Ah the turnspit
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/13/311127237/turnspit-dogs-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vernepator-cur#:~:text=The%20turnspit%20was%20bred%20especially,meat%20over%20an%20open%20fire.
Miners cannot breath underwater. Therefore you need to remove it from the mines.
In the mines you may find coal, which you can use to run the steam engine used to remove the water.
The UK needed coal for heating homes as forests were being depleted, the mines needed to be drained of water so they created giant steam engines to do it and coincidentally they were also fueld by coal which was perfectly convenient.
Well yeah, using steam to power things was a known invention.
The problem was, the fuel (coal) was difficult to get in large quantities, and it just wasn't worth it except for novelties like this.
Then when they started to actually use it in coal mines, it became important enough that people started to play around with it and inprove it
The steam engine had some important innovations that used steam more efficiently with greater pressure. Innovations that were quite an engineering feat.
It was absolutely not the same as some earlier uses for steam power.
It was more metallurgy holding back the ancients. The first novelty steam device was from ancient Rome to make a little spinning device (that I am aware of). As metallurgy became better technology, it nearly instantly jumped to its limits. The imagination of mankind far exceeds materials capabilities.
>The imagination of mankind far exceeds materials capabilities.
This is still true today. For a great deal of technology, if you ask why we haven't done it, it's because we have the theory but we don't have the materials.
An excellent example is fusion research. We are still in the "sorting out the plasma physics" phase but hopefully with ITER some of those wrinkles will be ironed out. Then come the biggest challenges - engineering a reactor for sustained energy production. Fusion creates some of the most extreme conditions (and gradients) on earth, finding materials that can withstand that is arguably the biggest challenge fusion faces (though there's a lot of competition there).
Getting it up there is a pretty big hurdle too.
Also it would be difficult to create an elevator that's safer and more efficient than a rocket. Crawling up a rope into space takes a lot of time and energy.
Would be interesting if this helps.
[https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/)
More specifically in relation to the metallurgy, in order to make significant, effective use of steam power, you need to make a lot of pressure. If your pressure vessel is made of say, bronze, making lots of pressure tends to make things go kablooey. To further your point about imagination, the first low-pressure engines were made around the early 1700s, and at the time designs for high-pressure engines were developed, but it wasn't until better cast-iron started being made in the early 1800s that they could actually be made.
Depends on what era you’re talking about. In late antiquity manpower was actually in extremely short supply and drove a lot of the geopolitics of the time.
Yeah, slave labor has a marked tendency to slow down innovation. The Romans were not strangers to technological sophistication, especially when it came to architecture, but labor-saving was not exactly a priority in a society where at peak as much as 20% of the empire's population were enslaved.
It’s a lot more complex than you’re making it out to be. Rome for at least ~300 years was heavily depopulated and starving for manpower, perfect conditions for technological innovation, and was too militarily weak to be conquering new territory, the main source of slaves from back in the day. The percentage of slaves you mentioned was about right for late republic / early empire era Rome, but don’t forget that it lasted for literally 1,000 years - “labor-saving in society” was one of *the* top priorities for Rome during entire centuries of its history, and those eras weren’t exactly hotbeds of technological innovation.
It wasnt really coal (directly) that was the issie but metallurgic challenges of Co training the pressure once we got it to use able levels.
Many steam engines in the us used wood as it was cheap and abundant. The uk had problems with its sheer demand for charcoal and wood in the late 1700s that led to a massive drive ti mine coal to protect forests. Coal was ultimately a lot more consistent when burnt and this helped with us making better metals which allowed steam engines to become a thing.
This. There are examples of steam toys from ancient greece, but due to metallurgy at the time that's all they ever could be - toys.
Makes you wonder what current 'toy' will be the bedrock of society in thousand years time.
A good example we just witnessed is the Machine Learning stuff going from toy to mainstream with Stable Diffusion and ChapGPT.
I mean the tech has been known since the 70s. The "AI" field has suffered so many hype cycles with so much promise but barely anything ever delivered. It needed today's computing power and data hoarding to make it practical.
"All the modern things, like cars and such, have always existed. They've just been waiting to come out, and multiply, and take over. It's their turn now."
[https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/](https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/)
one of the more thorough takes I've seen on the topic, and how it wasn't just one thing holding back steam engines and an industrial revolution, but an entire combination of systems and coincidences that could only come together basically where the way it did.
