Many years ago I learned that the size of the specialty publication industry was just enormous. I don't know if that's still true, but the existence of "Valve Magazine" isn't too surprising to me. We had fun at work thinking up fake industrial specialty pubs, such as "Door Knob Monthly" and "Parking Meter Trends".
That's how ad targeting was done before Google and Facebook. Now that you can buy valve buyer eyeballs while they are browsing cat pictures all those multitudes of specialisation are prone to do extinct.
(and to GP: perhaps one day we might discover the remains of ancient Roman Valve Magazine!)
Specialty industry magazines are way better targeting than google. Their value also shot up post-GDPR as publishers realized how valuable their subscriber lists were to vendors.
There is a whole genre of of industrial musical shows consisting of composers and actors. They perform at company conventions. In 2018 a collector of industrial musical records made an amusing documentary on the subject called "Bathtubs over Broadway".
Here in my country the biggest car trading website is called autotrader. For fun someone at my previous job typed in horsetrader and lo and behold, we apparently also had a horse trading site.
Wow. They must have had wrenches and other passable hand tools as well. How in the world could they get that far, without managing to build and harness even rudimentary steam engines?
If someone had described Hero's aeolipile to the people who built this plumbing, it might have made all the difference.
Still, a stationary power plant would have eminently doable in my not so humble opinion. Even stone for cylinder offers great compression strength. Make it big enough and the scale works out to your advantage. Bronze bearings could be made very durable.
The reason is simple - Romans tended to use wood as fuel source. Steam engines started way after we decided to use coal instead.
The wood heat is too low to get high pressure saturated steam, and lower pressure is not that useful and requires a huge boiler or specially prepared wood briquettes.
Metallurgically, Romans knew of brass and copper, which is enough for a decent steam boiler. It would be rather expensive to make.
That's a nicely built valve. Looks like something from 1890.
If the Romans had discovered the Bessemer process for making steel in quantity, the industrial revolution might have happened two thousand years sooner. They had a "steel industry", but could only make enough for swords and such. A Bessemer converter is much simpler than that valve. Would have changed history. The railroad era might have started around 150AD.
It's interesting to speculate about an industrial Rome, but I'm more convinced that the industrial revolution was just as much facilitated by the political and economic institutions of 18th century England, things that Rome never had.
The story about "flexible glass" during the reign of Tiberius Caesar is probably false, but illustrates how technological innovation is expected to be received when there are powerful gatekeepers to broad technological change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass
Entrenched interests usually would much rather maintain the status quo than enable anything potentially disruptive. The industrial revolution started because it was infeasible for any one powerful group in England to oppose innovation.
I totally agree. The financial and societal aspects are as much important as the technological development in kick-starting industrial revolution. As an engineer, I've come to believe the main reason industrial revolution happened when it did was not the sudden advancement of science, but the emergence of stable and inclusive economy based on commerce and private property and the inclusive political system that did not allow incumbent to stifle innovation through force.
That's a great little story, I assume untrue, where the "flexible glass" was just chosen as a mythical invention, to make the point. Similar to the "acid that dissolves any material" story.
Reading it, I thought how fantastic it would be if that material had actually been around for centuries. Then of course, the end of the article links to gorilla glass, a material we all use daily and barely even think about. Do we live in mythical times?
The industrial revolution's main prerequisite is not a converter or any other clever device. It's about power sources. When you've got e.g. a bunch of coal that gives off lots of thermal energy, finding ways to transform that energy (with engines, factory machining etc) becomes a hot open engineering contest with good solutions being a matter of years, and optimal ones, of decades or centuries (i.e. much longer than Roman history).
But if you ain't got the energy, then making any devices, however clever, isn't going to change the tide. Antique and medieval civilizations had some rather elaborate mechanisms like the antikythera, the trebuchet, rapid-fire crossbows in China etc. But without a major source of low-cost energy, none of them succeeded with an industrial revolution: large-scale coal-mining was what did it in the end.
> When you've got e.g. a bunch of coal that gives off lots of thermal energy, finding ways to transform that energy (with engines, factory machining etc) becomes a hot open engineering contest with good solutions being a matter of years
Not really; people had bunches of coal giving off lots of thermal energy forever. They used it in the obvious way, burning it for heat in winter. This didn't lead to much in the way of technological advance.
> and optimal ones, of decades or centuries (i.e. much longer than Roman history).
How is "centuries" "much longer than Roman history"? Roman history goes on for more than 700 years, and that's just the history of Rome as a major international power centered on the city in Italy. The Byzantine Empire, or -- as it called itself -- the Roman Kingdom, with extensive cultural and institutional continuity, went on for another 1000 years after that.
