I think we tend to underestimate the extent to which technologies arise out of the times they are found in—in many cases they arise almost as soon as they are practically possible. In many cases I suspect they arise before they are practically possible, and fail, repeatedly, until surrounding technology advances to the point that it’s possible to make them work. Steam engines, for example, weren’t invented until the 1700′s because metals were so bad at the time that pressure vessels were impossible to make safe—early cannon were extremely hazardous for this reason, and operated at low pressures. Early steam engines also couldn’t afford large amounts of metal, and were largely made of wood—a highly unsuitable material, and tended to use vacuum rather than pressure to work, as this kept the cylinders in compression, which was safer. They were consequently immensely inefficient, making a horse much more practical unless you happen to have lots of coal lying around.
Without any of the modern suppliers that we are all used to, it will be surprisingly hard to do much better than the Romans themselves did.
On IRC, papermachine mentioned incredulity that horse collars took so long to be invented—a millennia or two to not choke your horses? I commented this had always struck me as pretty bizarre too, and I had long wondered whether there was some unmentioned factor at play (suggesting that either wooden plows didn’t put enough weight to choke horses or that the choking only happened after horses were substantially enlarged after centuries of breeding).
He went looking on Wikipedia and indeed found subleties not usually mentioned:
While Lefebvre’s experiments clearly demonstrated that the throat and girth design he used rode up on horses and cut off their air, images from ancient art and partial yokes found by archaeologists suggested that with proper placement and the addition of a stiff partial yoke, the breastcollar remained on the chest, and wind was not in fact cut off while pulling.[30][31] Further studies conducted in 1977 by Spruytte and Littauer, followed up by Georges Raepsaet, with more accurately reconstructed ancient designs suggested that horses with ancient harness designs could pull nearly as much as with the more modern horse collar.[32] The primary benefit to the use of the modern horse collar, it is argued, was that it allowed a lower point of attachment and in doing so the increased usability of horses for ploughing.[33]
″ Steam engines, for example, weren’t invented until the 1700′s because metals were so bad at the time that pressure vessels were impossible to make safe ”
Not quite: the development of high-pressure engines was delayed, but the initial deployment if low pressure engines was an immediate success.
The first steam engines were, of course, atmospheric engines: fill a large piston with low-pressure steam, squirt cold water, and—whoosh! - the steam condenses to water and a pretty good vacuum, leaving the piston to be forced in by atmospheric pressure.
Inefficient? Actually, no. Heavy, yes: this is a building with an engine in it, not a locomotive; and slow. But good for pumping and acceptably efficient at it; beam engines remained in use as municipal pumping stations well into the twentieth century.
They were two or more orders of magnitude more efficient than a horse, given access to tons (but not tens of tons) per day of coal. You simply could not link up enough capstans and horses to do what an early beam engine did.
Crucially for our purposes, a working beam engine can be constructed by blacksmiths and coopers, with a little bit of skilled brasswork and solder for the valves. This is feasible and affordable, in Rome, with our limited start-up capital.
What we need next is a profitable application, and we can copy de Savary’s business model as well as his first crude invention: drain a once-lucrative mine that’s failing due to flooding.
The Romans had mines—huge ones for copper, in North Wales—and probaby silver elsewhere. If they had mines, they had flooding.
The question is whether we can travel back in time with a well-memorised geological map that shows the proximity of such an opportunity to any small (or large) coal measure.
So we might have an opportunity to make a lot of money from an abandoned and unprofitable enterprise that the owner will be delighted to sell or rent to us.
Note, also, that we’re travelling back in time with some seriously useful—and profitable! - ideas about mining engineering in general.
Armed with a lot of money, we might just have the cash flow to kickstart an industrial economy in the region, and start constructing a reverberating furnace and a real machine shop with some interesting uses for good steel. High-pressure boilers included.
It’s bad form to reply to my own post, but a strong cup of tea has invigorated me with some ideas that follow on from building the first working beam engine.
I’m introducing a second invention, halfway through, because you need something to pump industrial quantities of capital as well as water.
Firstly, you probably won’t have the cashflow to purchase another mine and build another engine for at least a decade. Not unless you’re mining silver, or there’s a severe economic supply contraint on copper, tin, or whatever you’re extracting, permitting you to make extraordinary profits.
You will have the cashflow to improve—and probably replace—your engine, your workshop, and your craftsmmen in two or three years.
You now have a business model. No, TWO business models.
Firstly, municipal water supply already exists in the Roman Empire: there’s an existing demand for big beam-engine pumps, and you can demonstrate a profitable and reliable working model. Your craftsmen might defect and start up a rival business—if they can get capital (which they can’t) or interest a Patrician—but you can let them go, secure in the knowledge that they can only ever copy what you’ve already done.
