Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

frogontrombone t1_iqy7b95 wrote

I teach the history of the industrial revolution in my engineering classes, and I was expecting technical gaps, but were not any. This was a great article.

The only thing I would add, and it is a corollary to the article's thesis, is that machine precision was not worked out until the industrial revolution. The early steam engines were next to useless and would have remained so if it were not for precision machining.

There were several key innovations that happened in quick succession that lead to precision machining, after centuries of research into them. First, the lathe completely transformed manufacturing because it allowed for precision screws, which allowed for precision measurement. At the same time, the straight line mechanism was essential for getting steam engines to hold any significant pressure, and the lathe was also modified to create the first precision cylindrical bore. All of this and more came together in the Watt-Bolton engine, which was the point at which steam power became widespread. The first flat plates were created not long after. And shortly after that, high precision lengths and weights. Exactly none of the industrial revolution could have not happened without major leaps in measurement, precision, and mechanisms.

But as I said, this is secondary to the articles thesis

Edit, wanted to add some sources for those interested. The Youtube channel "Machine Thinking" produces extremely accessible yet technically useful videos on the history of the industrial revolution. Highly recommend. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=machine+thinking

Edit 2: in particular, this video is most informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58&t=1493s

246

cambalaxo t1_iqychtt wrote

Very interesting . Thanks for your comment

24

boda_fett t1_iqywjd8 wrote

I smoked like a little bit of weed and then was reading this answer and soon realized that it blew my mind. Super interesting stuff, especially when you talk about the lathe. Never even considered how transformative it was.

19

Borazon t1_iqzinti wrote

I only missed a little bit more fleshed out argument about the possible usage of wind power. It in itself could have triggered a 'little industrial revolution'. Like we have in the Netherlands where it turned into a economic powerhouse in a short amount of time. That also required a perfect combination of factors, like England in this example. But those would have been more present in the Roman empire.

Btw, I love your argument about the requirements of machining and precision. I always made the same argument about why a blacksmith wouldn't be able to create a good motor block from scratch. And that this is one of the reasons you can't just 'skip' technologies.

The industrial revolution also enabled societies to create new forms (of metal), because it allowed for options to create higher forces, pressures, then ever before. It were great steam presses that enable making the plates for the Great Eastern, for example.

12

frogontrombone t1_ir03hg2 wrote

Great ways to put it with a blacksmith making an engineer block.

The part of the thesis i found so compelling was that Britain had a unique combination of resources and economics that presented creative pressure to invent that was not present otherwise. I think the Netherlands is a great counterpoint because even very inefficient windmills were enough to get the land reclamation done, so there was no creative or economic pressure to create precision pumps, for example.

To your point, I do think that the medieval use of wind and water turbines itself constitutes a "little industrial revolution", as these were not present to the same degree in antiquity.

5

Borazon t1_ir08jtr wrote

The little industrial revolution in the Netherlands was how wind energy was used to turn Zaandam, the region above Amsterdam into one of the premier shipbuilding facilities in the Netherlands, able to turn out 1 ship every two days. And it was likewise a combination of technological factors, geographical and historical factors that enabled it.

Geographical

  • Amsterdam's position was great for trade, for both Canal/Atlantic trade, trade via inland barges and most importantly, the Baltic sea routes.
  • Via the Baltic Amsterdam had access to lumber forests from Scandinavia (as the Netherlands never had much forests)

Technological

  • New ship designs like the Fluit which required fewer personal to man, meaning cheaper trade (at the max, half of the ships passing through the Kattegat at Denmark were Dutch)
  • New windmill innovation, in the crankshafts for transferring power and new designs for lumber cutting with reciprocating blades

​

and to truly create Amsterdam's golden century, lots of historical opportunities, among which:

  • the discovery of new sea routes to the indies
  • the availability of much manpower in the form of refugees from the 30 year war; the availability and knowledge of new forms of finance from rich Huguonets and Belgium refugees from the 80 year war both drawn in part by Amsterdam's religious freedoms.

Which allowed Amsterdam to turn the reliable Baltic trade into investments in the far east, in turn powering investment into the Netherlands and a golden age of arts. Do keep in mind that many of these sort of things interact with each other, similarly as in the English industrial revolution.

I'm both an Archeologist and a Mechanical engineering by education, so I always loved these kind of technological foundations to large cultural/historical changes.

3

Wintersbone7 t1_ir88yhr wrote

Don’t forget Jewish exiles from the Spanish Inquisition who brought much needed financial and other professional skills that helped monetize this industrial revolution

2

QueenOfGehenna45 t1_is6ssmr wrote

I thought the end of the cottage industry was a little bit later though?

1

BobbyP27 t1_iqzjeea wrote

Thanks for this post, it is interesting to see the steps needed and taken to allow modern type metalworking. I would, however, take issue with this being the necessary step to denote the beginning of the industrial revolution. Steam engines, albeit in less efficient formats, had existed for quite some time before Watt’s improvements, and those improvements came when they did because a requirement emerged to make improving the steam engine a problem that needed a solution rather than an interesting curiosity.