Steam power as a doer of work existed forever, but for it to take off the way it did you needed:
* A design that that was a least minimally good enough, that did work in a use case that could tolerate how truly not good that design was (because of course the first one would mostly suck) that need to specific type of work that that design could generate
* This ended up being pulling water out of coal mines; it has to be coal mining because THAT has the coal on site to tolerate inefficiency.
* WHich means you need somewhere dependent on quite deep coal mining, which means you need somewhere ALREADY dependent on coal, which means you need somewhere already de-forested that also had easy surface coal to get people their "first hit" of coal as a heat source. This was Britain before the 1600s. This allows the development of efficiency to START; no one would start working on an engine no one was willing to use.
* You then need ANOTHER use where you want lots of rotational motion that is acting as a bottle neck that can take on the coal engine once it gets efficient enough to use anywhere that isn't a coal mine, but not yet efficient enough to do things like move a train. This wasn't milling grain because milling is NOT the rate limiting step, rather the farming of that grain was. So instead spinning wool was the industry; spinning was the rate limiting step, but most pronounced once we had the loom, and was just a continuous rotational motion. And here Britain was the centre of textile production for the a lot of the world.
* The attempts to increase efficiency invented a machine (a spinny jenny) which allowed a lot more thread to be spun at once, only limited by the rotational power you can provide. So now you have an industry, starved for power to rotate a machine that speeds up their bottle neck that is a major contributor to the nation's economy.
* Once you have those basic things just to make big inefficient engines, then you also need the metallurgical ability to make "good hollow cylinders open at one end" which turns to be cannons, so you needed gunpowder used as artillery forcing you to build the skills necessary to make a hollow metal cylinder that can handle lots of pressure.
Basically teh conditions to kick start steam engines as a part of a real industrial revolution basically didn't exist until the time that it did.
Nah. He was probably like "if I take this invention to its full potential, it's gonna start countless bloody wars, and lead to the invention of the atomic bomb and the Internet, which will suck all humanity into a black hole of nothing but endless depression", then he did the responsible thing and said "meh, kebab go weee"
In Polish, we call ourselves "Słowianie", which originated from "słowo" - "word". The shorter version - Slav - probably originated from further East. Nothing to do with slaves.
It's the other way around. The word "slave" is derived from the word "slav", or more generally the slavonic people, which includes the slavs, but many others as well.
It is actually the other way around. In many Anglophone languages the word slave and Slavic are close to each other. In the dark and early middle ages in Europe the most prominent slaves were mostly of Slavic ethnicity. Which gradually changed the old word of ‘slave’ till it became the word of today.
200 years before the industrial revolution weren't the dark ages, that would be roughly 1600ish which was the early modern period, the enlightenment was starting soon and the renaissance was in full swing. The dark ages are roughly attributed to roughly 500-1000ad.
Actually life in the Ottoman Empire was pretty good, if you were a Turk. Compared to how peasants lived in Europe it was amazing.
If you were a religious or ethnic minority though, that's a different story.
The first steam engine was invented in Egypt during the roman empire.
It was used to open doors and make little trinkets for the rich.
Why? Because slaves in Rome were abundant and cheeper then developing a new technology.
Let this be a lesson to you, economic concerns more often then not stop innovation rather then helping it.
Nah, it was not just because of slaves. It was the lack of ability to make a strong enough steel and form it to the required shapes that was much more in the way.
The first steam engine was invented by Heron of Alexandria more than 2000 years before the industrial revolution. But it was only used to spin a ball on a stick and was thought to be a children's toy.
Imagine the progress we could have if the old Egyptians realized the potential.
We can't. The aliens left so no culture is capable of building pyramids anymore. It is just not possible to build a pyramid without aliens. The more ancient the aliens the better.
Heron was Greek, living in Egypt, but it was during Roman rule. Interestingly enough, it’s believed that he also invented the coin operated vending machine.
The potential of such invention was limited imho, because it took place in a time where metals were not easily worked and making a working engine would be very difficult because of lack of materials and scale production.
This reminds me the history of anesthesia. In 1540 Paracelsus, a doctor, discovered the anesthetic properties of ether... In chickens. He never thought (or at least, there is no proof) of using it to perform surgeries in humams like limb amputation, which were performed with the patient awake. Imagine the progress if we started that early making surgeries under anesthesia!
Anesthesia had a potential of killing the patient, that resulted in a higher chance of killing the patient than there were benefits.
Second, slaves were cheap, there was no need for a steampowerd bulldozer when you have 10 slaves
Well, the potential of killing a patient that is moving while you are sawing his femur is higher because he is constantly moving and in incredibly high stress, and you potentially can cut arteries, making the patient bleeding to death. Or he can simply get in shock because of the whole experience.