And all of that generated about 5 hp (3.7 kW), at about 1-3% efficiency of thermal energy to motive power.
Watt's engines were about 10-20 hp, and about 10% efficient. Peak efficiency of a triple-expansion steam engine approached 25%. The best thermal engines today (combined-cycle steam turbines) approach 50%, and have a far better power-to-weight ratio.
Well I think it is more about the human power sources.
Only the usage of more efficient crops like potatoes and the import of fertilizer like guano enabled the people of the industrial revolution to work in factories instead on the fields.
No pre industrial civilization was able to feed so many people not working in agriculture.
There's little to no coal in Italy. Nearest reserves are in (present-day) northern Spain, a very long sea voyage, possible only May - November.
Coal throughout Europe is mostly in the northern band, from Scotland, especially in Cornwall, France, Germany, and present-day Czech Republic and Poland. Where industrialisation happened, for the most part.
England's coal mines were near the sea, and river/canal transport, and could be moved readily by ship elsewhere in the country.
Coal in the US didn't come into wide use until after substantial rail infrastructure was built out (the 1880s), with high-grade Bessemer steel, capable of bearing heavy coal cars. Until then, wood, usually locally-sourced, was the preferred fuel.
Part of the reason the Bessemer process is so cheap is because it's burning the impurities in the steel to heat it. You heat up one batch enough to melt it and begin combusting the carbon and other impurities, and use the hot exhaust gas to heat the next batch. You still need some additional fuel, but not nearly as much as with competing processes.
Within a few years, the Bessemer process reduced the cost of steel by something like 85%. Most of that savings was a result of reduced coal usage.
> There's little to no coal in Italy.
Nor is there copper or tin. Cornwall was a significant source of tin during the Bronze Age, and was a significant part of the reason Rome invaded Britain. (there was accessible copper in Cyprus, just not in Italy itself.)
These "impurities" are mostly introduced into the mix in the blast furnace in the previous step in form of coal (coke). No coal, no pig iron, no converters.
The logistics of space -- not outer space, just, like distance -- are pretty damn tricky. Most of the time there is no way to deal with it other than "brute force" aka haul stuff long distances. Maybe you get a tunnel or pass through a mountain, maybe you get easy access to iron or oil, but otherwise you're a prisoner of logistics.
What's fairly freaky is that current transport cost ratios between modes of transportation are little changed from those of pre-industrial times. Land transport costs about 20x that of sea.
The principle differences are:
- Rail. Which is roughly the equivalent of a canal or waterway, though with higher speeds. About 1/2 as efficient as large-scale cargo ships.
- Air. Extraordinarly expensive, but fast. Also very effective at spreading disease.
The Romans were not good at adopting technology when they found it (conquered it). Seems they continued using oxen to pull loads when they had knowledge of horse collars. Would have doubled their 'speed of commerce'. Probably the inertia stemmed from being one of the worlds largest bureaucracies.
Oxen pull carts at 2mph, horses 3 or 4? So using horses could have had roughly the effect on commerce that steam trains had, or what FedEx did to business, you pick the analogy. Packages delivered in half the time; half the time spent on the road; cheaper (because the drover could deliver twice in a day) and on and on.
What gain is there in being able to do the trip twice if you carry less than half the amount? (Yeah, it's rhetoric, there is some gain, for some cargo, and loss for other cargo.)
IIRC there's a controversy around horse collars in history as most of the horse collars shown/found (I forget which) wouldn't work -- they apparently [would] strangle the horse.
Roman society was a slave society. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the economic differences between the American North and South. I suspect a similar comparison is fair between ancient slave states and Industrial Revolution countries (England, Northern State in pre-Civil War U.S.).
IMO that [Bessemer process] is really the sticking point that prevented the Ancient Romans from harnessing steam engines, and we had to wait until the early 18th century (1712ish) for the piston steam engine. The ancient romans did know of a rudimentary steam engine though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
The explanation I've always heard for why the Romans didn't industrialize had less to do with technology and more to do with economics. The Romans made extensive use of slave labor, so while they might have had the capacity to build engines and machines, there was simply no demand for anyone to do so -- why bother tinkering with machines when you can always just throw more slaves at your problems? Whereas in Britain slavery had mostly been confined to its colonies only, and the institution was abolished entirely between 1807 and 1833 -- the same period when industrialization really took off.
A similar effect could be seen in the different ways the American North and South evolved after independence -- the North, which didn't have slaves, industrialized, while the slaveholding South remained stubbornly agricultural right up to the Civil War.
The more expensive human muscle power becomes, the more attractive it becomes to replace muscles with machines. And a slave society is a society where muscle power will always be cheap.