At it’s core the industrial revolution is taking what had been artisanal skilled craft based trades and using machinery to deskill them, allowing for a huge increase in volume and reduction in cost of production. The two milestone events in this were the opening of the Etruria pottery in 1769 and the Cromford Mill cotton mill in 1772.

Both of these events preceded the machining developments you describe by a few years, and I would suggest that it was these and similar developments in the factory system that showed the need for and motivated the improvements in machining technology, rather than the machining technology being the key enabler that you imply.

3

frogontrombone t1_ir05g5t wrote

I appreciate the pushback. I agree that Watts contribution was preconditioned on those earlier inventions and that the growth period preceded Watts engine by a few years.

In my mind, all tech is a continuum, and we choose events to mark beginnings of whatever taxonomy we lay on top to make sense of it. With Watt and Bolton, I see their engine as occupying a similar position to the industrial revolution as solid state transistors replacing vacuum tubes in the computing revolution. I see both as the point where the technologies took off because they were the first two to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude.

Case in point, the steam engines up through the 1940s were all incremental improvements of the Watt Bolton engine. By this, i mean the thermodynamic cycle remained unchanged after them and all future steam engines used the exact same thermodynamic configuration until the steam turbine became widespread in the early 20th century. In terms of thermodynamics, the difference between the watt engine and the ones even a year before was as stark as the first Macintosh personal PC and the ENIAC before it.

Im not disagreeing with you. Im memorializing a different milestone for different criteria

4

BobbyP27 t1_ir0axo4 wrote

I think your comparison with the information revolution is a good one. Programmable digital electronic computers did exist and were used based on tube technology, and while they did lay the foundations and get the ball rolling with the information revolution, without the solid state transistor (and later the integrated circuit), the full impact of the "Information Age" could not be achieved. In that sense, the early factories of the likes of Arkwright were a clear start on the path to intense industrialisation, but to realise the full potential required both powerful and efficient steam engines, and the ability to make the machinery they drove.

I would take issue with your comment that everything from Watt to the 1940s in steam engine technology was incremental, though. While James Watt built engines that were recognisably the ancestors of engines still in use in the mid C20th, Watt himself was vehemently opposed to "strong steam", all of his engines were based on a boiler at atmospheric pressure, expanding down to condenser vacuum.

When Trevithick tried to develop higher pressure boilers, Watt used the patent protections he had to effectively shut down this development, and it was only when those patents expired that positive boiler pressure engines, a necessary prerequisite for things like railway locomotives or ship engines, that progress resumed.

The other major thermodynamic advance was the use of superheated rather than saturated steam, a development that came in the later 19th century, and also significantly changed the thermodynamics of the steam engine.

For high pressure superheated steam to be used effectively, compound engines were a necessary development, and in terms of the efficient operation of steam engines, the development of the steam turbine by Charles Parsons was also a huge leap forward. In modern thermal power stations, high pressure superheated steam expanded through multiple turbines are still in use today.

As with anything as complicated as "the industrial revolution", it took multiple steps in terms of science, engineering, finance and supporting social and agricultural systems to all come together to enable the change to take place, and a case can be made for any one of these things being the trigger. An argument could be made, for example, that the invention of the limited liability joint stock company was actually the key enabler, as industrialisation on a large scale was impossible within the limits of the capital an individual person could raise, and the risk that a company with unlimited liability would pose.

4

frogontrombone t1_ir0i55s wrote

Fair points. I made my comments with steam locomotives in mind, but I appreciate the more comprehensive description.

And yes, when talking about the most complex economic and scientific revolutions, single factor explanations necessarily fall short. I tend to see technology as something akin to biological evolution, where economic and social pressures drive mathematics, science, and engineering. More generally, we can say "necessity is the mother of invention".

On this point, I often reflect on pre-Columbian copper culture in the Great Lakes region. The natives of that region never developed metallurgy because they didn't need to. They could literally bash out huge nuggets of pure copper straight from the rock and they already had access to lithic material that produced razor sharp edges that self-sharpened with use. They had no pressure to develop for harder metals than copper. Despite their use of the metal, their use of it was a stone age tech, not a bronze age one. I find it a striking example of a people who were highly intelligent, sophisticated, and advanced, but didn't have the need for metallurgy, and thus never put effort toward it. It really reinforces for me the role of external factors in preconditioning and driving technological innovations.

3

Rainbike80 t1_iqzd3n4 wrote

Have you read The Perfectionist's? It's a great book and covers the early history of precision.

Fantastic read!

2

MoogTheDuck t1_iqzxhwn wrote

Thanks for this, great addendum. As an aside I love acoup

2

fuckfrankieoliver t1_ir15u62 wrote

I have a bachelors in ME and did not learn any of this, now I’m sad :(

1

frogontrombone t1_ir2c9zw wrote

lol, sorry to hear that. On the bright side, lifetime of learning, right? :D

I cover it so students feel some sense of their professional "heritage" and to motivate why we care about planar mechanisms at all in the age of mechatronics. And my class is very demanding, so it's a "sit back and enjoy it" lecture to give them a breather.

1