They cannot compete with your next technological improvement, or the one after: your emerging commercial rivals are no better than the industrial pioneers and inventors who took decades to develop things that you know completely, a century ahead of their best possible learning-curve.
Your second business model is that you know where the all good ore lodes are, and how to get at them—flooded or not. Even if you don’t, mine-owners with a flooding problem are going to tell you where the few known ones are...
...But developing those resources still needs far more capital than you possess; and your objective is to become Emperor, not just a provider of steam pumps to grand patricians with an ore lode, and Proconsuls with a municipal supply problem.
No, you need a second invention: the Joint Stock Company. Lots of wealthy families and merchants would love to have something to invest their money in—Rome’s a surprisingly rigid economy, above a certain level of family wealth—and you’ve got an idea they can see working.
So: get the articles drawn up—and sworn before a Quaestor (and a Vestalis if you want it to be a convincing demonstration of good faith that’ll get people killed for suborning or betraying) - and open up another mine.
And another. And a bigger one, with a horse-drawn tramway to move the ore and the coal. Lucky you, knowing the Mass Haul calculation, and the principles of bridge design, soil mechanics, and a simple optical level…
So now you have cashflow, an expanding demand for steel and machine tools, bulk transportation, and coal. And capital.
Sounds like an industrial revolution, right there.
And you’re always going to be first with the right technology, at the right time: whatever significant technology anyone else invents—or copies—you will always know its flaws and how they were overcome in subsequent improvement and developments—or how that particular technology was superseded by something far, far better when materials became available.
You also have a substantial political power base among your shareholders: merchants and mid-level patrician families who will, within a decade or two, be wealthier than the entire senatorial class of Rome.
Before you’re wealthy enough to actually have a significant political power base, it’s going to be obvious you’re getting wealthy. At that point you’re going to need political patronage to avoid having, say, joint-stock companies outlawed.
If the means by which you’re gaining wealth are not seen as legitimate, you won’t be allowed to accumulate enough to do you any good—and in a society with no ideology of economic liberty, any new means of accumulating wealth undertaken by anybody who isn’t already on top is almost automatically seen as illegitimate by the people who are already on top.
Partially correct, and partially wrong. The great patricians and senators will try to keep down a plebeian, but this is equally true of a fellow-patrician emerging as a dominant power.
But people could and did succeed in Rome: your point is an objection, not an insoluble problem.
I would point out that not getting assassinated—or coming up against a power bloc that can stop you—is a problem with all ‘Become Emperor of Rome’ scenarios: and it was solved by all emperors.
It boils down to politics. A strong point of the Joint-Stock plan is that you make a lot of people wealthy: a broad power base is a strong power base.
Consider this: many ancient and noble Patrician families are in a state best described as ‘genteel poverty’. Give them enough of a share to regain a place in public life—but about the same, or slightly less, than the share you sell to merchants, so that these aristocrats cannot dominate the power base and—and you’ve got a very powerful influence in the senate.
The other place to secure influence is the Army. Families of successful (or influential) generals and mid-level commanders must get a share. At least one Legion, within reach of Rome, should start receiving mass-produced high-quality equipment ….Or mass-produced equipment as good as the standard issue, but at factory prices—much to the profit of the commanders and the procurator. (This is legal in Rome: cost-effective supply was properly incentivised).
“The Joachimsthaler Legion stands with Rationus’ is a declaration that will put a stop to any drastic setback.
Incidentally, I wouldn’t even start on trying to get the Praetorian Guard ‘onside’ - too obvious, certain to alarm the Emperor, and fatal.
Improving the water supply, temple donations, and economic mobility: that’s a good route to popular support—and the ‘Vox populi’ was a matter of importance in Rome. Not that it was a democracy by that time, but the ruling classes took great care (and great expense) to maintain popularity. And there was a direct ‘Will of the People’ channel in Rome: the Tribunes.
Arguably, they are a point of failure: your public works, equalisation of wealth for plebeians, and temple donatuons would count in your favour—and should—but the Tribunes are a point of failure if your enemies seek influence there. Note, however, that the tribunes existed explicitly as a counterbalance to the great patricians and the emperor: that’s the way you play against ‘the people who are already on top’.
Finally, be sure that you and your supporters are liberal with donations to the Temples. And, indeed, to the causes and projects of the existing Emperor’s supporters… Some of whom will be happy to be shareholders, discreetly, because they’re not all rich—old families, again—and financial dependence on the Emperor is an uncomfortable thing.
In short, you’d play politics. But politics powered by an important invention of the modern age—Shareholders—with crude steam engines to prime that particular pump with money.