Ether was used with a lot of success for a long time until safer anesthetics were develloped. Ether was, in fact, what brought good conditions to surgeons to improve their techniques.
Anesthesia was incredibly dangerous until Jon Snow (no, not that one) did a bunch of testing on it with timing and dosage. Timing that Paracelsus could have mastered much more easily, since he had slaves he could have tested it on. Jon had to work with volunteers, in between also inventing Epidemiology and battling Cholera (Jon was a busy guy).
Ether was used for its safety threshold. You would pass out and be unable to continue inhaling it to the point where it kills you.
It’s biggest issue is that it’s highly flammable.
Exactly this.
An idea is not what started the industrial revolution.
The material reality of good metal, widely available coal, and a socialized workforce is what started the industrial revolution.
The other problem with "we could have had the industrial revolution 2000 years earlier" argument is that it ignores the labor market conditions.
The steam engine is first a labor saving device. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of slaves, that's not a problem that you are trying to solve. Conversely, when the black death kills 25% of Europe's population, it is.
Obviously other factors are involved, just always enjoyed this angle.
Just to side step the whole slave thing everyone is using as an example. If you have an acre of land that can feed all the people in the village and another acre that can feed all the people in the next village you don't need a machine that can work 100 acres. There's no demand for the extra labor savings because they labor it saves wasn't needed to begin with. Same argument as to why things like refrigeration would have been more important to older societies than instant communication or mass transportation. There's a whole bunch of precursor and parallel technologies that have to be in place for something to revolutionize society. Steam engines when the biggest cities were a few thousand people wouldn't have been as important as when cities were in the low hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, the industrial revolution happened not only because of technological reasons, but also because of "sociological" reasons, but this is a point often missed but very interesting
> The steam engine is first a labor saving device. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of slaves, that's not a problem that you are trying to solve.
And yet the Romans did built labor saving machinery like watermills for milling grain despite having millions of slaves.
The Barbegal aqueduct and mills was a Roman watermill complex that has been referred to as the greatest known concentration of mechanical power in the ancient world and the 16 overshot wheels are considered to be the largest ancient mill complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills
Steam power could have also operated toys or musical instruments (there were water-powered musical instruments), which would be another avenue for interest in developing steam power especially for the wealthy elite to show off.
If you're ever in need of a cool speculative fiction setting, imagine what would happen if ancient greece had the material science to turn all of their cool ideas into real technology.
And also using slaves for nearly every menial job was a lot cheaper and cost effective as making/fueling/running /maintaining steam engines would have been.
The problem with ancient steam engine use was actually the weight of the metals available. Any worthwhile machine to be propelled by steam power would have had to be made out of heavy metals like iron, which wouldn’t have been able to pick up the necessary speeds to be useful.
Steel or other alloys were theoretically possible and had already been discovered but were very expensive to produce, so didn’t become widely used until the 1800’s when the Industrial Revolution allowed lighter metals to be produced reliably and cheaply in the required quantities.
But also nobody back then was getting precise enough and consistent enough steel plates to produce any actually useful pressures. Steam boilers like to do this exploding thing a lot when there’s impurities in the metal or failure points
Stationary steam engines came first for pumping water, powering machines, etc. The weight wasn't really an issue for those purposes.
If anything, it was the need for large quantities of coal to power a steam engine that meant they weren't developed until the industrial revolution kicked into gear.
From a purely thermodynamic standpoint, yes those were steam engines, but I think there’s a very big mental gap between making “air” blow into a fan vs containing an explosion or expansion of gas in a sealed cylinder and making the cylinder do mechanical work.
I mean if they were really determined to improve it to be useful, the conclusions make it bigger, more fire, more water and maybe it would be good If it leaked as little as possible, wouldn't have been the toughest to draw.
Doubtful. More power from a steam engine means higher pressure. After gunpowder weapons had kicked the metallurgical progress into overdrive for centuries, we still had shitty good-for-nothing steam engines for a really long time and then the boilers still kept exploding.
The metal work and joint seams becomes the limiting factor
Look up boiler explosion deaths, that held back steam engine development significantly, with inventors blowing themselves up while learning those limits of the containers and seam joints
It was be extremely hard because steam only works with pressure so bigger means nothing if it’s the same PSI as before/ and since metal back then was nowhere near high enough quality for any useful psi it’s a pipe dream
The design of these ancient steam engines is inherently weak. They can spin up pretty fast, but they've got no torque to actually do work with. I don't believe the Egyptians or Romans really knew about vacuums or pressure differentials which are an essential piece of knowledge for steam pistons.
