[HN Gopher] Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
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Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
Author : barry-cotter
Score : 126 points
Date : 2022-10-14 08:09 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (antonhowes.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (antonhowes.substack.com)
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > So why did it then take almost another half a century, even
| with the increasingly widespread understanding of atmospheric
| pressure and vacuums, for a widely-adopted and practical
| atmospheric engine like Thomas Savery's to appear?
|
| > The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that
| inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the
| incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and
| even all the right general notions of how things work. As we've
| seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same
| ancient experiment as everyone else who worked on thermometers,
| weather-glasses, egg incubators, solar-activated fountains, and
| perpetual motion machines. But because people so rarely try to
| improve or invent things, the low-hanging fruit can be left on
| the tree for decades or even centuries.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I was having this argument the other day with regards to the
| post-WW2 Nazi rocket scientists who took the US to the moon.
|
| There's a very real possibility that liquid rockets would have
| remained a novelty, just another "Nazi Wunderwaffe" had they
| all been tried and hung for their crimes instead of pardoned
| and put to work. Solid rockets were (and are) more than
| sufficient for all military applications. But to get people
| into space, you need liquid engines. Would we have ever
| invented them independently? Very possibly not.
| midoridensha wrote:
| I thought the other reason was the availability of cheap labor
| (including slavery).
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Rubber was needed for gaskets and seals ???.
| somecommit wrote:
| My take is that they were not seeing the point to do so for the
| most easy one (like a mill, a press...) and from the other hand
| for clearly useful and advanced device like a vehicle/train it's
| the lack of amount of available combustible and iron. Even a
| train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly "why" it
| could be useful, do you really need to go so far with that amount
| of people? There were so much less people in the past, same for
| merchandise quantity probably.
|
| But the response in the article about the knowledge of the
| "vacuum possibility" is also very interesting, it is not
| mentioning this but it's crazy to think that we only know that
| the space emptiness is possible since Einstein theory 100 years
| ago (and not full of ether).
|
| Or that with the first locomotive people feared to die because of
| the speed.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > Even a train, it's possible that nobody were seeing clearly
| "why" it could be useful, do you really need to go so far with
| that amount of people?
|
| Railways predate steam locomotives by about 250 years [1], or
| 200 years if you only count overland railways (as opposed to
| their use in mines). They were mainly used for transporting
| coal. You could argue that replacing the horses with steam
| engines was a very straightforward idea as soon as it was
| technologically feasible.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagonway
| ljnelson wrote:
| I also like https://technicshistory.com/2021/02/18/the-age-of-
| steam-intr..., which points in part to metal purity and
| engineering tolerances.
| effnorwood wrote:
| lordnacho wrote:
| I think the reason is best described by Factorio.
|
| Yes, with a lot of spaghetti belts and manual crafting, you can
| make late-stage products. But to do it well, in a way that
| transcends merely being able to make a handful of items, you need
| a huge underlying economy. You end up having to re-arrange your
| whole factory, or you need to clear new land, which means you
| need to spend some time on diversions like improved military.
|
| Translated to the real world, it means you need to rearrange a
| large amount of the social system (slaves/serfdom) as well as
| creating markets for a bunch of inputs that build higher and
| higher in your tech tree.
|
| Still a good question though, I don't mean to say things had to
| happen just as they did.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| A nice explanation for the "rate of progress" is the percentage
| of the population that is _not_ involved in the production of
| food.
|
| Since the dawn of humanity up until "very recently" in the
| grand scheme of things, something like 95 to 98 percent of the
| population were directly involved in food production. There
| were the odd shamans, priests, tribal leaders, or what have
| you, but _everyone else_ made themselves busy hunting, fishing,
| or farming.
|
| The current ratio in developed countries is something like 1 to
| 2 percent of the population directly working in farming, and
| maybe 20 to 30 percent working in "food production". Think
| workers at the biscuit factory, or chefs in a restaurant.
|
| Everyone else is free to do science, engineering, project
| management, finance, or _whatever_.
|
| The difference between 2% of the population free to work on
| non-food activities and 70% is massive.
|
| This is why so much progress has happened just in the last few
| centuries.
| lordnacho wrote:
| That's true, but you need to unlock the tech for you to have
| enough food to feed everyone comfortably. Until it's comfy
| you have a fragile economy that occasionally falls into
| famine, so everyone would have to make plans to accommodate
| that, ie they can't build the pyramid too high.
|
| Your problem also isn't just inventing better methods, you
| also have to rearrange society to take advantage of this new
| possibility.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| and also: today the farming and food making activities are
| evolving the society beyond the basic need of feeding people.
| For example the food industry is developing its own
| materials, processes, refrigeration techniques, delivery
| industry (doordash, uber eats etc.) are advancing our
| computer systems
| derekp7 wrote:
| The question I have is how did mega projects in ancient times
| (such as the Pyramids) get enough people to work on them, and
| still have enough food to feed them? Or were the people on
| those projects (and other city-building projects at that
| time) only less than 5 percent of the total population?
|
| Also, is that 95% that are spending the majority of their
| time on food production? Or is that including people that
| spend a lot of time on fall harvest and spring planting, but
| don't do much else during off seasons?
| notahacker wrote:
| Pyramids were built during offseasons. But it wouldn't
| really have been an option to redeploy that unskilled,
| uneducated labour towards industrial research instead, at
| least not without a radical change to ancient societies.
| Not least because kings and religions tended to want non-
| agricultural engineering resources focused on monuments and
| defences, not finding more labour/cost-effective ways of
| increasing output of craft produce or pursuing science for
| the sake of science
| isk517 wrote:
| Also wasn't ancient Egypt ridiculously fertile? I imagine
| being able to consistently produce excess grain means you
| can divert workers to other projects.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Plus don't forget why Egypt was fertile: The farmland got
| regularly flooded by the river. Can't do much while it's
| flooded, just go and help out on the pyramid project.