Depends on the technology. Sure, for steam engines you need good metallurgy, but it turns out that good metallurgy needs relatively little in the way of technology as opposed to knowledge of chemistry and minerals. With the knowledge of chemistry available in 2012, it’s very, very easy to move Rome forward to late 190th-century steel metallurgy. Bessermer converters and open hearth furnaces are reasonably within the capabilities of Roman brick technology to build; they just didn’t know enough about the chemistry of steel to know what they should be making.
I think we tend to underestimate the extent to which technologies arise out of the times they are found in—in many cases they arise almost as soon as they are practically possible. In many cases I suspect they arise before they are practically possible, and fail, repeatedly, until surrounding technology advances to the point that it’s possible to make them work. Steam engines, for example, weren’t invented until the 1700′s because metals were so bad at the time that pressure vessels were impossible to make safe—early cannon were extremely hazardous for this reason, and operated at low pressures. Early steam engines also couldn’t afford large amounts of metal, and were largely made of wood—a highly unsuitable material, and tended to use vacuum rather than pressure to work, as this kept the cylinders in compression, which was safer. They were consequently immensely inefficient, making a horse much more practical unless you happen to have lots of coal lying around.
Without any of the modern suppliers that we are all used to, it will be surprisingly hard to do much better than the Romans themselves did.
On IRC, papermachine mentioned incredulity that horse collars took so long to be invented—a millennia or two to not choke your horses? I commented this had always struck me as pretty bizarre too, and I had long wondered whether there was some unmentioned factor at play (suggesting that either wooden plows didn’t put enough weight to choke horses or that the choking only happened after horses were substantially enlarged after centuries of breeding).
He went looking on Wikipedia and indeed found subleties not usually mentioned:
This is wrong, but less wrong than I thought:
″ Steam engines, for example, weren’t invented until the 1700′s because metals were so bad at the time that pressure vessels were impossible to make safe ”
Not quite: the development of high-pressure engines was delayed, but the initial deployment if low pressure engines was an immediate success.
The first steam engines were, of course, atmospheric engines: fill a large piston with low-pressure steam, squirt cold water, and—whoosh! - the steam condenses to water and a pretty good vacuum, leaving the piston to be forced in by atmospheric pressure.
Inefficient? Actually, no. Heavy, yes: this is a building with an engine in it, not a locomotive; and slow. But good for pumping and acceptably efficient at it; beam engines remained in use as municipal pumping stations well into the twentieth century.
They were two or more orders of magnitude more efficient than a horse, given access to tons (but not tens of tons) per day of coal. You simply could not link up enough capstans and horses to do what an early beam engine did.
Crucially for our purposes, a working beam engine can be constructed by blacksmiths and coopers, with a little bit of skilled brasswork and solder for the valves. This is feasible and affordable, in Rome, with our limited start-up capital.
What we need next is a profitable application, and we can copy de Savary’s business model as well as his first crude invention: drain a once-lucrative mine that’s failing due to flooding.
The Romans had mines—huge ones for copper, in North Wales—and probaby silver elsewhere. If they had mines, they had flooding.
The question is whether we can travel back in time with a well-memorised geological map that shows the proximity of such an opportunity to any small (or large) coal measure.
So we might have an opportunity to make a lot of money from an abandoned and unprofitable enterprise that the owner will be delighted to sell or rent to us.
Note, also, that we’re travelling back in time with some seriously useful—and profitable! - ideas about mining engineering in general.
Armed with a lot of money, we might just have the cash flow to kickstart an industrial economy in the region, and start constructing a reverberating furnace and a real machine shop with some interesting uses for good steel. High-pressure boilers included.
It’s bad form to reply to my own post, but a strong cup of tea has invigorated me with some ideas that follow on from building the first working beam engine.
I’m introducing a second invention, halfway through, because you need something to pump industrial quantities of capital as well as water.
Firstly, you probably won’t have the cashflow to purchase another mine and build another engine for at least a decade. Not unless you’re mining silver, or there’s a severe economic supply contraint on copper, tin, or whatever you’re extracting, permitting you to make extraordinary profits.
You will have the cashflow to improve—and probably replace—your engine, your workshop, and your craftsmmen in two or three years.
You now have a business model. No, TWO business models.
Firstly, municipal water supply already exists in the Roman Empire: there’s an existing demand for big beam-engine pumps, and you can demonstrate a profitable and reliable working model. Your craftsmen might defect and start up a rival business—if they can get capital (which they can’t) or interest a Patrician—but you can let them go, secure in the knowledge that they can only ever copy what you’ve already done.
They cannot compete with your next technological improvement, or the one after: your emerging commercial rivals are no better than the industrial pioneers and inventors who took decades to develop things that you know completely, a century ahead of their best possible learning-curve.
Your second business model is that you know where the all good ore lodes are, and how to get at them—flooded or not. Even if you don’t, mine-owners with a flooding problem are going to tell you where the few known ones are...
