liquid _fuel_ such as alcohol and oil existed, but the
| _notion_ let alone the _availability_ of _oxidizers_ didn
| 't until the early 19th century. The first use of liquid
| oxygen in rockets didn't occur until 1926, by Robert
| Goddard.
|
| Hypergolics or solid rocket motors would have been other
| options, but both are still pretty advanced. I've no idea
| how likely they'd have been.
|
| One of the more viable solid fuels might have been _rocket
| candy_ , made of sugar and usually potassium nitrate as an
| oxidizer. Both would have been available.
|
| Demonstration here:
| https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=12fR9neVnS8
|
| Whether or not that would generate sufficiently strong and
| reliable thrust for a steampunk JATO launch, I'm not sure.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Yes, but no...
|
| Rocket does have the trust ratio needed. But then there is
| questions of burn time and control. So you could get up
| there, with some risk. But not stay there for very long
| time.
|
| Short googling for solid fuel rockets seem that longest
| burn times are less than 3 minutes... And that is best case
| scenario with 20th/21st century technology...
| zabzonk wrote:
| But once you are up there you are up there, and
| professinal glider pilots can stay up there for ever,
| using thermals etc.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My suspicion is that a lot of the basics of glider flight
| were a lot easlier to discover / develop with powered
| aircraft. Given the relatively low power-output, and
| reliability, of early engines, many early aircraft might
| be considered (intermittently) powered gliders.
|
| It could still have been possible to work things out
| based on JATO launch, though the hang-glider approach of
| low sand-dune testing / training would probably have been
| safer and a better overall option.
|
| Powered aviation also helped drive and prove materials
| design enhancements and general aviation theory,
| controls, avionics, etc., all of which transfer well to
| gliders, but would very likely have been far more
| difficult to develop in a a glider-only regime.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Actually many gliders, such as thosed used by the nascent
| Luftwaffe when they were banned from real aircraft used
| things like rubber bands and human towing to launch, and
| I can remember ground-based winches being used to launch
| RAF cadet planes when I was a kid.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm not arguing that ground-launching gliders isn't
| possible.
|
| I'm saying that _having an airworthy craft once you 're
| off the ground_ takes some doing, and it's probably
| easier to get there if you're experimenting with powered
| craft.
|
| The early powered heavier-than-air craft were _not_
| especially aeronautically sound. But with the ability to
| perform design-build-test cycles, and not kill overly
| many pilots in the process, _once engines existed_ design
| progressed rapidly.
|
| Getting from the Wright Flyer to a modern sailplane would
| have been far more challenging without engines.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Sailplane is basically more wing, isn't it? I don't see
| how that needs an engine in its past, but I could
| understand material constraints.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Imagine you have no idea about aeronautics, controls,
| lift, thrust, where lift exists, how it works, etc., etc.
| You have no idea how to actually _fly_ the thing.
|
| Or land it.
|
| So you build your best guess at what a working glider
| might be. You don't have robotics or radio to remotely
| control it, so someone's got to fly the thing.
|
| You build a kite flinger and/or ramp or rail to toss it
| off the side of a building or cliff or whatever.
|
| And then you hope, desperately, that you weren't too
| terribly mistaken about a great many things.
|
| Franz Reichelt wasn't quite building airplanes, but he
| turned out to have misjudged his own competence in a
| somewhat similar manner:
|
| https://allthatsinteresting.com/franz-reichelt
|
| Now consider the same situation, except that you've at
| least got a motor to buy your way out of design and/or
| piloting errors, at least a little bit.
|
| Under which of those scenarios do you think actual useful
| design might have progressed faster?
|
| Keep in mind that people _have_ had the notion of flying
| with wing-like contraptions dating to the ancient Greeks
| (see the legend of Icarus). There were numerous inventors
| who threw themselves off hills or cliffs with various
| attempts. Lack of power, and the frequent short
| professional career track of such inventors tended to
| stymie progress.
|
| Successful gliders and sailplanes almost entirely
| _postdated_ powered heavier-than-air flight. The first
| designs appeared after WWI, and practical use didn 't
| appear until the 1930s. My understanding is that
| popularity of recreational gliding didn't emerge until
| the 1950s or 1960s, again benefiting from aeronautical
| engineering, materials, radios, much better knowledge of
| aircraft operation, controls, and instrumentation.
|
| Glide ratio is one measure of aerodynamic efficiency and
| sophistication. Early 1930s gliders achieved about a 1:17
| ratio. Most modern gliders exceed 1:30, and the best 1:50
| or more. This expresses altitude loss per unit foreward
| travel (e.g., 1 meter loss for 30 meters forward flight).
|
| Google's Ngram viewer is a somewhat fickle guide, but
| suggests an initial spike in mentions in the late 1930s /
| 1940s, again in the 1950s, then a third in the 1970s:
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sailplane&y
| ear...
|
| Adding in "glider" (multiplied 10x) still lags
| "aeroplane" by decades.
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28sailplan
| e%2...
|
| There may have been earlier terminology used, and
| "glider" has other meanings which might confound matches,
| but at least for "sailplane", the trend line lags
| "aeroplane" and "airplane" considerably. (I've multiplied
| "sailplane" results 100x in this plot):
|
| https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28sailplan
| e%2...
| criley2 wrote:
| >Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-
| to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel)
| existed.
|
| The only thing I would change is that this makes it seem like
| powered flight was waiting on the engine, when it was waiting
| on the plane.
|
| One thing that struck me at the Museum of Flight in Seattle
| is how far advanced IC technology was while the Wright
| brothers were gliding in wooden contraptions. They had
| turbocharged v12 diesel engines and Benz was already making
| aluminum engines for cars before the Wright brothers made
| their first attempt.
|
| I found it fascinating how as soon as flight was
| demonstrated, it only took a few years to go from a wooden
| prototype to a sophisticated machine with a very complex
| engine.
|
| Bonus pic of some of those early engines
| https://i.imgur.com/mENnuHH.png
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Or rather, that _development of the plane_ was waiting on
| the engine. The Wright brothers did all of their iteration
| and experimentation on relatively flat terrain flying close
| to the ground, which is how they were able to survive at
| least eight major crashes (and probably more minor ones.)
| Without an engine this kind of iterative experimentation
| seems almost impossible: you'd need to launch from a
| height, which means the first minor failure probably kills
| you and destroys the prototype.
|
| And of course even if you survive the iterative development
| process, all you've got is a (largely) useless glider until
| the engine comes along and you can commercialize it.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| See the Caproni Transaero from 1921, with eight engines and
| nine wings it's right from the time you are talking about -
| putting engines on a fixed wing solid plane body is
| possible but sufficient understanding of flight is still
| missing.