| feoren wrote:
| During the fertile season, right after the floodplains were
| flooded, you needed an _enormous_ amount of labor to take
| advantage of the huge area of freshly-fertilized soil.
| Presumably this area needed to be tended and maintained,
| and then of course the harvest was another time when you
| needed enormous amounts of labor. And then you 've
| harvested and the plains are briefly fallow, then they get
| flooded by the Nile for a few weeks, and there's nothing to
| do. So you have an enormous amount of labor power with
| nothing to do for a couple months every year. Why not pay
| them a little to lug massive stones around to build a
| monument to your awesomeness? Better than having them
| idling in the streets!
| [deleted]
| gopher_space wrote:
| > something like 95 to 98 percent of the population were
| directly involved in food production.
|
| For some people and areas this just involved wading into a
| river for a few minutes every other day.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| There is that also a matter of economics too.
|
| For example take the iPhone. All the bits for an iPhone were in
| place easily 10 years before that. Yet we did not have it. It
| took breaking the idea of paying 40 bucks a megabyte, or before
| that some amount of money per min to talk on land line and over
| the air. Once those two things were 'gone' we got what we
| consider a modern cell phone. Sometimes it means taking away
| things so others can move into their place. In my example the
| economics of running a phone company had to change before an
| innovation could happen.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I think you're underestimating the amount of innovation
| required to make the original iPhone.
|
| The hardware required an extremely thin battery, a super-
| efficient processor, a high quality display with a built-in
| capacitative sensing grid, robust(ish) glass, and very small
| carrier, WiFi, and Bluetooth hardware.
|
| The visible software required a good touch OS with a secure
| file system, while the underlying carrier stack relied on
| data compression and adaptive line quality innovations, under
| a complex mix of networking protocols.
|
| The productisation required a complex logistics chain that
| sourced raw materials and converted them into phones at
| unprecedented scale with extreme precision.
|
| Very little of this existed in 1997. ADSL was just starting
| to be a thing, WiFi was still fairly exotic, and most people
| were still using dial-up. Windows 95 was everywhere and OS X
| hadn't been invented yet. Most phones used GPRS.
|
| Products like the Nokia Communicators might look somewhat
| iPhone like, in a bricky way, but they just didn't offer the
| same intuitive pocket-sized touch screen benefits.
|
| Modern phones are very literally the summary of modern
| materials science, microelectronics, comms and data
| compression theory, industrial engineering, and some CS, in a
| package that hides the physics and engineering in an almost
| effortless way.
|
| They seem simple, but they're anything but.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I never understood, why there was no Palm with phone in the
| mid 90s.
| ekianjo wrote:
| early 2000s well before the Iphone you had PocketPCs with
| phone and wifi connection and a lot of apps
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Google "Motorola DynaTac" and you'll see why, that's the
| first phone I remember seeing in the mid 90s.
| [deleted]
| rocqua wrote:
| Note that the first steam engines in productive use were at
| coal mines.
|
| This is because they were incredibly inefficient, and needed
| huge amounts of coal. Really the only way to solve the
| transport problem was to not have to transport the coal at all.
| As it saw continued value produced, the mechanism was made more
| efficient, until eventually it was viable to use in certain
| other places.
|
| However, the transport problem still remained. You could
| replace muscle power with steam power, but if it still took
| massive amounts of muscle power to get your coal, that wasn't
| worth much. The breakthrough here came with stream trains. Now
| you could use coal to transport your coal. And muscle power was
| possible to be largely eliminated.
| mkl95 wrote:
| We knew how to make things like Hero's engine
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile) since ancient times, so
| at least there was some intuition that something like the steam
| engine could be made, even if it escaped our ability.
|
| When it comes to building steam based devices the biggest
| difference to people back then is probably our knowledge of
| thermodynamics, which grew explosively (no pun) since the mid
| 17th century.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Slaves and serfs.
| aurizon wrote:
| The root was zero IP law. People who invented any new thing(say =
| a widget stamp) could use it to make widgets all day and sell
| them. If someone looked in a window and say how to made widget
| presses = he could also make them. If he open sourced it = showed
| his neighbours = all know the secret and market saturation
| ensues. That secret was his ' barrier to entry', anyone else had
| to do the old hard way. Romans were famous for this, rich men
| would kill inventors of new processes to maintain a monopoly.
| This led to intense secrecy. Look at Newton's famous secrecy, he
| was only convinced to publish late in life and, along with
| others, started the learned journal industry that employed the
| new printing tech to make many at a low cost. Once an inventor
| could reveal his secret to employees to make many items AS WELL
| AS have the original Royal Patent protected fabrication
| monopoly(later time limited monopolies emerged).
| Copyright/rant/Disney = another story...
| Jagerbizzle wrote:
| Another great read along the same vein from Bret Devereaux's
| blog: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-
| indus...
| nottorp wrote:
| So who uses that newsletter subscribe popup with no intuitive way
| to close it besides substack? Just so I know to avoid them.
|
| [I know where to click and I know there are technical workarounds
| probably, I just don't want to give them my eyeballs.]
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Author has an interesting point of view, I always assumed that
| the issue was the quality of the steel available at the time was
| too low to prevent explosive failure under pressure or collapse
| under vacuum:
|
| > "Now, one might suggest that Petty and Kalthoff simply lacked
| the tools or materials to make sufficiently strong and precisely
| fitting vessels and pipes. But I highly, highly doubt this."
|
| This issue has been historically researched with respect to
| artillery development, which seems to have been mostly bronze up
| until the 18th century, when reliable iron/steel artillery was
| introduced. For example:
|
| https://www.billstclair.com/weaponsman.com/index.html%3Fp=32...
|
| Perhaps the pressures and temperatures involved in steam engines
| weren't as great as those involved with artillery, but the cost
| of making a bronze steam engine might have been prohibitive.
| rofrol wrote:
| Similar comment here:
|
| _The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not
| steel. Mass production of steel didn 't appear until the 1880s,
| with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the
| deployment of successful railroads.