...But developing those resources still needs far more capital than you possess; and your objective is to become Emperor, not just a provider of steam pumps to grand patricians with an ore lode, and Proconsuls with a municipal supply problem.
No, you need a second invention: the Joint Stock Company. Lots of wealthy families and merchants would love to have something to invest their money in—Rome’s a surprisingly rigid economy, above a certain level of family wealth—and you’ve got an idea they can see working.
So: get the articles drawn up—and sworn before a Quaestor (and a Vestalis if you want it to be a convincing demonstration of good faith that’ll get people killed for suborning or betraying) - and open up another mine.
And another. And a bigger one, with a horse-drawn tramway to move the ore and the coal. Lucky you, knowing the Mass Haul calculation, and the principles of bridge design, soil mechanics, and a simple optical level…
So now you have cashflow, an expanding demand for steel and machine tools, bulk transportation, and coal. And capital.
Sounds like an industrial revolution, right there.
And you’re always going to be first with the right technology, at the right time: whatever significant technology anyone else invents—or copies—you will always know its flaws and how they were overcome in subsequent improvement and developments—or how that particular technology was superseded by something far, far better when materials became available.
You also have a substantial political power base among your shareholders: merchants and mid-level patrician families who will, within a decade or two, be wealthier than the entire senatorial class of Rome.
Purple rather suits me, don’t you think?
Before you’re wealthy enough to actually have a significant political power base, it’s going to be obvious you’re getting wealthy. At that point you’re going to need political patronage to avoid having, say, joint-stock companies outlawed.
If the means by which you’re gaining wealth are not seen as legitimate, you won’t be allowed to accumulate enough to do you any good—and in a society with no ideology of economic liberty, any new means of accumulating wealth undertaken by anybody who isn’t already on top is almost automatically seen as illegitimate by the people who are already on top.
Partially correct, and partially wrong. The great patricians and senators will try to keep down a plebeian, but this is equally true of a fellow-patrician emerging as a dominant power.
But people could and did succeed in Rome: your point is an objection, not an insoluble problem.
I would point out that not getting assassinated—or coming up against a power bloc that can stop you—is a problem with all ‘Become Emperor of Rome’ scenarios: and it was solved by all emperors.
It boils down to politics. A strong point of the Joint-Stock plan is that you make a lot of people wealthy: a broad power base is a strong power base.
Consider this: many ancient and noble Patrician families are in a state best described as ‘genteel poverty’. Give them enough of a share to regain a place in public life—but about the same, or slightly less, than the share you sell to merchants, so that these aristocrats cannot dominate the power base and—and you’ve got a very powerful influence in the senate.
The other place to secure influence is the Army. Families of successful (or influential) generals and mid-level commanders must get a share. At least one Legion, within reach of Rome, should start receiving mass-produced high-quality equipment ….Or mass-produced equipment as good as the standard issue, but at factory prices—much to the profit of the commanders and the procurator. (This is legal in Rome: cost-effective supply was properly incentivised).
“The Joachimsthaler Legion stands with Rationus’ is a declaration that will put a stop to any drastic setback.
Incidentally, I wouldn’t even start on trying to get the Praetorian Guard ‘onside’ - too obvious, certain to alarm the Emperor, and fatal.
Improving the water supply, temple donations, and economic mobility: that’s a good route to popular support—and the ‘Vox populi’ was a matter of importance in Rome. Not that it was a democracy by that time, but the ruling classes took great care (and great expense) to maintain popularity. And there was a direct ‘Will of the People’ channel in Rome: the Tribunes.
Arguably, they are a point of failure: your public works, equalisation of wealth for plebeians, and temple donatuons would count in your favour—and should—but the Tribunes are a point of failure if your enemies seek influence there. Note, however, that the tribunes existed explicitly as a counterbalance to the great patricians and the emperor: that’s the way you play against ‘the people who are already on top’.
Finally, be sure that you and your supporters are liberal with donations to the Temples. And, indeed, to the causes and projects of the existing Emperor’s supporters… Some of whom will be happy to be shareholders, discreetly, because they’re not all rich—old families, again—and financial dependence on the Emperor is an uncomfortable thing.
In short, you’d play politics. But politics powered by an important invention of the modern age—Shareholders—with crude steam engines to prime that particular pump with money.
You might have infeential distance problems explaining that one.
Depends on the technology. Sure, for steam engines you need good metallurgy, but it turns out that good metallurgy needs relatively little in the way of technology as opposed to knowledge of chemistry and minerals. With the knowledge of chemistry available in 2012, it’s very, very easy to move Rome forward to late 190th-century steel metallurgy. Bessermer converters and open hearth furnaces are reasonably within the capabilities of Roman brick technology to build; they just didn’t know enough about the chemistry of steel to know what they should be making.