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=uYn6fyGNg7c
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Excellent example. And a beautiful failure to boot.
| GistNoesis wrote:
| The boomerang is quite old.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Paper airplanes were around for centuries. Nobody knew how they
| worked.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| This is really interesting and I had never considered it
| before. Would you happen to know any books or articles that
| tell the history leading up to the wright brothers but
| focusing on those kind of questions and theories?
| morelisp wrote:
| Although the mathematics is quite complex (Newton,
| Bernoulli, Navier-Stokes) the history happens fairly
| quickly as the mathematics appears. Bernoulli published in
| 1738, Cayley designed the fixed-wing aircraft in 1799. From
| that point it was mostly a matter of finding ways to
| increase thrust / reduce weight through better engine
| design to achieve useful flight time / lift.
| Koshkin wrote:
| But the gliding (of larger birds) was observed for millennia.
| I think people had a pretty good idea about the possibility.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Nobody knew how penecilin worked when it was first discovered
| (we now know it inhibits the growth of the bacterial cell
| wall) but that did not stop people using it, to good effect.
| Similar for many other discoveries/inventions.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| More generally: technology (engineering) delivers
| _results_. Understanding _why_ it does so is not required,
| and often comes quite late.
|
| If you want _explanation_ , that's _a_ role of science,
| though it 's often preceded by a very long period of
| systematic observation.
|
| One striking example is geology, which has existed since at
| least the 17th century, but which didn't formally adopt its
| central organising and explanatory principle, of plate
| tectonics, until 1965. Biology (evolution and DNA), physics
| (celestial mechanics, particle physics, reletivity, and
| quantum theory), and chemistry (periodic table and electron
| orbitals) also come to mind.
|
| Thermodynamics arose out of work with steam engines, and
| eventually developed to the point that the theoretical
| understanding and equations began driving, rather than
| being driven by, engineering accomplishments. Electrical
| engineering is another example where modern developments
| required understanding of, and calculations based on,
| circuit and field theory, rather than just more lab
| experimentation. (I'm hazy on details here, though this is
| my general understanding.)
|
| There are practices which existed for many thousands of
| years before a deep understanding was achieved:
| fermentation, fire, firing ceramics, glassmaking, smelting
| metals, and many agricultural practices. Doing and
| understanding are separate undertakings.
| bravura wrote:
| Also, a lot of empirical progress in ML didn't happen
| until people stopped worrying about explainability and
| theoretical guarantees. Remember when NNs were
| unfashionable?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Self-imposed unnecessary limitations are a frequent
| inhibitor of technical progress.
|
| Though I've had my concerns for what the growth in
| solution-without-explanation (or understanding) that ML
| is generating.
| NateEag wrote:
| my impression is that mostly NNs made progress when
| compute got really cheap.
| tialaramex wrote:
| However, this blundering about approach only works if
| almost anything could have worked and so you just keep
| trying until you hit upon it.
|
| You can discover that eating one of the dozen types of
| plants growing on the hillside nearby treats toothache
| without any overarching theory about how that could work,
| just try eating stuff and see what happens - but you
| aren't going to invent the LED lamp this way.
|
| Example: When we put a cable on the bottom of the ocean
| these days it's optical fibre rather than electrical.
| But, even with optical fibre, even the best stuff we can
| make, this will need amplifying for long distances or
| it's pretty awful. One thing you could do would be to
| choose reconstructing amplifiers when making the cable.
| So e.g. you decide this cable is Protocol X at 100Gb/s,
| you make amplifiers which can reconstruct a Protocol X
| signal at 100Gb/s and "boost" it, splice those in along
| the distance of the cable, and drop the whole lot into
| the ocean. However, somebody is going to invent 500Gb/s
| Protocol X+ and if you want to upgrade you will need to
| send teams down to the ocean floor to replace those
| amplifiers. Ouch.
|
| In principle individual photons are travelling along the
| fibre, and physics doesn't say we can't just have one
| photon in => two photons out to boost this without
| needing to reconstruct the signal at all. There should be
| some way to build a device which does this, an Optical
| Amplifier, and it would be OK if this is quite expensive
| since it's saving you that enormous expense by allowing
| you to upgrade to 500 Gb/s X+ or to 10Tb/s XXX or
| whatever other future protocols just involve sending
| photons down a fibre without trying to upgrade equipment
| at the bottom of the ocean. But... how?
|
| Turns out scientists can guess exactly how that should
| work if it's possible, and then direct the experiments,
| trying out only the handful of things which actually
| might work instead of just groping about at random. My
| alma mater was one of the places figuring out how to do
| this in the 1980s, they were still really proud of that
| when I studied there a decade later. Erbium Doped Fibre
| Amplifiers are the result.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I think that your fundamental premise is wrong: there've
| been a large number of ancient / preindustrial inventions
| which were _not_ obvious, which were terrifically
| surprising, or which required a tremendous amount of
| skill or craft to accomplish. It 'd be interesting to
| come up with a catalogue of these....
|
| Your transoceanic cable example is an interesting one, as
| the first electrical / telegraph cables greatly expanded
| the understanding of electric fields and interactions
| with the environment, especially in salt-water.
|
| I'm also wondering if there's some sort of frontier
| between the "just blundering around" approach --- mass
| parallel experimentation --- and "requires a substantive
| theoretical understanding". To take your LED example,
| LEDs are the inverse of the photoelectric effect (and
| apparent PV panels will emit photons when a charge is
| applied to them). Electroluminescence dates to 1907,
| whilst the first LEDs were developed in the 1960s. There
| were earlier similar phenomena such as chemoluminescence
| (including numerous examples of bioluminescence) which
| might have suggested the possibility.
|
| I'm agreeing in part, disagreeing in part, and wondering
| if there might be a more robust or systematic way of
| distinguishing limits of both methods.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Yeah, something more systematic would be good.
|
| Sometimes it's surprising what nobody was _interested_ in
| inventing. I think Grace Hopper is really important
| because people were resistant to the idea that
| programming the computer involved boring mindless steps
| which _could be done by a machine_ and so of course
| instead of hand writing the program in machine code you
| should write a higher level language and have the machine
| translate that. It 's incredible now, but this very idea
| was once an important invention and yet her superiors
| were not enthusiastic.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| There's an inherent resistance to change, _even where it
| provides improvement_.
|
| Bernhard J. Stein's *Resistances to the Adoption of
| Technological Innovations" (1937) is a fascinating read
| in this regard:
|
| https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/
| pag...
|
| As Markdown: https://rentry.co/szi3g
|
| I'd heard of it via Isaac Asimov who mentions it in his
| biography and a few other contexts. Asimov was Stern's
| research assistant, and incorporated the ideas into
| several of his own stories.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's not that simple. Lots of things that are discovered
| are discovered when the goal was something else entirely.