|
| Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't
| very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good
| enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the
| "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a
| modest iron and steel industry.
|
| A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel
| lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman
| ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's
| hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at
| first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000
| experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the
| process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough
| heat and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore,
| leaving pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a
| "double carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish
| mountains" which was iron, 86...25; manganese, 8...50; and
| carbon, 5...25. Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are
| thus put back into the molten iron, and steel comes out._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32611002
| hef19898 wrote:
| Until the end of the 19th century iron production out paced
| steel by roughly 9:1, after that it slowly changed and
| reached, IIRC, in the early 20th cebtury the opposite ratio.
| Good luck finding iron nowadays...
| andrewla wrote:
| In this particular article, we're looking at the window between
| ~1640 and ~1690. A fifty year interval is a pretty long time in
| human terms. But it is fairly narrow in technological terms.
| Steel production did not change significantly during that time.
|
| I still, without evidence, cling to the notion that external
| technologies (like advances in precision engineering) held
| things up, but the article makes a very compelling argument
| that this is not the case, and that it really was a question of
| having an individual inventive and ambitious and persistent
| enough to really attempt to reduce to practice the concepts
| that were floating around at the time.
| scythe wrote:
| >This issue has been historically researched with respect to
| artillery development, which seems to have been mostly bronze
| up until the 18th century, when reliable iron/steel artillery
| was introduced.
|
| But then couldn't they have simply made steam engines out of
| bronze? It might be more expensive, but it's certainly enough
| to demonstrate the concept.
| ThomPete wrote:
| Another question you might ask is why wasn't the computer
| invented earlier?
|
| Babbage and Lovelace came close but they didn't realize they had
| (almost) invented a computer they just thought they had invented
| a calculator. They thought they solved a math problem when in
| fact they had solved a physics problem.
|
| We could have been traveling between stars by now.
| rgmerk wrote:
| But how useful would a mechanical general-purpose digital
| computer have been?
|
| Even if a competent project manager had been in charge, steam-
| driven mechanical computers would have been extremely
| expensive, physically large, and very slow. Most of the time,
| I'd expect special-purpose devices would have been more cost-
| effective.
|
| The technologies to build electronic computers didn't exist for
| another half-century at least.
| Aloha wrote:
| The one that makes me think is either the galvanic or visual
| telegraph.
| cptaj wrote:
| An important factor seems to be precision engineering. I saw the
| point made in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created
| the Modern World by Simon Winchester, where they argue that while
| all the science and experimentation was there, it wasn't until
| precision parts were widely available that steam engines really
| solved all their problems and became viable
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...
| csours wrote:
| A YouTube channel primarily dedicated to precision:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/machinethinking
|
| Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
|
| I think it's fair to call these mini-documentaries.
| bitexploder wrote:
| In particular, the standardization of units and measurements
| and the lathe. Lathes with accuracy were a tremendously
| important component of producing steam engines.
| andrewla wrote:
| This is a great thesis because it can be falsified.
|
| The contention you are making is that between 1640 and 1690
| the standardization of units of measurement and the invention
| of the lathe meant that Kalthoff (say) could not produce a
| viable steam engine in the 1640s, but Savery could
| successfully produce one in the 1690s.
|
| I suspect this thesis is false, but I wanted to state it here
| before I did any research into it.
| andrewla wrote:
| Some basic research I think indicates we can rule out the
| standardization of units of measurement; there were no
| serious attempts at this in the timeframe in question.
|
| Hard to say about the lathe; as the article notes,
| Wilkinson's work in cannon boring machines certainly made
| James Watt's life easier, but that was still way in the
| future (circa 1774) so there doesn't appear to be anything
| relevant to the timeframe the article is discussing.
| MeteorMarc wrote:
| But the first lathes could not be steampowered!
| wongarsu wrote:
| Almost any stationary machine that can run on steampower
| can be run on water power instead. Or by horses trotting in
| a circle, or humans walking in a treadwheel [1].
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane
| bluGill wrote:
| Even after the steam eninge was common foot powered lathes
| existed. Or you can power a lathe from water.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Bow lathes are fun looking and can be made with low tech.
|
| The fun thing with lathes is they are able to make things
| more precise than they are, power of screws really. So
| they're a bootstrap technology.
| mc32 wrote:
| I suspect metallurgy and metallic and alloy purity is part of
| it too. One needs the vessel to handle certain types of
| pressures without catastrophically failing.
| mannykannot wrote:
| So then the next question is: why was precision engineering not
| developed earlier? One apparently plausible answer is that the
| perceived need did not arise earlier, but that leads into the
| question of what changed that perception? If the answer is "the
| development of the steam engine", we have a causal loop which
| is not clearly anchored to any particular time.
|
| One of the often-overlooked prerequisites for Watt's
| improvement of the steam engine through the use of an external
| condenser was the need for a precision cylinder. Then-recent
| advances in boring machinery for making cannons provided the
| means, but cannons had been around for centuries before this
| development came about. Furthermore, while this improvement
| depended on an advance in precision engineering, Newcomen's
| steam engine was already eighty years old.
|
| The industrial revolution and its successors depended on the
| mutually-supporting bootstrapping of several disparate facets
| of technology, all of which could possibly have started
| earlier, so it seems unlikely that the timing of the initial
| spark can be attributed to an until-then absence of just one of
| them.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Non-precision items can be more field expedient to fix. If
| you're 30 days from the factory do you want something only
| they can fix, or something you can with the local blacksmith
| or an axe, rope and a log?
| mannykannot wrote:
| But for this to explain the prior absence of precision
| engineering, and for that absence to explain the timing of
| the development of the steam engine, this would have to
| change around 1700. As far as I know, it didn't.
| Iv wrote:
| The progressive end of slavery is often quoted as a possible
| cause for the sudden interest in moving machines.