That's a valid point, of course. However, abolition of slavery is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. Remember e.g. the Black Plague in Europe which led to a sharp increase in the value of human resources and caused some positive effects like the rise of free cities, powerful guilds of professionals, and the Renaissance of arts and sciences. However, things stopped short of an industrial revolution: it took some 3 or 4 centuries more to come around.
The Romans obviously made extensive use of technology, and their peers didn't advance much more quickly than they did, with the massive capitalization of slave and other labors. Nor did the vassal states within the "boundaries" that we find in history books.
As Christianity became popular, Rome started to free slaves. Later Rome was no longer a society based on slavery, rather early feudalism.
Rome was also short on population after multiple plagues and needed to focus more on food production, rather than having enough manpower to industrialize. After all, they couldn't even put up armies in the size they needed.
So at the time they could afford it, they were expanding or fighting civil wars, later they were scrambling to hold it together.
The main source for the large-scale applications of mechanical energy that were later powered by steam engines was animals, in ancient Rome just as in pre-industrial England. I've heard that argument before, no technological progress because of slavery, but it's widely oversold. Romans had water-powered grain mills, saw mills, and trip hammers, despite slavery. They did have some famous mine-dewatering systems that were human-powered (slaves), keywords: reverse overshot water wheel. Mind-dewatering has been the original use case for the steam engine, so it's quite likely that those installations are the inspiration for the "no technology because of slavery" argument.
Who is making the claim that the Romans didn't industrialize? They may not have gone through the industrial revolution, but I find the claim that they didn't have industrial output to be nonsensical/doubly when trying to connect the lack of a "full scale industrial revolution" to slavery, which is some weird myth that refuses to die.
Romans heavily implemented new processes for things such as mining, milling, and shipping. The slavery angle doesn't pass any form of smell test. If the claim is true, why would any society that ever had slavery ever do anything? Romans had waterwheels that drove machinery and used generated power to automate many aspects of their society.
Agreed, it's especially worth looking at particular examples of Roman industry, such as Las Medulas gold mines. That said, while we could assume that slavery angle wasn't ruling out industrialization entirely, it wasn't pushing towards it either.
I’ve heard it explained that every ‘great’ civilization has a ‘great’ energy source, and that slavery was Rome’s energy source. Much of especially the late Roman empires expansion and conquest can be seen through a lens of needing to capture more slaves. Not a historian, but I’ve heard that argument at least.
Far as I understand there are two issues. One is before coking was developed you couldn't use coal to produce iron. You needed to use charcoal from trees. Which Italy had a limited supply of. Iron production also competes with using wood as fuel and building supplies.
There is also a transportation problem. The inputs for steel manufacture are large. To be economic you needed fuel and ore in close proximity.
Sweden was a power house based on high quality iron ore deposits and vast pine forests. Which they cut down pretty much completely. I think India with fast growing tropical forests was also a large exporter of iron.
Britain initially had large forests and iron ore. But also huge reserves of coal almost on top of their ore deposits. That allowed them to keep going once the forests were gone.
It's an underappreciated irony that coal save the trees and the whales (coal gas supplanted whale oil at a time when whales were being hunted to extinction, deforestation in America was dramatically retarded after coal reduced the need for wood for charcoal).
Oil and gas are reducing our reliance on coal.
Barring some new discovery about energy sources, nuclear is probably the only thing that can appreciably reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
I think there are way too many technical problems related to transporting energy through the atmosphere, launch expense, and materials science to make any satellite based energy systems viable, but I’ve heard of some really cool concepts, like one that relies on dragging a tether and somehow harvesting huge amounts of energy to beam back to earth.
Does anyone know if those are as far off/unrealistic as they sound?
Large space-based solar installations are feasible, the only big problem is transmission of the power, usually proposed via laser or directed energy beam to the ground. That is technically feasible, but nobody has ever attempted to wirelessly transmit such high levels of sustained energy over long distances. Depending on the transmitter and receiver efficiencies and what wavelengths are used a lot of power could be lost and there are potential disasters like missing your target receiver with your energy beam, or interactions of the air with such a high powered beam, or EM 'pollution' from an imperfect transmitter.
As for something like tethering orbiting objects or the like, it is all still theoretical. A space elevator requires similar material technologies and nobody has found a way to feasibly build such a large, strong, and light tether or chain. But that isn't something I would expect to see any time soon.
I was thinking of a smaller electrodynamic tether that would be floating in space rather than anything anchored or as long as a space elevator. I’d assume the stresses would be significantly less/more feasible to overcome, but that’s a naive assumption. Maybe a power generating, floating electrodynamic tether would have to be similarly super long and strong to generate meaningful amounts of electricity; I know fairly little about them, but they sounded more plausible than a space elevator to me.