| The number of accidental inventions is very large and it
| isn't rare at all that the accidental invention (or, more
| appropriately named, accidental discovery) is of much
| more value to society than the original goal was.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Chemistry has only lately _really_ become tractable, now
| that we can simulate appreciable quantities of matter in
| a computer and our simulations have become accurate
| enough to for instance reliably predict how certain
| molecules will orient themselves spatially (including
| folding).
| Jensson wrote:
| They lacked the physics theory to make planes stable enough to
| carry a load, and nobody wants to experiment throwing
| themselves out over a cliff with prototype wings that will
| likely get them killed.
| magpi3 wrote:
| He wasn't testing wings, but you make me think of this poor,
| brave man.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Eiffel_Tower_ju.
| ..
| dham wrote:
| You didn't need to throw yourself off a cliff though. Just
| think of something like Jockey's Ridge.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I mean, an improvement, but that just means that you'll be
| killed when your wings _half_ work (enough to lift you into
| the air high enough that the fall will kill you) rather
| than when your wings don 't work at all.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > nobody wants to experiment throwing themselves out over a
| cliff with prototype wings that will likely get them killed.
|
| Actually, not a few people did exactly that! If they had used
| a scaled-up paper plane, they might have lived. Or think of a
| modern hang-glider, but made from bamboo and silk.
| narag wrote:
| Only the tough materials (stone, bones, metal, pottery) remain.
| I always wonder how many civilizations disappeared without a
| trace because they built their cities with wood.
|
| Maybe a lot of devices were invented and reinvented many times
| and then forgotten because there wasn't a practical purpose for
| them at the moment.
| masswerk wrote:
| My favorite example is the Antikythera mechanism. It is quite
| clear that this had not been a one-of-a-kind, but that there
| must have been (many) predecessors of this technology to
| arrive at the kind of workmanship and layout that doesn't
| show any marks of hesitation or corrections as in the sole
| example, we know of. And that we know of this example at all,
| is just by sheer luck.
|
| Generally, we only know of landmark size applications of
| historical technology, which tend to be rare.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It probably wasn't as common as the slide rule was in the
| 50's but I'm pretty sure there were more of these and some
| predecessors as well. The chance that we have found the
| only example that ever existed for something so useful
| seems slim.
| saalweachter wrote:
| It's _probably_ the case that foundations get invented pretty
| darn quick in a civilization that builds primarily with wood.
| Wood rots too fast in environments where (a) trees grow and
| (b) wood is in contact with the ground.
|
| Midden heaps can also close the gap.
| globalise83 wrote:
| I often wonder the same. As someone with a hobby of making
| unpowered gliders from balsa wood and laminating sheets, I
| often wonder why such simple contraptions (I can make very nice
| gliders with around 20 pieces of wood and one sheet) weren't
| discovered using easily available woods and paper many
| centuries ago and extrapolated to bigger machines with fabric
| and wooden struts. Seems that the raw materials would have been
| available in Roman times and only very minimal amounts of
| theory (as opposed to trial and error tinkering) are required.
| Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were never
| invented for warfare.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Yeah, I used to build toy gliders too - it's really easy,
| though with balsa of course, which would not have been
| available in western Europe during the Renaissance (so tough
| shit Leonardo) but there are other light-weight materials,
| which is what sparked my question.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Spruce was used in aviation through WWII.
|
| Boeing was located in Seattle to be near wood supplies
| needed in aircraft fabrication. (Well, that and its founder
| was already in the lumber business.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Boeing
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Those "simple contraptions" probably were invented, many
| times, at different places all over earth. Just for fun and
| as a hobby. No records were made because no one considered
| those things worthy. People just never thought big or never
| had the opportunity to.
| 7952 wrote:
| Aeroplanes rely on light and strong materials with a high
| power to weight ratio energy source. Without that it is
| difficult to make the physics work. The internal combustion
| engine made it more possible.
| earthbee wrote:
| Maybe because trial an error improvement isn't possible if
| you're actually flying the vehicle? Just a guess.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Solution: send your butler up in it!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley
| morelisp wrote:
| > Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were
| never invented for warfare.
|
| What?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite#Military_applications
|
| Steering is important though, you need to a) go up, b) go the
| right place, not back at you, c) come down, again not where
| you are.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I wonder how much people tried to develop ballistae
| projectiles, perhaps once they had bolts/darts they were
| good enough and longer range just wasn't necessary?
| morelisp wrote:
| In most cases if your goal is just to get some explosives
| over a tall wall, a trebuchet or siege tower is probably
| sufficient. On the other hand, if you have a lot of
| gunpowder, a cannon is also pretty fine on its own
| without any need to go up-and-over.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Heavier than air flight dates back at least 2500 years from
| bamboo helicopter toys in China, with various others through
| the 17th to 19th century, however the first manned, powered,
| controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft wasn't until
| Whitehead, Wright et. al at the end of the 19th century
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Primitiv...
| xaedes wrote:
| I was always under the impression that it would be cool to have
| solar cells or mirrors automatically follow the sun using
| mechanical processes like those depicted in the article, without
| the need for additional electronics and motors. Does something
| like this exist and I only don't know of it?
| carapace wrote:
| Wax.
|
| > A wax motor is a linear actuator device that converts thermal
| energy into mechanical energy by exploiting the phase-change
| behaviour of waxes.[1] During melting, wax typically expands in
| volume by 5-20%
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motor
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm no expert on the history of invention but I assume there's
| some latency where a technology is discovered and it takes time
| to make it useful. And then that opens up new technologies to be
| discovered etc.
|
| Something I'm curious about are what technologies sat around a
| very very long time with no real blocker for discovery. That it
| was as simple as "nobody thought to do it that way..."
| aikinai wrote:
| Fixed-wing flight is one. I remember that being a point in the
| aviation exhibit at the London Science Museum. Nothing was
| stopping people from building hang-gliders in at least the
| Renaissance, maybe earlier? But everyone was fixated on
| flapping wings.
|
| I think one of the Assassin's Creed games plays with the idea,
| having Leonardo build a hang-glider for the main character.
| ioseph wrote:
| Unpowered gliders tend to need aerofoils which is a pretty
| advanced concept that took us a while to get right
| GuB-42 wrote:
| And took quite a few lives in the process. Early
| hanggliders were particularly deadly before we understood
| how to make and pilot them safely.
| jccooper wrote:
| One of the Wrights' enabling technologies was the powered
| fan that allowed them to make a wind tunnel to refine the
| airfoil from barely-functional to fairly-useful. They used
| a small gasoline engine, which enabled them to construct
| their wind tunnel on a small independent budget. I suppose
| you could have done that on an institutional level as early
| as 1750 with steam engines (or perhaps earlier with water
| power) but mines and mills and factories weren't
| particularly interested in the problem.