| ravedave5 wrote:
| The Antikythera mechanism is shockingly precise for how old it
| is. (100-200BC)
| virtualritz wrote:
| In the 80's my uncle, a trained mechanical engineer, tried to
| build a working scale small gauge steam locomotive at home for
| fun. He was a train geek. I reckon it was maybe 1/16 scale or
| the like.
|
| He machined all parts on his Emco Unimat II, a 70's hobbyist
| convertible lathe. The final piece was beautiful.
|
| Ultimately the kettle couldn't build up enough steam because of
| tolerances of parts.
|
| He machined the resp. parts from scratch with more rigor. A
| year later, the 2nd version moved half a meter before it
| stopped for the same reasons.
|
| I remember his swearing and disappointment. But then he
| explained calmly to my cousin and me why he couldn't do any
| better w/o an investment into heavier, more precise and much
| more expensive tools. Too expensive for a hobbyist.
|
| Go figure.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| That makes me wonder if I could do so with my 1966 South
| Bend...but then I think I'd probably finish the cylinder bore
| with a cheap Chinese Reamer, which is not something he would
| have probably wanted to purchase for a one off operation.
| (Think $300 for a cutting tool, vs one I can buy today for
| $25)
|
| You bore thecylinder to rough dimension, then use the reamer
| to set it to final tolerance.
| grogenaut wrote:
| When making a real steam engine you use piston rings, you
| don't really machine to exact tolerance except where you're
| showing off how precise you are. The rings are consumable,
| they also flex since they're split rings (they're a C),
| which lets them expand as they wear. They're usually softer
| material or a slide compatible material with the cylinder
| walls. This makes them sacrificial and saves the much more
| expensive cylinder.
|
| You see them in literally every modern engine and I'm sure
| absurdly far back, even though they have better precision
| now.
|
| Your 1966 south bend is likely several orders of magnitude
| better than that emco, those things are more meant for
| wood, and imagine if you needed to align your spindle on
| your lathe every time you used it how inaccurate it'd be.
| foobarian wrote:
| I wonder if he was running into a cubed/squared scaling issue
| where scaling down the model made the operation impractical.
| Given same tolerances, a 16x larger dimension of the tank
| gives 16^3 more steam volume or at least 16^2 more heat flux
| which might make the gaps a lot more forgiving.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Partly. But the weights to be move - the locomotive itself,
| any model cars, etc. - also weigh 1/(16^3) as much as the
| full-sized ones.
| adrianN wrote:
| I'd love to read a writeup on that project. Sounds
| fascinating.
| andrewla wrote:
| The article specifically talks about the availability of
| precision engineering in the concluding section, and attempts
| to rule it out.
|
| Not that the rebuttal is conclusive; I tend to think that you
| are closer to being correct than the author's conclusion (which
| is that the inventors themselves are rare). But I think you
| would need to specifically address the argument in the article
| rather than claiming that the article failed to consider this
| point.
| telesilla wrote:
| This is also cited as the reason the difference engine was not
| completed.
| bklaasen wrote:
| Alan Bromley and Doron Swade's rebuild of the Difference
| Engine, done using metals and techniques that were available
| in Babbage's time, seem to have put paid to that idea.
|
| These days it's Babbage's poor project management that's
| cited as the cause. He had a stormy relationship with his
| engineer, and couldn't settle on a design long enough for it
| to be implemented.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Modern people overestimate how long we have been able to
| engineer things precisely.
|
| I used to use a lot of vintage German cameras. Really right up
| through the 1950s the tolerances were wide enough that no two
| cameras were exactly alike. The parts were all replaceable, and
| there were often adjustments & shims inside to keep things in
| spec. For example, one camera might have part A that's a little
| long so it's matching part B would be a little short to
| compensate. They'd sort it out at the factory where they have
| the parts bins and could keep trying different part Bs to match
| the part A installed until they had a close enough match, then
| shim it.
|
| This was even more so in the 1920s-1940s cameras.
|
| The cameras actually had stickers in the film compartment
| warning you to send it in for professional service for any
| repairs. Note the implication that the camera needed frequent
| enough service that they'd actually bother putting a sticker in
| it!
|
| So for some we look back on the era as things being user-
| serviceable and parts replaceable, but it was that way for
| reasons of manufacturing ability.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I was going to argue with you but luckily I checked first :-)
|
| My argument was that Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy (one
| of the canonical works of precision engineering literature)
| was published in the early 1900's, but no, it was actually in
| 1970. (https://pearl-
| hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...)
|
| Can't believe that I was that far off! I might have been
| thinking of Precision Hole Location, but even that wasn't
| published until the 1940's.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Meanwhile the Swiss, making watches machined to an impossibly
| perfect degree since the 18th century: "I have no such
| weakness."
| treeman79 wrote:
| Mad dad worked in airplane manufacturing. He once told a
| story about how every part in for something in a wing was in
| spec. But it was a foot to long all together. Not even close
| to fitting on the airplane
|
| That was in 80s.
| buildsjets wrote:
| The entire fuselage for the last 737 NG to be built had to
| be scrapped, and a new one had to be fabricated by the
| supplier, because certain parts were so out of tolerance
| that the wings could not be fitted.
|
| https://twitter.com/aeroimageschris/status/1152442572553326
| 5...
|
| https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1427119
|
| edit - "Mad Dad" - that's either a great typo or great use
| of alliteration.
| saalweachter wrote:
| One of my favorite YouTube channels, "my mechanics", is a
| restorer who specializes in restoring _beyond_ the original
| condition of the item -- he will frequently fill in holes and
| re-bore them when the initial machining was shoddy and led to
| a poor alignment of the parts.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I had a 89 Corvette...designed in the late 70's early 80's
| before computers were generally used to do so. It was a mass
| of shims and slotted holes to get things to line up.
|
| I had a 1998 Corvette...designed in the early 90's with
| CADCAM. No shims. Things like a door latch and door made by
| entirely different companies, the three holes to attach the
| latch weren't shimmed or slotted, and the replacement fit
| exactly with no adjustment.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Cars were exactly the other example I was going to use but
| cut my comment short.