I guess I just don't understand where the generation capacity comes from that because it is trading kinetic energy into electrical but that kinetic energy has to come from somewhere or you will deorbit your anchor.
Although now that I think about it, you could potentially nudge a conveniently positioned space rock into a sacrificial eccentric orbit around earth and harvest energy off that ever time in skims by until it finally crashes down into the earth.
> When the tether intersects the planet's magnetic field, it generates a current, and thereby converts some of the orbiting body's kinetic energy to electrical energy. Functionally, electrons flow from the space plasma into the conductive tether, are passed through a resistive load in a control unit and are emitted into the space plasma by an electron emitter as free electrons. As a result of this process, an electrodynamic force acts on the tether and attached object, slowing their orbital motion. In a loose sense, the process can be likened to a conventional windmill- the drag force of a resistive medium (air or, in this case, the magnetosphere) is used to convert the kinetic energy of relative motion (wind, or the satellite's momentum) into electricity. In principle, compact high-current tether power generators are possible and, with basic hardware, tens, hundreds, and thousands of kilowatts appears to be attainable.
Maybe cosmic radiation interacting with the magnetosphere is adding to the "wind" in the analogy; not sure. Agree that the explanation makes it sound like you'd basically just be turning launch energy into electricity, which doesn't sound useful for generating power to send back to earth.
Nudging space rocks into orbit to generate electricity is a cool sounding idea. I've heard similar proposals for space mining if and when it becomes a thing just to make transporting the material a lot easier. Not sure how plausible that is either.
Regardless of what form it takes, I really hope we get some serious and practical space infrastructure at some point. I think having a practical reason to go into space beyond just gathering astronomical data and doing experiments will help keep space programs from stagnating. Plus it'd be super cool.
It's striking how wealthy Romans had running water in their homes, 2000 years ago, when my parents in rural Belgium (!), some sixty years ago, had to make do with wells and rain water. Even today, millions (billions?) of people don't have access to clean drinking water, let alone running water. We've come so far, yet not.
Only the wealthy had clean water delivered to their homes, but public fountains were actually widespread, clean and free. This was in many ways better than the American/European average until pretty recently.
Lead pipes are fine when the ph is the right level to create a barrier "passivization" layer within the pipe between the lead and the water. Rome's water's ph was naturally ok.
The issue with Flint was that they increased the acidity of the water by changing the water source, which removed that barrier.
Yes, acidity plays a role in it. No, Rome is not Flint, and --if you want to believe archeological evidence-- its water supply was NOT ok.
https://www.pnas.org/content/111/18/6594
How much of it was lined with lead vs terra cotta. Most traversal was on aqueducts which I don’t think typically were lined with lead, but I’d love to be corrected on that.
Distribution is a vastly underestimated economic problem. Of course, politics can be a major factor too, but I wouldn't assume that politics is the problem just because there is plenty in one place and scarcity in another.
Highest mortality was among infants and young children. Once you reached age 20, odds were quite good of living to 60. Elders of 80+ years were common.
These are data from England and Wales, 1700 to present, but would all but certainly have been similar for ancient Rome:
Kind of.... in antiquity (really anything more than 100-150 years ago), age of average mortality was dominated by deaths of the extremely young... but the reality is that people who did survive, often lived to their late 50s and early 60s.
Yep, if you survived childhood, you’d likely live long enough to see grandkids and ‘retire’ in Rome. In addition, a Roman army field medic/surgeon from the late republic/early empire onward was probably just as effective as any medic/doctor anywhere until the 19th century. Amputations, suturing lacerations, and so on didn’t really change at all until antiseptics and antibiotics.
It’s crazy to think how medicine didn’t really advance for ~2000 years, and then vaccinations, antiseptics, and anesthesia (and later antibiotics) came into use and medicine advanced rapidly. Oh, add in a dash of germ theory and the scientific method, and stir. The Romans were really quite amazing!
The plug insert looks remarkably well made. It looks to have been turned in a rather precise, if crude, lathe (look at the the detail of the groove). This is even more impressive if you think that the first real modern lathes only date from the late 18th century. The plug insert could've been moulded by some sort of near net shape method, but I doubt it (the top part of the plug seems to be much more rougher in nature). The pics are too low resolution to make a definitive judgement.
Fascinating, those granite pieces seem extraordinary even for today's technology. Of course "buried in the oldest of Egyptian pyramids" is the ultimate in survivorship bias... But they still made at least one of them.
The existence of "Valve Magazine" is slightly more so.