| causi wrote:
| Like stirrups.
| kleton wrote:
| A practical steam engine requires a high level of ferrous
| metallurgy. Samuel Clemens lost his brother to a boiler explosion
| on a steamer. It was a common occurrence in those days.
| beefman wrote:
| Part I was posted here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31765136
| arbitrage wrote:
| Thanks, beefman
| cletus wrote:
| I looked in Part 1 and 2 and didn't see this point raised, which
| is a shame because it's one of my favorite stories of intertwined
| technological process.
|
| An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create the
| pressure that process has to be precise. This process was
| perfected in making cannons.
|
| Why I like this story is that it embodies the unintended
| consequences that underlies so much of progress, like Alexander
| Graham Bell inventing the telephone while trying to create
| something for the deaf.
|
| You see this with research now that's plagued with being goal-
| oriented. "What will you discover/prove/invent in the next 5-10
| years?" Who can say?
|
| Also, the steam engine and the internal combustion engine are
| directly the products of technology created for war to kill
| people.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create
| the pressure that process has to be precise. This process was
| perfected in making cannons.
|
| There is speculation that the techniques for casting these
| cannons, was actually perfected in making church bells.
| Basically, if you turn a church bell on its side you have a
| primitive cannon. This may be one of the reasons that Europe
| was able to harness gunpowder more effectively and climb to
| dominance.
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| Actually a Savery engine (the type of engine the OP's post
| starts off with) doesn't have a piston at all. And the Newcomen
| atmospheric engine didn't require a very precise fit to
| function either. It wasn't until Watt started the drive for
| more efficient engines that accurately boring the cylinder
| became important.
| antonhowes wrote:
| Exactly! Part III or IV will end up talking about boring
| techniques of the 1650s (long before the famous John
| Wilkinson methods), but that is precisely the thing with
| Savery engines - and indeed with Newcomen engines, which
| worked with pistons long before Wilkinson too!
| mariuolo wrote:
| The unavailability of rubber as sealant both in Europe and Asia
| is not mentioned in either part I or II.
| antonhowes wrote:
| Neither the Savery nor Newcomen engines used rubber, so that
| doesn't work as a limiting factor. That's why I didn't mention
| it.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It's not discussed in the article, but the magic of steam in the
| 16th century was expressly investigated by Robert Fludd. As a
| mystical philosopher, he was attacked by the more scientific
| types of his time. This probably set back the steam engine. But
| clearly, he was really on to something!! Don't discount the
| weird, I guess, is the takeaway.
| antonhowes wrote:
| Well-noticed! I used one of Fludd's illustrations, but I ran
| out of space writing about Drebbel, which took us up to c.1607.
| Fludd will feature VERY heavily in Part III. Fludd eventually
| became totally obsessed with the inverted flask experiment -
| and recent historiography suggests he wasn't seen as a crank,
| but actually highly respected at the time.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Nice! Thanks to the Ritman library in Amsterdam, I have
| access to a lot of Fludd's published books (with fun
| marginalia etc...) but a fair amount of his work doesn't seem
| to have been translated. (Maybe you've found otherwise?)
|
| Descartes and Mersenne present a early conflicted aversion to
| the occult/esoteric/natural magic (eg, topics like
| resonance). I presume that certain ideas became somewhat
| taboo. This is one reason why it may have taken so long for
| the concept of resonance to be adopted widely in the sciences
| (see Buchanan 2019 in Nature "Going into resonance")
| legitster wrote:
| Environmental collapse and the price of steel!
|
| 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.
| trinovantes wrote:
| > And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if
| they hadn't completely depleted their environment.
|
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railw...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Forester_Mushet
| mason55 wrote:
| Sounds like energy production recently. While oil was cheap
| enough we had no reason to invest in cleaner tech. Even the
| threat of climate change isn't enough. It's only when oil gets
| real expensive that we invest in alternatives.
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| Imagine all of those minds that went into oil extraction and
| where else they could have been better spent over the years.
| I know turbines really leveraged computer models to achieve
| such stunning efficiency, but in all honesty I don't think it
| would have taken much past the 70s for us to have achieved
| nuclear / renewables at similar energy output as oil / gas at
| the same timeframe if we didn't have the shortcut available
| for so long.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Oil extraction engineering has a pretty phenomenal return
| on investment. If oil sells at 100 dollars per barrel,
| that's 600 dollars per cubic meter. If you produce a cubic
| meter per second (1/200th of world production), that's 50
| million dollars per day.
|
| But certainly, nuclear or renewables could have been
| developed more and earlier.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| A lot of very smart people went into nuclear up to the
| 80's. It didn't make much of a difference.
|
| People severely underestimate the impact computers have on
| our society and the dynamism of the current day R&D. Even
| here on HN.
| legitster wrote:
| Imagine if you were living in this period - England was
| constantly at war, the trees had all run out, and quality metal
| was nowhere to be found. You would think you were in the late
| stages of humanity, not at the cusp of the greatest moment of
| human progress.
|
| 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.
| mike_hock wrote:
| > You would think you were in the late stages of humanity,
| not at the cusp of the greatest moment of human progress.
|
| So which great invention is just around the corner _now?_
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| History of corporations:
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/40697762
|
| (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.
| eesmith wrote:
| I think your 15th century date is for a book describing
| double-entry bookkeeping, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del
| la_mercatura_e_del_mercante...
|
| 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".
| grog454 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Yet when you bring up a certain recent improvement to records
| of entitlement around here, you tend to get crucified.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| nradov wrote:
| If you read English literature from the mid-18th century
| there doesn't seem to have been a sense that they were in the
| late stages of humanity. People were adaptable and accustomed
| to tolerating hardships that would shock most of us. Yes, the
| large trees had mostly been cut down but they were able to
| import enough lumber for essential construction projects.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| One of the most important, but that people forget very often.
| They needed to right to have strange ideas without being
| chased down and killed due to them.
|
| 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.
| awongh wrote:
| _The Europe science and engineering moved into England much
| before the economical activity_
|
| interesting- I haven't heard of this view before. can you
| give some examples?
| pratik661 wrote:
| Rights to privately acquire land, create corporations, and
| sell across markets were extant across different
| civilizations throughout history.
|
| 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.
| pratik661 wrote:
| We tend to underestimate how complex even pre Bronze Age
| kingdoms were. To rule them, our ancestors came up with an
| intricate way to let different combinations of symbols
| represent abstract thoughts.
| Crespyl wrote:
| > an intricate way to let different combinations of
| symbols represent abstract thoughts
|
| I seem to find that this is still the best way to
| communicate.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Another one is that ancient Mediterranean traders used what
| were essentially futures contracts to trade wheat and other
| grains.