|
| Anyone who has looked in the engine bay of a car from
| 50s/80s/00s/now can observe how tightly packed &
| compartmentalized everything is now. Early cars had a lot
| of room under the hood cuz mechanics were constantly in
| there tinkering, adjusting or replacing bits and pieces.
| It's incredible how long a car from a reliable brand lasts
| now, with minimal maintenance.
|
| EVs are another step function in this change as theres even
| fewer mechanical moving parts and fluid lines to worry
| about.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "I had a 89 Corvette...designed in the late 70's early 80's
| before computers were generally used to do so. It was a
| mass of shims and slotted holes to get things to line up."
|
| This has nothing to do with computers. Detroit just didn't
| care about building decent cars back then. Mercedes and
| many others were able to build very nicely designed cars
| long before CAD/CAM was available.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Wouldn't you know it, the mercedes door handles from 1985
| used slotted holes[1]. As much as you like them, Mercedes
| cannot transcend the technical abilities of the time.
|
| [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/174693656016
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I guess my comment was more about the general build
| quality of US cars from the 70s. I have worked on some
| and it seemed they were just thrown together without any
| thought or care.
| gw99 wrote:
| Same as the old land rovers I used to work on. 2mm was
| considered miraculous tolerances anywhere. If something
| didn't line up it usually got hit until it did.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Indeed, Any maker who has attempted certain kinds of projects
| (involving vacuum, mechanisms, etc.) will understand this.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Modern items have stickers about warranty void if you open
| it, etc, other warnings like that. My 100% user serviceable
| coffee machine recommends you send it to them, cars encourage
| you to go to dealers. I don't see how that sticker is
| different in the 50s and now. There's a profit motive for
| them to fix it for you even if they don't charge it's still
| reputational (they stand behind their work).
|
| Having this sticker on my device doesn't make me think that I
| need to send it in often, it's more that they're covering
| their ass.
|
| The rest of your comment I'd agree with but a lot of things
| were designed around needing tight tolerances and using tight
| tolerances when you don't need them is not always a good
| idea. My earbuds won't charge if there's the tiniest bit of
| dust in the little recesses the charging pins go into or in
| the bottom of the well. Lower precision there would make them
| more reliable.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I think the most egregious one of these I've seen is a
| digital multimeter I have that says there are no user
| serviceable parts inside. Pretty standard, but it implies
| that even the sort of person who uses a multimeter isn't
| qualified to replace the fuse and 9v battery inside it.
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| > [...] the camera needed frequent enough service [...]
|
| Let's hope that in the future software engineering becomes
| mature enough that we don't need daily security updates.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| I think that needing legions of Archeologist-Programmers
| who will continuously tune the systems is much more likely.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Shhhh don't ruin my retirement part time gig plans
| Huh1337 wrote:
| Don't worry there's going to be a need for literal
| legions, and it still won't be nearly enough
|
| "I had a problem so I thought I'll use Java - now I have
| a ProblemFactory"
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| Resistor matching is still a thing to this day.
| noizejoy wrote:
| And also tube matching for us tube guitar amp users.
| anjc wrote:
| > Modern people overestimate how long we have been able to
| engineer things precisely
|
| I think you're underestimating it also. For example,
| micrometres capable of measuring imperceptible differences
| have existed for many centuries, same for manufacturing
| machines (lathes, mills) that can shape objects to
| imperceptible requirements.
|
| Cameras probably just don't require such precision.
| riversflow wrote:
| nit picks on this:
|
| Humans are capable of detecting extremely small details
| with their fingertips[1] anecdotally, this can be trained
| if you use your finger tips for precision work a lot, you
| can easily feel things that you can't see without
| significant magnification.
|
| Additionally, I would push back on "many centuries", the
| Machine age came about in the mid 19th century, so if were
| being generous, 300 years[2].
|
| [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130916110
| 853.h...
|
| [2] https://archive.org/details/englishandameri01roegoog/pa
| ge/n2...
|
| [2] is cited on the wikipedia page for micrometer. Cool
| book though, might read it.
| epicide wrote:
| > Cameras probably just don't require such precision.
|
| Depends on the camera.
|
| I think if we combine both of your comments, we get a more
| clear picture of reality: we've had the _ability_ to
| manufacture one instance of something with precision for a
| while, but not the ability to do so consistently, reliably,
| or quickly.
|
| i.e. tolerances have shrunk dramatically over the past
| century or so, along with time needed to produce things
| with such low tolerances.
|
| However, while that is generally true across the board,
| tolerances haven't all gotten to the same place! Materials
| involved, costs, time to build, and need for low tolerances
| still largely affect all of it, of course.
|
| And for some things, individual variations are even
| considered desirable.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Cameras always have been optical appliances. And as such
| they in deed do require a lot of precision. Especially
| those with changeable lenses, unless you don't mind your
| focal plane not being where your film, or nowadays sensor,
| is.
| anjc wrote:
| I presumed OP was talking about winders and so on. If
| shims were used for critical elements like optical
| alignment, I'm guessing that it's because this was the
| cheaper route to precision, rather than due to an
| inability to measure and manufacture precisely.
| thfuran wrote:
| Cost is always a factor in manufacturability.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Optics absolutely had shims in this era. Talking
| 1930-1950 era Leica lenses for example. 50mm lenses that
| you can't just swap in a replacement element without
| adjusting shims because they would match them and shim at
| factory.
|
| I recall some lenses from the era having their actual
| exact focal length inscribed inside since they weren't
| exactly 50mm and the variance was 0.2mm or so.
|
| Don't even get me started on Soviet cameras.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Recently I disassembled a Nikon lens, the first 24-120
| with VR as the VR constantly engaged. The plan was to
| disconnect the VR unit completly and use, interim,
| without VR. Didn't work, as apparently apperture control
| (electronic in this lens) and focus (AF and manual, also
| electronic) go over the same platine. No VR, that worked,
| but also no focus or apperture.
