frogontrombone t1_ir05g5t wrote on October 4, 2022 at 11:39 AM

Reply to comment by BobbyP27 in Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? by Magister_Xehanort

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

BobbyP27 t1_ir0axo4 wrote on October 4, 2022 at 12:31 PM

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.

frogontrombone t1_ir0i55s wrote on October 4, 2022 at 1:30 PM

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.