| nine_k wrote:
| The problem is that (early) Medieval Europe has lost much
| of that.
|
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| I largely agree with this.
|
| 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| I'm having a really hard time understanding your
| observation, or how to apply it.
|
| 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]
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'm not familiar with the Chola but one problem the Arab
| world had during this period was their equivalents of
| corporations dissolved upon the death of any of the
| principals. For a trade expedition that might last a year
| or two this is a perfectly sensible arrangement. But not
| for large mills or foundries requiring multiple principals
| to build and run and which might last decades and which
| can't be easily divided.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| The role of materials in technological innovation, and the
| technological prerequisites of those materials, is hugely
| underappreciated IMO.
|
| 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.
| bko wrote:
| I wonder if there is anything today that would need to come
| down (or up) in price to kick off a revolution. I've heard some
| argue that was decentralized payments online (cryptocurrency)
| but that hasn't led to much outside of speculation IMO.
|
| 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.
|
| https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/matthew-ball/
| betwixthewires wrote:
| While I don't think that cryptocurrency is about to kick off
| a _technological_ revolution on par with the industrial
| revolution, it is important to note that the technological
| advancements that led to here weren 't readily apparent when
| they were invented either, except to slightly zany
| visionaries. The invention of the automobile for instance was
| seen for a few decades as a rich person's toy. People usually
| have small minded views of the implications of new
| technology, because we look at them through the lenses of the
| world we live in _now_.
|
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to:
| "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's
| _stupidly_ cheaper " - cheap enough to throw applications at
| it.
|
| 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.
| dTal wrote:
| >I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down
| to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's
| stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at
| it.
|
| 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.
| eesmith wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| Definitely not current diesel trains, but maybe gp is
| referring to when they were first introduced.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I assume they meant that the diesel trains were not as
| powerful when first implemented, but they were cheaper.
|
| It fits with their other examples much better.
| qz_kb wrote:
| If robots were way cheaper it would change quite a bit.
| nradov wrote:
| Better battery technology won't allow mobile device
| electronics to run cooler. We need more power efficient chips
| using the upcoming 3 nm process technology.
| antonhowes wrote:
| I don't think this fits the evidence. At least for the 17thC.
| People in England did not know how to make good iron with coal,
| let alone steel, despite many decades of extraordinary
| government encouragement and special incentives - witness the
| many, many failed patents that had to be reissued from
| Sturtevant in 1612 all the way through to the 1660s and beyond.
|
| 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.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I think you are correct. Coal gave Britain a leg up as early
| as the 14th century but not for steel making. It's fungible
| though coal was being substituted for burning wood. Which
| means probably more wood to make steel. Also more land can be
| used as pasture.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mjh2539 wrote:
| Access to machining and steel production at scale. Steam power
| was known in antiquity.
| napier wrote:
| josefx wrote:
| Interesting, how did the Roman Empire suppress advanced
| civilizations developing in China and America? Assuming that
| Asian cultures outside of the influence of the Roman Empire
| already had nuclear weapons, how did the Empire survive their
| incursions? When do you presume will the descendants of
| advanced south American cultures return from Mars to punish us
| for what we did to the environment?
| napier wrote:
| Creative straw man. Mind if I steal that as the basis of an
| alt history novel?
| scythe wrote:
| The Americans were disconnected from advancements in the rest
| of the world, and even worse, from each other. Ancient Greece
| inherited iron smelting from Anatolia and formal legal codes
| from Babylon. The Islamic development of chemistry benefited
| greatly from the Roman development of glass, and the Italians
| learned math from Fibonacci who was schooled in Algeria. The
| printing press was first developed in Korea and may have
| influenced the developments all the way across Eurasia by
| Gutenberg.
|
| But _to this day_ , there is no land transport connection
| between North and South America! Corn eventually made it from
| South to North America, but the potato was stuck in Peru
| until the Spaniards showed up on very nice boats.
|
| China was doing great until Mongke Khan showed up.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| The only reason we have as much record of the Western Roman
| Empire as we do is endless copying and recopying by monks. The
| Eastern Roman Empire and later the Arabs preserved a lot but
| without the ecclesiastical establishment much more of the Wheat
| would have lost all literate culture.
|
| On economic and technological growth Brad Delong has a new book
| out, Slouching Towards Utopia, and he kind of hits the idea of
| very, very slow technological progress before 1870 over and
| over again. I want to say 1% growth every 50 years on average?
| Doubling slow enough to be easily outpaced by population growth
| anyway.
|
| The Church preserved learning. It didn't stifle it. For most of
| the history of the Church it was the only set of institutions
| one could do intellectual work in at all.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| A fun quirk of history, embedded in the English language, is
| the fact that "cleric" (meaning "a member of the clergy") has
| the same Latin root as "clerk" (meaning a worker who is
| trained and literate). Of course they both have the same
| adjectival form: clerical.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're implying here.
|
| First, are you equating "tech tree development" with pure
| engineering? Because that sounds like a reductionist view on
| history given that human advancement in thinking stretches far
| beyond technical / practical innovations. And that surely
| arbitrarly didn't stop between 500-1500AD just because the
| Roman Empire dissolved either.
|
| Second, taking a eurocentristic perspective is a fallacy when
| it comes to history. Other parts of the world saw plenty of
| advances in mathematics, astronomy, navigation, trading,
| finance, public administration, medicine, literacy and so on.
| Just consider the many advances in the Islamic world or the
| Mongol empire. Ghengis Khan wasn't just a warlord, he was also
| a surprisingly progressive statesman introducing notions such
| as "freedom of religion" throughout his empire. The Silk Road
| wasn't just the odd caravan passing through the desert. It was
| as an intricate trading network connecting cultures and
| continents. Arguably, many of the ideas that was spawn the age
| of Enlightenment in Europe can be traced back as imported from
| outside.
|
| Third, The so-called "Dark Ages" are a contested concept in
| modern historiography.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) It's,
| at best, a form of value attribution. And modern historians are
| quite reluctant to label the period between 500-1800 as
| "stagnant". On the contrary.
|
| Fourth, neither religious zealotry nor progressive thinking are
| absolutes. Sure, the world wasn't an utopia in the past.
| History is rife with examples of barbarism and persecution. But
| let's not pretend that the Industrial Revolution somehow did
| away with all that. In fact, while the world entered the so-
| called Information Age over the past 40 years, it also saw
| subsequent wars spurred by religion in the Middle East,
| Balkans, Africa and South-East Asia.
| napier wrote:
| The thread title refers to the steam engine, and yes, I'm
| referring solely to mechanical engineering and by extension
| the scientific method. In no way intending to discuss or
| disparage the myriad achievements of other formerly extant
| cultures of the world that took different paths to different
| destinations.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| Neither mechanical engineering or the scientific method
| could ever emerge in isolation, regardless of what happened
| elsewhere in the world.