|
| Point of the story, the lens had some shims to get into
| the proper focal plane relative to the camera. The model
| in question doesn't have the best sharpness reputation,
| some people put it on the worst 10 list of Nikon lenses.
| The sample I had is sharp so (VR didn't engage until 28
| mm). My theory now is tgat the lens is sharp, and the bad
| rep comes from compromises during manufacturing (Thailand
| instead of Japan, with all the corresponding issues of
| setting up high precision operations in a new site), and
| potentially sub-par QC. Not sure if other lenses have
| shims as well, I'm kind of not inclined to disassemble
| perfectly working samples just to find out.
|
| So no, shims aren't per-se a bad sign but rather one of a
| certain calibration strategy. If those shims are
| everywere so, manufavturing quality propably isn't the
| best.
|
| Oh, one word on 50 mm lenses. Those are among the fastes,
| sharpest lenses ever regardless of manufacturer. And dirt
| cheap compared to "pro" models. Seems to be quite well
| understood optics.
|
| I do have two pre-AF Nikon lenses, and those are master
| pieces of precision mechanics, dating back to the late
| 70s and early 80s.
| reneherse wrote:
| Lensrentals.com founder Roger Cicala publishes teardowns
| of high-end modern lenses and I recall that he and his
| team occasionally (often?) find shims used to calibrate
| the optics.
|
| https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/author/roger/
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| That's fascinating, because recently I started thinking that
| I'm _underestimating_ how long we 've been able to craft
| (which may be different than engineer, or mass manufacture)
| things precisely.
|
| Recently I dug teeny bit into pocket watches, and then wrist
| watches, which turnst out were a thing way longer than I
| imagined!
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| > Recently I dug teeny bit into pocket watches, and then
| wrist watches, which turnst out were a thing way longer
| than I imagined!
|
| Weren't these handcrafted by highly skilled and highly paid
| specialists for a long, long time. In contrast to more
| modern mass production.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Yes; so I think that's where scope or intent of statement
| may come in. I think:
|
| * We were able to craft, manually, things much more
| precisely for much longer than some of us thought
|
| * We were able to design/engineer/mass-manufacture
| precise things for far shorter than many of us thought
| jandrese wrote:
| What we have with CAD and robot aided assembly is making
| precision _affordable_.
|
| Which is probably a good reason the early steam engines
| didn't take off. You could build something in the lab,
| but there was no way to affordably mass produce a
| usefully efficient version.
| hef19898 wrote:
| They were. With the following caveats: non, or limited,
| interchangeability of parts, horrendous precision of
| showing the correct time. All of which can be traced back
| to low precision manifacturing.
| Iv wrote:
| Another important factor was interest. It is noteworthy that
| fast development in the steam engine came after slavery started
| being outlawed everywhere. Before, moving machines powered by
| wind or steam were just an intellectual amusement (that was
| actually known since antiquity).
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The atmospheric steam engines which were first put to practical
| use did not require precise manufacturing. The cylinder and
| pistons were finished by hand and eyeballed for correctness
| (far from precise.) The gap was made up using leather seals and
| a layer of water sitting on top of the piston.
| moffkalast wrote:
| This just poses further questions as to why electric motors
| weren't popularized before the steam engine instead. They're
| so easy to make that it's entirely possible to make one out
| of a literal box of scraps.
|
| We have some records of batteries dating back far even to
| ancient Egypt, magnets can be found on the ground, the only
| real obstacle is making thin copper wire reliably I guess.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Electric motors have some of the same problems that steam
| engines do. You need very precise bearings because of the
| relationship between magnetic field and distance. You need
| lots of copper wire, as you mentioned, and while magnets
| might be "found on the ground" I don't know that powerful
| enough ones to be useful were known of.
|
| It's easy to make a proof of concept electric motor. It's
| far more difficult to make a useful one.
|
| And then, of course, you need a source of electricity to
| use them in the first place, whereas the steam engine just
| needed heat and water.
| soneil wrote:
| I believe metallurgy played a big part in it too. It may
| actually be the improvement in canon during the age of the
| great european land laws that brought our steelworking to the
| place needed.
|
| It's amazing how many details needed culminate into what now
| seems a relatively obvious technology.
| shagie wrote:
| While science fiction, the Safehold series by David Weber gets
| into this. As the series opens, everything is made by its own
| guild/foundry to the point of cannon balls for one ship
| wouldn't work on another because of the lack of
| standardization. Guns (muskets) where such that if a part broke
| you needed a gunsmith to craft a new part for it... which might
| have slightly different dimensions so it was best if it didn't
| break in the first place.
|
| As part of the foundations for rapid technological advancement,
| standard weights and lengths were put into place by the
| crown... and that then allowed the foundries and factories
| which made the parts to specialize instead of needing a master
| gunsmith to craft each part for each gun, you could have many
| lightly trained people making the parts and then the gunsmiths
| only needed to assemble it.
|
| At a point later in the series, one of the characters on the
| other side of the war demonstrates this by taking three rifles
| and disassembles them, and then reassembles a working rifle
| with parts randomly selected from the different three
| disassembled rifles and asks his leadership if that was
| something that they would be able to do (it wasn't).
|
| This in turn allowed for tighter tolerances for the weapons of
| war which then in turn meant more powerful weapons and being
| able to out produce larger nations even with a smaller
| industrial base.
|
| Consider the question then of "at what point in the history of
| the world could you take three rifles made by the same maker
| and swap parts and still have it be perfectly serviceable?"
| cdot2 wrote:
| The earliest example I know of with interchangeable parts
| were the 1819 Hall rifles.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpW054cVfHc
| shagie wrote:
| And for a comparison of timeframes, Stephenson's Rocket was
| 1829.
|
| Early steam engines for work (not train) The Newcomen
| Engine in the 1700s (though fairly inefficient - and you
| can see that it could be made without precision parts). By
| 1800 (when Watt's patent expired) there was an estimated
| 450 Watt engines (totaling 7,500 hp) and over 1500 Newcomen
| engines in the UK.