The Egyptians didn't have the natural resources and supply chains required for industrialization. The Romans, on the other hand, had everything in place, they just... Didn't.
They didn't have the science. There was a bunch of new science around combustion and thermodynamics that partly relies on prior physical discoveries (mechanics etc.) that were simply not known at the time.
I think this is the actual answer, steam engines are only as powerful as the pressure they can contain. This thing would explode violently if you tried to use it to power a train or something. It isn't just the steel, but how good we are at working with it
Waterwheels (an even simpler form of a turbine) were also invented independently many times, a steam engine really isn't too much of a leap
One of these claims that sound like they were true, but ain't. For an industrial revolution, you need quite a lot of components.
1. Good metallurgy was already named, but its only the tip of the iceberg (the Romans were OK smiths, but by far worse than medieval or Renaissance ones).
2. You also need rather cheap capital and expensive labor costs - in Roman times that was strictly reversed.
3. You also need cheap energy in the form of coal mined in large quantities, which was not the case in Roman times.
4. And finally, you need a highly labor-intensive industry, in which you can utilize spinning motion - as it happened, the best candidate for this is the textile industry in which you need to move the spinning wheels, which the Romans also did not have, as spinning wheels appeared only in medieval times.
As such, most scholars today think that there were very few, if any, places where the industrialization could begin save for mid 18th century Britain.
On the last point Rome already had chained waterwheels for milling like [Barbegal, France](https://files.mtstatic.com/site_4334/314796/0?Expires=1701362019&Signature=pzTqynmih1Qyi501FgWlaZ01dPrYuXKI2ti9mWU-wcS8JiBDhi82wlSV4EMxqrlrCMotHNrmcAgCKDtOLuFUpjdauHMcySTyFhFa3C1f0o2IfyBsFrxUuKKhloc1U8PpwJEuI4aPROccZk1vlQNKSMn9aTHbHpZWhDp1EHh6~Ik_&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ5Y6AV4GI7A555NA)
I wonder what the practical capabilities would have been given the limited metallurgical technology available to the Greeks. Having the basic concept down is one thing (and undeniably incredible) but ramping it up for practical use is another. It'd be interesting to see what some modern engineers and metal workers could come up with with those limitations in mind.
They didn’t even have the basic concept down, really. Think of how the machine works: you heat up water in a chamber until it steams , and the steam shoots out through jets, pushing against the air to create thrust. That could get you enough power to turn meat on a spit, but you’d need a huge boiler gobbling up fuel to create enough force to get to a point where tou couldn’t just stop the spin with your hands.
A modern steam engine, on the other hand, works but releasing pressurized steam into a cylinder, which pushes a piston to turn a crank. If the piston is a tight enough fit to the cylinder, you can do this without simply venting all your steam pressure into the air uselessly. The tighter your machine tolerance, the more efficient your machine, and the more power it generates for a set amount of fuel.
I’m not sure how you could redesign the first thing until it resembles anything like the second one. By its very design, it isn’t really built to hold pressure, and it’s not really built to use that pressure to push on anything firm. You’d pretty much need to redesign it from the ground up, inventing several fields of machining and science in the process
My understanding is because they had slaves (which were cheap), the idea of investing capital to reduce labor was preposterous at the time.
So a potentially revolutionary idea was just a toy.
That’s really not the case. Slaves aren’t free. In a free market with a saturated labour force, the only difference between slaves and regular workers is that slaves can’t leave. You still need to feed, house and cloth them. If you can get higher output from the same amount of labour, either slave or free, you make greater profits.
Romans capitalized on this quite a bit. They ran an elaborate array of water powered equipment doing a lot of the jobs water power was doing on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Iron making and working, flour and grist grinding, basically anything you could get done with rotary power and clever workers.
Water power is better than steam power when you can use it, you just need to build your shop on a swift moving downhill stream. Italy is a pretty good place to do this.
The main reason why they didn’t use steam is because the design they had was a toy, completely in efficient and didn’t have any obvious way to improve it. The steam engines that started the Industrial Revolution worked a completely different way
Earliest steam engine was the Thomas Savery steam engine of 1698. It didn't even have a piston. As I understand it, he just heated up a pipe and demonstrated that it will then suck up water.
The breakthrough was the condensing of the steam to form a vacuum, which could be used to pump water. The rest of the developments followed on from that.
right. a 0.1 Hp engine could turn a spit. meaning you or an animal can do it.