|
| The scientific method itself, such as it was developed
| during the 18th century, is a poster child example as
| thinkers at the time hit the so-called Problem of
| induction. The great enlightened tinker David Hume provided
| foundational insights through his work "An Enquiry
| concerning human understanding" and "A Treatise of Human
| Nature".
|
| Scholars have argued that David Hume has been influenced by
| oriental ideas when he developed his thinking regarding
| observations, causality, induction and self. Ideas which
| were paramount when it comes to defining a formal theory
| regarding the "scientific method" such as we understand it
| today.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Name one technology or scientific discovery that was squelched
| by religious zealotry in that time period. And, no,
| heliocentrism doesn't count.
| lettergram wrote:
| Ah yes and during the enlightenment who led the charge?
|
| This is such a naive comment... look at what religious cultures
| used to do prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the
| Americas -- they'd literally sacrifice humans. That was the
| norm prior to the dark ages.
|
| During the dark ages, they developed a wealth of technology.
| The challenge more had to do with the plague, famines, raids
| from the nords / Muslims, etc
|
| Anyway, I recommend reading some books on the topic of you're
| interested. Particularly because it's around 1/4 - 1/3 of
| western history (at least the history we have decently
| documented).
| napier wrote:
| Whataboutism. But I'm curious as to the roots of your
| perspective. Which books, specifically am I missing out on?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas
| -- they'd literally sacrifice humans.
|
| Even if you would consider the Romans to engage in explicit
| ritual human sacrifice they just weren't within five orders
| of magnitude of the Aztecs. We have less than ten attested
| instances of Roman human sacrifice ever. Human sacrifice _was
| the irreducible core of the Aztec religion._
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_ancient_Rome#Hum.
| ..
|
| > Human sacrifice in ancient Rome was rare but documented.
| After the Roman defeat at Cannae two Gauls and two Greeks
| were buried under the Forum Boarium, in a stone chamber
| "which had on a previous occasion [228 BC] also been polluted
| by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman
| feelings".[56] Livy avoids the word "sacrifice" in connection
| with this bloodless human life-offering; Plutarch does not.
| The rite was apparently repeated in 113 BC, preparatory to an
| invasion of Gaul. Its religious dimensions and purpose remain
| uncertain.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_cul.
| ..
|
| > What the Aztec priests were referring to was a cardinal
| Mesoamerican belief: that a great and continuing sacrifice by
| the gods sustains the Universe. A strong sense of
| indebtedness was connected with this worldview. Indeed,
| nextlahualli (debt-payment) was a commonly used metaphor for
| human sacrifice, and, as Bernardino de Sahagun reported, it
| was said that the victim was someone who "gave his service".
|
| > Human sacrifice was in this sense the highest level of an
| entire panoply of offerings through which the Aztecs sought
| to repay their debt to the gods.
| napier wrote:
| Interesting points, although I'm not sure what they have to
| do with European history or invention of the steam engine.
| I can only presume you've benefited from a level of liberal
| arts education that I sorely lack.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > I can only presume you've benefited from a level of
| liberal arts education that I sorely lack.
|
| Wikipedia and the library are available to you too.
| lettergram wrote:
| Later in history people liked to revise Roman's history.
| They regularly "ritually strangulated" enemies at the alter
| of Saturn. There are documented cases where hundreds were
| strangled / executed by other means.
|
| I grant you the Aztecs seemed far more extreme, but it was
| also core to the Roman belief system.
| clarionbell wrote:
| Wow, you should present your findings to historians. I'm sure
| they enjoy a good laugh.
|
| But seriously, I know that you have been fed this line by
| various popular media, most of us were, and I don't blame you
| for it. Still, you should try to think about it a bit.
|
| Like, how many of those "RESET BUTTON" cases can you name? When
| they happened? How come rest of the world didn't make any
| separate progress? How is it that those same zealots founded
| almost all universities in Europe etc..
| napier wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Religious flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of
| how right you are or feel you are. Please don't post like
| this to HN again.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| napier wrote:
| Thanks for the respectful nudge and reminder that HN has
| some of the more thoughtful and nuanced content guidelines
| of any popular forum. The discussion tone fostered here is
| what makes this site enduringly great. I didn't project my
| initial comment would cause such offense amongst certain
| users and now realize my offhand followup was insensitive.
| andrepd wrote:
| Absolutely. Christian monks in particular were a force of
| _strong_ obscurantism, from the 300s when they gained power in
| the Roman Empire and for the millennium that followed.
|
| The picture we have in our minds of the scholar monk copying
| the Greek classics was only really true starting with the
| 1200s, not earlier.
| clarionbell wrote:
| Monks gained power in Roman empire? Can you name some?
| andrepd wrote:
| They = Christians in general, not a monk in particular.
|
| After the proclamation of Christianity as the official
| religion of the empire, it took only a few years/decades
| before Christians were on a full-blown iconoclastic
| campaign of destruction of so-called "pagan" religion, and
| all non-Christian culture in general. This meant murder and
| forced conversions, but also destruction of patrimony:
| libraries burned, temples razed, schools closed, statues
| smashed, etc.
| emptyfile wrote:
| If I was on a more sophisticated forum I would assume this is
| satire.
|
| Alas, just classic HN tech bro nonsense.
| masswerk wrote:
| Just good old 19th century play write logic.
|
| In essence, it's about not seeing the role of an economic
| window of opportunity for opening up a then rapidly advancing
| segment of the "tech tree". E.g., the idea of the locomotive
| only became viable with the Napoleonic wars and the (at
| times) exponential increase in prices of horses and/or fodder
| (esp. between 1808 and 1824 in the UK, these spikes are also,
| when we see any major projects started). With maintenance
| costs of horse driven machinery rising, even marginal
| technology like early locomotives became viable, eventually
| leading to a mature technology, which is economical sound
| even in normal times. (We me see similar with rising natural
| gas prices in Europe, nowadays.) So, why hadn't this been
| pursued earlier? Well, it must have been because of the
| stubbornness of the ancestors. Usually, this is accomplished
| by ignoring that there had been always a difference between a
| commonly acknowledged working model and a higher spiritual
| truth, which seldom clashed, only when it came to claims that
| endangered the hierarchy. (E.g., the idea of everyone
| actually believing in a flat earth originates essentially in
| a 19th century play about Columbus. However, the T-shaped
| world map was never a working model, it conveyed a spiritual
| truth only. Columbus' problem was really him proposing that
| the world was smaller than generally assumed, thus there
| would be no room for another continent - for which there had
| been some evidence - and a direct way to India. Which is, as
| we know, not how it works.)