|
| The first high pressure steam engine was built by Oliver
| Evans in 1801 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Evans#De
| veloping_the_hi...
|
| By the 1830s, you had this - https://youtu.be/zoBWAE0win0
| hef19898 wrote:
| Maybe even earlier with French artillery carriages. But
| yes, it sis really start around the Napoleonic Wars.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> At a point later in the series, one of the characters on
| the other side of the war demonstrates this by taking three
| rifles and disassembles them, and then reassembles a working
| rifle with parts randomly selected from the different three
| disassembled rifles_
|
| Based on the real history of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts :-
|
| _By around 1778, Honore Blanc began producing some of the
| first firearms with interchangeable flint locks, although
| they were carefully made by craftsmen. Blanc demonstrated in
| front of a committee of scientists that his muskets could be
| fitted with flint locks picked at random from a pile of
| parts._
| shagie wrote:
| Heh, that's probably where that scene was from.
|
| The development of interchangeable parts, precision parts,
| higher performing weapons (which often is a driver of
| innovation) and the steam engine have more than casual
| linkages between them.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > Consider the question then of "at what point in the history
| of the world could you take three rifles made by the same
| maker and swap parts and still have it be perfectly
| serviceable?"
|
| It depends on the weapon.
|
| To this day, there are many designs that require "fitting"
| for some parts. The M1911, a .45 ACP semi-automatic handgun
| that entered US service in 1911 and is still a relatively
| popular, doesn't have truly interchangeable parts. The
| interface between the sear and hammer, or the trigger bar and
| sear, must be manually carefully shaped for feel, safety, and
| reliability. The "ramp" that guides the cartridge into the
| chamber is similar, and it's common to get new guns that
| won't reliably work with common brands or designs of
| ammunition.
| dboreham wrote:
| Watt needed to get a set of technologies developed to make a
| workable efficient steam engine. E.g. how to bore a straight
| cylinder in a material that withstands high pressure and
| temperature.
|
| Another aspect is that solutions tend to occupy a niche within
| the existing environment. E.g. an iPhone is no use to a
| Babylonian because they have no 5G infrastructure. A Lamborghini
| is no use to a Roman because a) no gas stations, although they
| could probably run it on alcohol, and b) it'd get stuck behind
| all the ox carts already on the road.
| marktangotango wrote:
| > it'd get stuck behind all the ox carts already on the road.
|
| Lol, that's pretty much the case today, as anyone who's driven
| a sports car in traffic, on public streets can attest!
|
| In my public education the steam engine received zero coverage
| which is a pity because it's development and application
| spurred so much science and understanding. I've often thought a
| science curriculum based on the study of steam and work would
| be particularly enlightening.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I always wondered why the phonograph wasn't invented earlier! As
| soon as people were able to build geared mechanisms, they should
| have had the machining skills to build a simple cylinder
| photograph.
| retrac wrote:
| It almost was! In the mid-1850s a French inventor, Edouard-Leon
| Scott de Martinville, was studying sound, and he invented a
| device that could record it [1]. It was a diaphragm attached to
| a very lightweight pen, and when paper was drawn through it at
| high speed as sound was produced, it basically drew the
| waveform. He used it in his study of phonology.
|
| So close! And yet no way to play it back. And trying to come up
| with some way to play it back seems to have eluded him, and
| others for a couple decades. Some of de Martinville's
| recordings have survived, and today software can reconstruct
| them into almost-intelligible speech and music. They're the
| oldest known recordings of a human voice.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph
| nemo44x wrote:
| We needed calculus first and the formalization of mechanics, both
| published originally by Isaac Newton. Once mechanics and their
| calculus were formalized we had the tools to logically build
| mechanical things and share the abstract concepts with others in
| our networks which promoted faster iteration.
| minraws wrote:
| I think this question is very intriguing and weird in the same
| breath, like why was X not invented a few decades earlier.
|
| I would honestly like to read papers on it both from sociology
| and scientific discovery point of view to contrast what
| justification are we provided for this.
|
| Which IMHO seems like a problem of pure chance, basically
| invention of X-1 pushes invention of X ahead and so on.
|
| Really curious how people would explain aberrations and delay in
| theoritical discoveries against physical inventions in this
| respect as well.
|
| Cause I don't think relatively would have required gravitational
| theory but I would wager it would have definitely helped.
|
| I am most certainly very intrigued, good job author you have me
| hooked. No pun intended.
| [deleted]
| lixtra wrote:
| The follow up was recently discussed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Why wasn 't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 - July 2022 (304
| comments)
| red_admiral wrote:
| Relevant recent ACOUP (Brett Deveraux) post:
| https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Just came here to link this.
|
| Tldr: There was no use case for low power steam engines in the
| ancient/roman world. There was no know-how on building high
| pressure vessels that would allow higher power steam engines
| (this know-how was gained by work on cannons).
|
| The key use case for the first practical engines was draining
| coal mines, in the ancient/roman world this was not a big
| problem because most of their energy was from wood not coal.
| baking wrote:
| Also, transportation of fuel by animal power was inefficient
| so basing the steam engine at the source of the fuel (a coal
| mine) was the only practical first application. It wasn't
| until the steam engine was perfected that it made sense to
| transport fuel.
| macintux wrote:
| That was a compelling read, and to my untutored eye raises more
| important points than this one. Economics trumps ingenuity.
| bsder wrote:
| Agreed. I never really thought about how you needed a
| compelling usage of the "crappy" versions of steam engines
| before you would spend the time and resources to engineer
| better ones.
| audunw wrote:
| This reminds me of James Burke Connections. That show often
| showed how many different and surprising dependencies there are
| on the path to any given invention. My favorite example is how
| the internal combustion engine needed an invention from perfume
| bottles to spray a good mist of fuel/air-mixture into the
| cylinder. Might have taken longer to invent ICE if that wasn't
| already readily available.
