The model I have of human progress is this. Intelligence is not the limiting factor. Things are invented quite soon after they become possible and worthwhile.
So, let’s take the steam engine. Although the principle of the steam turbine is known to the Greeks, actual steam engines are only commercially viable from the time of Newcomen’s atmspheric engine. Why not earlier?
Well, there is an existing technology to displace, first of all, which is a couple of unfortunate animals walking in a circle driving an axle. This is far more fuel efficient than the steam engine, so it persists until coal mining comes along and provides fuel of a kind that can’t be fed to an animal. Of course coal mining exists for a long time before the industrial revolution, but as long as fodder is cheap enough compared to coal, the animals continue to win.
There is also a materials problem with steam. Wood is a terrible material for making steam engines, yet it’s cheap enough that it is used rather a lot in early models. Iron at the time is expensive, and of such terrible quality that it is brittle and quite unsafe as a means of making pressure vessels. There was no good way of making pressure vessels at all until the industrial revolution, along with good sliding seals, and initially there is great reluctance to use even moderate pressures due to the problems. The pressure to solve that set of problems was already faced by makers of guns. Essentially it was improving metallurgy that allowed the higher pressures that permitted the higher efficiencies that made steam engines more than a curiosity. Steam engines essentially couldn’t be invented earlier because the iron was too expensive and didn’t hold pressure well enough to allow the boiler to be made. As it was, burst boilers were not uncommon. Along with this there is a general problem of making anything with reasonable precision so that parts fit together in a reasonably airtight way.
Ditto the motor car. A motor car differs only from a steam engine in that it doesn’t run on a track—which isn’t really even an inventive step. So why didn’t people take steam engines off their tracks and run them on the roads? Well, steam engines were very heavy, and the roads were very bad. The idea is simple enough, but doing it with 1820′s technology isn’t really possible. Better metallurgy and better quality machining later allows light high speed engines that finally allow the horse to be displaced.
It’s an interesting counterfactual test. Pick any invention you like, and look into why it wasn’t done twenty years earlier. Usually the answer is that it couldn’t be done economically back then. The situation is usually more like the one with colour flat screen displays. It’s been considered a good idea for decades, but only actually became possible in the 1990′s. If you look at the details of how it was done in the 1990′s, you discover techniques that weren’t possible in the 1980′s.
It’s these changes in the surrounding technology that seem to me to govern progress, and these changes happen at a rate governed by as much by economics as anything else.
Essentially it was improving metallurgy that allowed the higher pressures that permitted the higher efficiencies that made steam engines more than a curiosity.
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Better metallurgy and better quality machining later allows light high speed engines that finally allow the horse to be displaced.
Out of curiosity, what was it that made better metalugy possible?
The industrial revolution has some very tightly coupled advances, The key advance was making iron with coal rather than using charcoal. This reduced the price, and a large increase in quantity of manufacture followed. One of the immediate triggers was that England was getting rather short of wood, and the use of coal as a substitute started for iron-making and heating.
The breakthrough in steelmaking was initially luck—some very low sulphur coal was found and used in steelmaking. But luck arises often out of greater quantities of usage, and perhaps that was the key here. It certainly wasn’t science in the modern sense as the chemistry of what was going on wasn’t really understood—certainly not by the practitioners of the time. Trial and error was therefore the key, and greater quantity of manufacture leads to more trials.
The model I have of human progress is this. Intelligence is not the limiting factor. Things are invented quite soon after they become possible and worthwhile.
So, let’s take the steam engine. Although the principle of the steam turbine is known to the Greeks, actual steam engines are only commercially viable from the time of Newcomen’s atmspheric engine. Why not earlier?
Well, there is an existing technology to displace, first of all, which is a couple of unfortunate animals walking in a circle driving an axle. This is far more fuel efficient than the steam engine, so it persists until coal mining comes along and provides fuel of a kind that can’t be fed to an animal. Of course coal mining exists for a long time before the industrial revolution, but as long as fodder is cheap enough compared to coal, the animals continue to win.
There is also a materials problem with steam. Wood is a terrible material for making steam engines, yet it’s cheap enough that it is used rather a lot in early models. Iron at the time is expensive, and of such terrible quality that it is brittle and quite unsafe as a means of making pressure vessels. There was no good way of making pressure vessels at all until the industrial revolution, along with good sliding seals, and initially there is great reluctance to use even moderate pressures due to the problems. The pressure to solve that set of problems was already faced by makers of guns. Essentially it was improving metallurgy that allowed the higher pressures that permitted the higher efficiencies that made steam engines more than a curiosity. Steam engines essentially couldn’t be invented earlier because the iron was too expensive and didn’t hold pressure well enough to allow the boiler to be made. As it was, burst boilers were not uncommon. Along with this there is a general problem of making anything with reasonable precision so that parts fit together in a reasonably airtight way.
Ditto the motor car. A motor car differs only from a steam engine in that it doesn’t run on a track—which isn’t really even an inventive step. So why didn’t people take steam engines off their tracks and run them on the roads? Well, steam engines were very heavy, and the roads were very bad. The idea is simple enough, but doing it with 1820′s technology isn’t really possible. Better metallurgy and better quality machining later allows light high speed engines that finally allow the horse to be displaced.
It’s an interesting counterfactual test. Pick any invention you like, and look into why it wasn’t done twenty years earlier. Usually the answer is that it couldn’t be done economically back then. The situation is usually more like the one with colour flat screen displays. It’s been considered a good idea for decades, but only actually became possible in the 1990′s. If you look at the details of how it was done in the 1990′s, you discover techniques that weren’t possible in the 1980′s.
It’s these changes in the surrounding technology that seem to me to govern progress, and these changes happen at a rate governed by as much by economics as anything else.
[...]
Out of curiosity, what was it that made better metalugy possible?
Gunpowder, which required Iron Working and Invention, and so on.
The industrial revolution has some very tightly coupled advances, The key advance was making iron with coal rather than using charcoal. This reduced the price, and a large increase in quantity of manufacture followed. One of the immediate triggers was that England was getting rather short of wood, and the use of coal as a substitute started for iron-making and heating.
The breakthrough in steelmaking was initially luck—some very low sulphur coal was found and used in steelmaking. But luck arises often out of greater quantities of usage, and perhaps that was the key here. It certainly wasn’t science in the modern sense as the chemistry of what was going on wasn’t really understood—certainly not by the practitioners of the time. Trial and error was therefore the key, and greater quantity of manufacture leads to more trials.