| dang wrote:
| Please keep religious flamewar and other generic ideological
| tangents off HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| There's a big gap between 'inventing' a steam engine as a diagram
| in a book or table top novelty and physically creating one that
| can do more work than a horse or two, can work continuously, and
| is safe to use.
|
| The technical advances of Newcomen and Watt also coincided with
| the ability to create boilers and pressure chambers that didn't
| explode (too often).
| antonhowes wrote:
| Indeed. I'll get to that in Part III (or IV if it's too long).
| And it's why I've tried to point out evidence of actual use
| rather than just the diagrams themselves (though those are at
| least a start when it comes to subsequent improvement). Safety
| is certainly a big issue, and Savery's engines often struggled
| with it (for the expansive phase of operations). As you say,
| it's about the "too often"!
| ghaff wrote:
| When we're talking about industrial revolution type of stuff,
| there is a whole train of dependencies that I suspect would
| have been difficult to speed up a lot. Maybe if the Roman
| Empire hadn't collapsed though you could make arguments both
| ways given the Roman Empire as a slave society didn't
| necessarily need a lot of labor saving devices.
|
| The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the
| will to put them into practice were probably more in realms
| like health/medicine. Even a lot of science, your hypothetical
| time traveler might have been "right" but in many cases would
| have no way to prove it.
| Balgair wrote:
| Slavery was largely defunct for it's last ~250 years as
| serfdom-like systems took over.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Byzantine_Empir.
| ..
| bluGill wrote:
| Most Romans (excluding the salves who were not Romans despite
| being the majority in Rome) would have been better off with a
| good steam engine. However before you get to good you need to
| go through a lot of working toys that are not worth having.
| Tractors (tractors have replaced almost half historical human
| labor, with various automated spinning/weaving machines most
| of the rest - everything else done by humans, slaves or not
| is a footnote) are vastly better than slaves, but there is a
| reason when John Deere bought a tractor company in 1918 they
| wrote all their dealers something to the effect of the horse
| drawn plow will always be the backbone of the American farm -
| early tractors were not better than human labor in general.
| visiblink wrote:
| The use of the word dependencies in this context is perfect.
|
| Untangling the history of technological innovation is an
| adventure into dependency hell.
| OJFord wrote:
| It could be a pretty nice 'coffee table book': a walk
| through history of inventions, with the dependencies of
| each one listed (to one or maybe two degrees only of
| course).
|
| You could pick it up anywhere, read forwards; back from
| something specific (or forward, if you made it a doubly
| linked list?); or back from whatever 'the end' would be.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| It would be interesting to see if there's a way this
| dependency graph could be captured and saved for future
| generations in the event of civilisation collapsing. I
| suspect something like that would rapidly reduce the time
| it takes for society to rebuild because it wouldn't have
| to spend energy figuring out what _doesn 't_ work all
| over again as much.
| I-M-S wrote:
| Both of you might be interested to check out "How to
| Invent Everything" [1] - it's even got flowcharts the
| kind you mention at the end! [2]
|
| [1] https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/ [2] https://mo
| hamadacma.com/content/images/2022/04/825235c6-665f...
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Cheers for this, looks interesting!
| zehaeva wrote:
| You might be interested in James Burke's TV Show
| Connections!
|
| Which does this sort of thing for like 8 episodes. Go and
| learn why you can't have cars without swamp gasses!
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Connections is also a book too!
| [deleted]
| moffkalast wrote:
| Hell, even today if a CME or something wipes out our
| electronics we'll have to go way back to vacuum tubes or
| even simpler setups to restore our society since most
| modern electronics need modern electronics to be designed
| and manufactured.
| wrycoder wrote:
| You can make something as complicated as a 6502 processor
| with just electricity for furnaces, motors, and pumps,
| without using any electronics.
|
| You'd have to go back to hand-cut Rubylith for the mask
| sets.
|
| Hand made transistors are no problem, just more
| expensive.
| mywittyname wrote:
| People still do this stuff for fun too. So it's not some
| lost knowledge.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if some colleges taught this as
| part of a history of computers course.
| mannykannot wrote:
| That is true, but I don't think there is much evidence for
| people imagining steam engines for doing useful work prior to
| Thomas Savery (update: Jeronimo de Ayanz y Beaumont appears to
| have preceded him by almost a century.) Admittedly, absence of
| evidence does not settle the issue, but AFAIK Leonardo never
| sketched one, even though he did propose a steam cannon. If he
| had conceived of a rotary steam engine, or the idea was 'in the
| air', how could he have resisted the appeal of a horseless
| carriage?
|
| One technical point: Jeronimo's and Savery's pumps used
| pressurized steam, but Newcomen and Watt used it at atmospheric
| pressure. The latter, at least, was dead set against using
| pressurized steam on account of the risks it posed given the
| technology of the day (a well-founded concern, as it turned
| out.)
| antonhowes wrote:
| Hello, author here. I mention this in Part I to link to a
| prior piece specifically on Ayanz, as this is hugely
| misunderstood. Ayanz's machine only used the expansive force
| of steam, while Savery's used _both_ atmospheric pressure and
| the expansive force of steam. This is an absolutely crucial
| distinction. They were not at all the same, and Ayanz's
| populariser and biographer specifically noted the difference.
| larrydag wrote:
| Advances in manufacturing processes is often overlooked in the
| industrial age.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Two or three parts.
|
| First understanding at least some level what is happening or
| some useful effect. Second having materials and resources(like
| fuel) to build it to exploit the effect. Third actually having
| a use for whole thing.
|
| World and what was possible was just different back then. It is
| rather eye opening to remember how recent some things are. Like
| precision manufacturing such as metal lathe. Not that small
| parts were not done before, but it was all by hand...
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Not sure what conclusion the author will come to as an answer to
| the question in the title (part III is still to come). But if it
| doesn't include the liberation of inventors (i.e. the protection
| of intellectual property through patents) and the legal framework
| for "anyone" to profit from their inventions then I'll be
| disappointed.
|
| As his story indicates so far it was not for the want of
| ingenuity that the industrial revolution did not occur before,
| but the social framework for transforming the society in the way
| that the industrial revolution did was simply not at hand.
| Primarily because the decisionmakers that held the power were
| tied to another mode of production, usually involving fleecing
| peasants.
|
| That the industrial revolution needed the steam engine goes
| without saying. But the steam engine without the industrial
| revolution was a mere party trick.
| Thorentis wrote:
| I reject the idea that patent and IP law would have made these
| developments occur sooner. In fact, I blame the slow down in
| technological development partly on patent and IP law. You
| think the rapid development seen during the industrial
| revolution could have happened if people were at litigious as
| they are now? The ability to create derivative inventions is
| essential to progress.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Your perspective on patents seems colored by the relative
| recent advent of patent trolls and the use of litigation to
| stifle innovation and competition. I suggest you look at the
| situation in England around 300 years ago and compare to the
| feudal system that was the rule elsewhere at the time -
| everything had to be approved by the king or the nobility,
| who had vested interests in land owning and serf systems.