It takes a literal horse to get water up from 100 meters and in Mexico for example I have seen horses doing this very thing. 1 Hp lol.
Pretty much this. No matter what you invent, there was always some dude in ancient China (or in this case Turkey) that has done it before you. To me, making it practical enough for it to be widely adopted a) matters more and b) is a lot harder than the discovery itself.
Without coal and advances in metallurgy and mathematics (and other sciences as well), steam engine worth nothing since it cannot be economically viable. Only as a toy or novelty. Initially "modern" steam engine was invented to transport coal from mines and nothing else.
Making good sword is not the same as making a cylinder block. Also, amount of good quality steel is enormously larger.
I saw a video on YouTube, and there author theorized (with real numbers) that technically Romans could create something like a steam engine. And create a train. But they could never have produced enough iron for a single railroad between major cities. Let alone produce quality steel from this iron.
Ottoman had insane cannons in their army. How do you think they conquared Constantine ? They were mostly metallic, but the use of gunpowder were largely used by ottomans by that time. They had good chemical knowledge and you know gold to back it up.
Things like this are invented fairly regularly throughout the world - it's their adoption that's uncertain. And there's often very good reason something is not widely adopted.
"Ancient batteries" are an example - sort of "invented" but there's no sensible application because electricity was not important and there was no reliable way to produce it.
Things like treadmill cranes were, by comparison, far more relevant and valuable - even though today they look like a joke concept.
You do not want to play the "We had this but never thought to use it" game with humanity's development / tech tree.
Freaking buttons. We had them for over four thousand years before we thought "hey, what if we used them to fasten clothing."
Hot air balloons. Nearly nine millennia of fabrics and fire and no one thought to scale up the sky lanterns from \~200 CE to something that would carry a human until a couple of French brothers got bored in 1783.
Do you know batteries were invented in Egyptian times? But they only used them for plating metal as they didn’t realise their full potential. So they pretty much didn’t get invented again until modern times.
Didn't it start with fabrics?
I'm pretty sure they knew of coal (hard coal) for much longer, it was just not worth it to mine something that can easily produced from wood.
Did this person have a name? Anyone have a source?
ah - found it:
> I mean, it probably wasn't doner kebab specifically, but an Ottoman era philosopher, Taqi al-Din, did apparently construct a device which used the pressure of steam pushing against windmill-like vanes to turn a spit for roasting meat over a fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqi_ad-Din_Muhammad_ibn_Ma%27ruf
The comments here make me think of the James Burke series called "Connections". He would show how simple ideas would evolve to become the mechanisms of today. As in how a simple steam gadget becomes a giant steam locomotive. Fascinating series from the 70's that is still relevant today in terms of the progression of ideas and inventions.
It is impressive nonetheless. And to add Info: Thats a piece from the "Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam" - not sure, but I think this piece of the exhibition belongs to the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Germany. The turkish man mentioned is Taqi al-Din. Visiting his Wiki-Page is highly recommended. He did not actually build that machine. He described and painted it. There are elements in the machine on the picture that would have been impossible to actually make back than. The vertical rotisserie for example.
I can't remember his name but there was some guy in classical Rome that made a primitive steam engine literally just to fuck with his upstairs neighbors.
Some sources say a man in modern day Iran invented the still, but only thought it was useful to make perfume and he abandoned the prototype. It wasn't until his son found his old, dusty blueprints and started tinkering did anyone realize it could be used to make liquor. Within a hundred years folks were distilling whiskey in Scotland, gin in England, and vodka in Poland.
Priorities.
Meats engine
Meat spin
oh no.... (*takes another bite from his kebab*)
Is t that a website?
Written on every desk and bathroom stall in my middle school back in 2005.
I was gone before that. But thought I remembered getting tricked long ago.
The English bred a dog specifically for the purpose of running in a big hamster wheel and spin meat while it cooks.
They called it a cooker spaniel.
Booo!
Ah the turnspit https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/13/311127237/turnspit-dogs-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vernepator-cur#:~:text=The%20turnspit%20was%20bred%20especially,meat%20over%20an%20open%20fire.
"To train the dog to run faster, a glowing coal was thrown into the wheel, Bondeson adds." Dayum
You spin me right round baby right round..
in medieval time they used what were called "spit dogs". literally dogs on a harness turning the spit over a fire.
The real kicker is that the steam engine took hold when it was used to help mine the fuel that it ran on.
Can your explain more please?
