> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Also wasn't ancient Egypt ridiculously fertile? I imagine being able to consistently produce excess grain means you can divert workers to other projects.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
In particular, the standardization of units and measurements and the lathe. Lathes with accuracy were a tremendously important component of producing steam engines.
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].
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.
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.
I think I conflated invented with reproducibility, etc.. Without relatively precise (for the tome) tolerances on your components you can’t build a steam engine that works. I have machined a steam engine from pretty limited pieces before on my lathe. The cool thing about them is they do tolerate a lot more variance than what comes next in the evolution of engine design, but only so much. Wish I had my books detailing the intertwined history of precision machine tooling and steam engines developing hand in hand. Anyhow I think other comments covered it. I should have been more precise with the claim :)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?"
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.
> 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
By around 1778, Honoré 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.
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.
> 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.
Wow. I loved this series. I skipped essentially every line of character building, which was terrible.
But the build up to creating the universe, the prelude, and then all the historical engineering details were so good I didn't mind skipping over all the attempts at having characters after the initial scene was set.
I’ve found that I’ve enjoyed books more as audible… in most cases (there was one notable case where that reader and editor completely messed up the third book of a trilogy). The thing with audible is that I can’t skip over the “boring” parts as easily. Safehold and Anathem where two that this was important for (I will note the Recluse series got odd if you listened to them in chronological order rather than publication order as the author kept using the same phrase in later books and the quality from book to book varied wildly).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Good questions because you are right, there is path dependency, but I do think a lot would have been different if we had understood earlier that computation is about physics not math.
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
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.
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...
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
In the US, I believe that’s AP physics B, whose topic is thermodynamics and “integration without integration” (i.e., the work done is the area under a PV graph)
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.
154 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] thread> 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.
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.
> A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.
I think it's steam-engine-time, when the steam engine arrives. And gets successfully marketed.
Other things are completely non-obvious. Politicians and journalists falling in love with a platform that only allows 140-character messages? Very much unexpected.
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.
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.
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.
Your problem also isn't just inventing better methods, you also have to rearrange society to take advantage of this new possibility.
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?
For some people and areas this just involved wading into a river for a few minutes every other day.
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.
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.
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.
[I know where to click and I know there are technical workarounds probably, I just don't want to give them my eyeballs.]
Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 - July 2022 (304 comments)
I really hope that someone remakes a modern version of Connections.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle
The premise of the show is still very actual, even more so with current technologies.
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.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068671-the-perfectioni...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treadwheel_crane
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/author/roger/
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/2013/09/130916110853.h...
[2] https://archive.org/details/englishandameri01roegoog/page/n2...
[2] is cited on the wikipedia page for micrometer. Cool book though, might read it.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/174693656016
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.
* 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
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.
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.
Let's hope that in the future software engineering becomes mature enough that we don't need daily security updates.
"I had a problem so I thought I'll use Java - now I have a ProblemFactory"
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.
That was in 80s.
https://twitter.com/aeroimageschris/status/11524425725533265...
https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1427119
edit - “Mad Dad” - that’s either a great typo or great use of alliteration.
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?"
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#Developing_the_hi...
By the 1830s, you had this - https://youtu.be/zoBWAE0win0
Based on the real history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts :-
By around 1778, Honoré 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.
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.
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.
But the build up to creating the universe, the prelude, and then all the historical engineering details were so good I didn't mind skipping over all the attempts at having characters after the initial scene was set.
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.
You bore thecylinder to rough dimension, then use the reamer to set it to final tolerance.
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.
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.
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.
It's amazing how many details needed culminate into what now seems a relatively obvious technology.
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
I think it's fair to call these mini-documentaries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> "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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Atmospheric engines, WP has a good description and history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine
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
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.
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.
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.