| This social order was the real inhibitor of technological
| progress that England was the first country the liberate
| itself from.
|
| Laws that protected the IP rights of inventors were
| absolutely crucial to that process.
| lolc wrote:
| Check out the Wright brothers patent war at
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Thanks that was interesting. But I'm not sure if there is
| a point related to the discussion in there or if this is
| just a tangential piece of trivia?
| noselasd wrote:
| If you follow what those industrial pioneers were up to, you
| will find them at least at litigious as people are today.
| They certainly protected their patents and inventions with
| teeth and claws
| marsven_422 wrote:
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind that the article mentions a Dutch patent from 1598.
|
| On the other hand, the development of the steam engine and its
| application is partly grounded in Trevithick's fierce rejection
| of existing patents (hence high steam pressure) and also in the
| rather loose enforcements of the Stephenson patents.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| > You say the anthill is the result of the amazing
| collaboration of all the ants in the colony, but look here is
| an ant that goes off doing nothing. What say you now?
|
| I say the big picture is that the steam engine was developed
| within a legal system that in general protected IP rights, at
| least respected them on a completely different level than
| before. Granted there are more pieces to the puzzle, but
| let's not forget one of the most important pieces.
| masswerk wrote:
| Which meant that we would be still stuck with the Newcomen
| atmospheric engine as the settled technology?
|
| High steam pressure isn't just about a wandering ant, but
| about the major step in the development of the steam
| engine, opening the technology to all kinds of
| applications, beyond just pumping.
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Interestingly, we don't seem to understand each other. It
| could be me. No matter, have a nice day.
| antonhowes wrote:
| I have written very extensively on the evolution of the early
| patent system - I actually have a not-yet-completed, so far
| 9-part series on the context of the Statute of Monopolies - but
| you'll be in for something of a surprise in Part III. (Spoiler:
| the most generous ever English patents was seemingly granted to
| an early steam engine in the 1660s but to little effect)
| stareatgoats wrote:
| OK thanks that sounds interesting, will keep a lookout!
| hgomersall wrote:
| I have a similar question: why did the jet engine take so
| (relatively) long, since it's basically a turbo charger with an
| integrated combustion chamber. The answer, as with the steam
| engine is the materials science needed to be done first.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I've often thought we could have had integrated circuits shortly
| after the invention of photography. 150 years earlier! It would
| make an interesting steampunk world with steam and hydraulics and
| CPUs.
| antonhowes wrote:
| If you write that up, please send me the link (I'm the OP)
| ttyprintk wrote:
| You might find these comments interesting:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17371343
| varjag wrote:
| The theoretical stack required for successful IC design very
| much guarantees it wouldn't remain at steampunk.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Remember, 'integrated' meant initially just 'more than one
| component'. It would start with poster-sized wiring diagrams,
| switch elements, photosensitive spots etc. As it got smaller
| and more circuit elements were added the math may have
| progressed with it.
| varjag wrote:
| It's more than the math. It requires modern understanding
| of electromagnetism and material science accounting for
| semiconductors. From that things like practical electric
| motors/generators and plethora other technologies become
| essentially a corollary.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Why did you think that? We didn't have transistors until the
| 1960s.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Well, integrated circuits started as just 'more than one
| component' on the same device. So a sensor and a switch
| perhaps. Or a resistor network. Etc. Start there and you
| rapidly improve (just like it happened later)
| nousermane wrote:
| Only as in "ability to replicate that alien technology".
|
| In the same way, all materials and construction techniques for
| 1896 Marconi radio receiver were available in Ancient Greece.
| bichiliad wrote:
| I'm reading a really good book on the history of steam power
| called "Fossil Capital"[0]. The thesis so far seems to be that
| access to -- and need for -- more portable energy like fossil
| fuels drove the ability to expand. This in turn induced more
| demand for energy as humans developed further and further away
| from places that traditionally provided energy in fixed places,
| like rivers that could power water wheels.
|
| The book ties this into the roots of the idea of infinite growth,
| as well as the climate crisis. It's a little sad in that respect,
| but also genuinely fascinating if you like history.
|
| [0]:https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital
| mhb wrote:
| Primitive Technology: Iron knife made from bacteria
|
| https://youtu.be/dhW4XFGQB4o
| lambda_matt wrote:
| There is an absolutely fantastic book by Simon Winchester called
| The Perfectionists. He has a chapter on the steam engine-- the
| long and the short of it was it couldn't exist until they could
| precisely machine the bore and piston to adequate tolerances
| produce enough power without accidentally producing a bomb
| antonhowes wrote:
| Maybe for the Watt engine, but this does not apply to the
| Savery or Newcomen engines. (Though Part III, or perhaps IV,
| will have a few notes on some almost totally forgotten machine
| makers of the 1650s.
| aniijbod wrote:
| Silly me, I saw that title and I genuinely thought this: "it's
| gonna be some ingeniously titled PR puff cunningly contrived to
| get me to read about what was behind Valve's decision to rename
| their 'Source' game engine to 'Steam Engine'.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Arguably, the steam engine is a form of artificial intelligence.
| At least with Watt's engine, the "governor" plays an essential
| information processing role in modulating the pressure. Sensing
| and reacting to keep a measured value in an optimal range is
| pretty much the definition of AI (see Norvig's definition of
| intelligence). Autopilot is another example of non-computational
| AI (autopilot was invented in 1914).
| kragen wrote:
| To me the most surprising thing about this series is that de Caus
| had a working CSP (concentrated solar power) setup by 01615
| (https://antonhowes.substack.com/i/57230676/solar-powered-ste...,
| original source
| https://archive.org/details/raisonsdesforce00Caus). I had thought
| CSP only dated to Shuman's installation in Egypt in 01913, but I
| see that
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Histo...
| also mentions that Mouchout did a solar steam engine in 01866.
|
| But 01615! We've had working solar power machinery for _four
| centuries_.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Not to be outdone, we had solar thermo photovoltaics in the
| early 1900s
|
| https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...
| huseyinkeles wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what's with the dates prefixed by 0?
| zamadatix wrote:
| https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-
| di...
|
| I'm always a bit split when I see it. Even when used
| genuinely it still comes off as making the comment feel like
| it exists to showcase long now instead of the response. On
| the bright side out of all the things to get over this ranks
| on the "easy" side of the list.
| cfmcdonald wrote:
| For another take on this story, please check out my blog series
| on the Age of Steam: https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-
| steam/
| mitghi wrote:
| Do you mean Source Engine?
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