|
| I really hope that someone remakes a modern version of
| Connections.
| aequitas wrote:
| > I really hope that someone remakes a modern version of
| Connections.
|
| The premise of the show is still very actual, even more so with
| current technologies.
| bilsbie wrote:
| I thought the carberator did this?
| andylynch wrote:
| Yes, but a key development in carburettor design was an 1880s
| patent by Maybach and Daimler, based on the principles of an
| atomiser as used for perfume.
| berkes wrote:
| Steam locomotives and other steam boilers used the same
| principle (Bernoulli). Did Daimler and Maybach say they
| took inspiration from perfume atomizers? Because it would
| make more sense if theyt took inspiration from steam
| engine's injectors.
| bluedino wrote:
| There are fuel injection patents from the 1870's
| berkes wrote:
| Both perfume bottles and the carberator use Bernoulli's
| principle, which was published in 1738[1]. I'm not sure
| whether Bernoulli developed this for perfume bottles, but I
| doubt it.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
| jmyeet wrote:
| Early steam engines were developed well before the locomotive
| steam engine, which is generally what we associate with the term
| "steam engine". I don't think you can overstate the importance of
| the technological development in the 19th century on these
| developments.
|
| The US presented a new need that I don't think really existed
| before: crossing vast distances over land, eventually all the way
| from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast. IIRC the population
| of the US was 2 million in 1800 and 50 million in 1900.
|
| Others have mentioned precision engineering. This was an
| important factor and had its origin in manufacturing cannon
| bores.
|
| But a bigger factor (IMHO) was steel. Steel existed before the
| mid-19th century but it was incredibly expensive (more expensive
| than gold) and relatively low volume. This all changed with the
| Bessemer process that allowed the mass production of inexpensive
| steel. It made Andrew Carnegie in particular incredibly wealthy
| in the process.
|
| Trains existed before cheap steel but builds of railroads and
| trains absolutely exploded in the wake of cheap steel. This also
| led to the shift from wooden sailing ships to (ultimately) steel-
| hulled boats with engines.
|
| So prior to trains, what were the potential use cases for a steam
| engine? Automobiles seem unlikely (given weight and size and the
| ubiquity and utility of horses). Ships? Maybe. But sailing is
| effective and fires tend to be bad news for ships.
|
| So that really leaves factories, mills, etc. Mills in particular
| often used hydro power (ie a river turning a wheel). You could
| build them in locations with such features. Labor was also
| relatively cheap (and largely free in some cases ie slaves).
|
| Ultimately I don't think it's one thing and it's hard to separate
| these factors cleanly. It becomes a chicken and egg problem.
| Advancement can often fuel each other.
|
| It does seem like long distance transportation ultimately led to
| at least popularizing and mass producing steam engines.
| andrewla wrote:
| This article is very specifically not talking about locomotive
| steam engines, but the early, even pre-Newcomen, pre-Watt, low-
| pressure steam engines developed by Thomas Savery in the 1690s.
| saalweachter wrote:
| The original "tractors" were called "steam traction engines",
| to distinguish them from the steam engines you would pull
| around with a team of horses to where you needed them.
|
| There were a variety of earlier pieces of farm machines that
| could be driven by treadmills and belts; steam engines could
| naturally slot in as a drop-in replacement for the treadmills
| to power all of your equipment.
| implements wrote:
| > Early steam engines were developed well before the locomotive
| steam engine, which is generally what we associate with the
| term "steam engine".
|
| Atmospheric engines, WP has a good description and history:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine
| fspacek wrote:
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Often multiple inventors arrive at the same idea at almost the
| same time, for example Edison and Swan for the light bulb, Meucci
| and Bell (among others) for the telephone, Tesla and Marconi for
| radio, the Wrights and many others for the airplane etc. possibly
| because the technological and social level of society has reached
| a certain point in its development when the "time is ripe" for a
| given invention. As Charles Fort put it:
|
| > A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until
| comes steam-engine-time.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Not sure I buy that. I've never found users (culture) knows
| what it wants next. In software, users will suggest incremental
| improvements but never a whole new tool.
|
| I think it's steam-engine-time, when the steam engine arrives.
| And gets successfully marketed.
| michaelt wrote:
| _Some_ things are obvious - people have talked about "self-
| driving cars" for almost as long as there have been cars.
| Pirates and porn-lovers were watching entire movies on their
| computers, via broadband internet, 5+ years before Netflix
| launched their first streaming service. Electric cars -
| around since the 1880s.
|
| Other things are completely non-obvious. Politicians and
| journalists falling in love with a platform that only allows
| 140-character messages? Very much unexpected.
| perilunar wrote:
| The Wright Brothers didn't come up with the _idea_ of the
| airplane _at all_ -- people had been working on it for over 100
| years.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yet on the 10 years around their flight, a lot of people
| developed powered flight independently. And none did it on
| the previous 95 years.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| and without the Wright Brothers, the plane would have
| developed regardless, the time was indeed ripe for flying.
| People have been hopping around in self propelled planes for
| a few years before the Wrights, it would have only been a
| matter of time until they perfected it.
| bumby wrote:
| There's an argument that heavier than air flight was mainly
| due to Curtis who was able to help the Wrights get an engine
| with a much better power:weight ratio.
|
| The Wrights made many contributions, notably a very efficient
| propeller, I believe. But some of their biggest claims, like
| wing-warping, succumbed to others ideas like Curtis'
| ailerons.
| soco wrote:
| Let's not forget Leonardo da Vinci's studies around 1500 or
| whatever flight the Babylonians or Indian vimanas were
| supposed to do...
| bumby wrote:
| Sure if we're talking about the _idea_ , I was more so
| referencing the realization of that idea.
| scythe wrote:
| The light bulb was first developed by Sir Humphry Davy eighty
| years before Edison. The only _problem_ was that it was made of
| platinum, which turns out to be impractical. Edison 's great
| achievement was making it affordable enough for everyone to get
| one.
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