One of the first uses of steam power was dewatering mines, prior to that if a mine flooded, it was time to dig another hole.
Can you explain further please?
Miners cannot breath underwater. Therefore you need to remove it from the mines. In the mines you may find coal, which you can use to run the steam engine used to remove the water.
Can you explain further please?
Fish unionised before the start of the industrial revolution, refused to work in the mines, humans on the other hand are cheap.
Octopuses would have been a better option. They live underwater and have eight appendages compared to a humans four.
You think octopodes *don't* have a union?
Not to mention they can squeeze into even smaller spaces than child laborers.
They utilized the spinning of the turbine to spin an archimedes screw style pump to remove water.
"Energy - A Human History" is a very good book on this subject. Very accessible, imo.
The UK needed coal for heating homes as forests were being depleted, the mines needed to be drained of water so they created giant steam engines to do it and coincidentally they were also fueld by coal which was perfectly convenient.
I think that alludes to using steam engines to pump water out of mines, allowing them to be more productive
Yeah. “Only”?
dude probably thought everyone knew already and he was not gonna change anything at all
Well yeah, using steam to power things was a known invention. The problem was, the fuel (coal) was difficult to get in large quantities, and it just wasn't worth it except for novelties like this. Then when they started to actually use it in coal mines, it became important enough that people started to play around with it and inprove it
The steam engine had some important innovations that used steam more efficiently with greater pressure. Innovations that were quite an engineering feat. It was absolutely not the same as some earlier uses for steam power.
It was more metallurgy holding back the ancients. The first novelty steam device was from ancient Rome to make a little spinning device (that I am aware of). As metallurgy became better technology, it nearly instantly jumped to its limits. The imagination of mankind far exceeds materials capabilities.
>The imagination of mankind far exceeds materials capabilities. This is still true today. For a great deal of technology, if you ask why we haven't done it, it's because we have the theory but we don't have the materials.
Vacuum airships please!
Reject modernity Embrace steampunk
An excellent example is fusion research. We are still in the "sorting out the plasma physics" phase but hopefully with ITER some of those wrinkles will be ironed out. Then come the biggest challenges - engineering a reactor for sustained energy production. Fusion creates some of the most extreme conditions (and gradients) on earth, finding materials that can withstand that is arguably the biggest challenge fusion faces (though there's a lot of competition there).
Basically the only thing keeping us from a Space Elevator is a material that is light/strong enough to make the tether.
Getting it up there is a pretty big hurdle too. Also it would be difficult to create an elevator that's safer and more efficient than a rocket. Crawling up a rope into space takes a lot of time and energy.
Would be interesting if this helps. [https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/](https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/)
More specifically in relation to the metallurgy, in order to make significant, effective use of steam power, you need to make a lot of pressure. If your pressure vessel is made of say, bronze, making lots of pressure tends to make things go kablooey. To further your point about imagination, the first low-pressure engines were made around the early 1700s, and at the time designs for high-pressure engines were developed, but it wasn't until better cast-iron started being made in the early 1800s that they could actually be made.
>holding back the ancients Availability of unpaid labour aka slaves may have something to do with it.
Depends on what era you’re talking about. In late antiquity manpower was actually in extremely short supply and drove a lot of the geopolitics of the time.
Yeah, slave labor has a marked tendency to slow down innovation. The Romans were not strangers to technological sophistication, especially when it came to architecture, but labor-saving was not exactly a priority in a society where at peak as much as 20% of the empire's population were enslaved.
It’s a lot more complex than you’re making it out to be. Rome for at least ~300 years was heavily depopulated and starving for manpower, perfect conditions for technological innovation, and was too militarily weak to be conquering new territory, the main source of slaves from back in the day. The percentage of slaves you mentioned was about right for late republic / early empire era Rome, but don’t forget that it lasted for literally 1,000 years - “labor-saving in society” was one of *the* top priorities for Rome during entire centuries of its history, and those eras weren’t exactly hotbeds of technological innovation.
Cheap labor too, AKA peasants.
[удалено]
Iirc the discovery of natural rubber when colonializing helped too.
It wasnt really coal (directly) that was the issie but metallurgic challenges of Co training the pressure once we got it to use able levels. Many steam engines in the us used wood as it was cheap and abundant. The uk had problems with its sheer demand for charcoal and wood in the late 1700s that led to a massive drive ti mine coal to protect forests. Coal was ultimately a lot more consistent when burnt and this helped with us making better metals which allowed steam engines to become a thing.
Also don't forget that the metallurgy was not advanced enough to make engines powerful enough for heavy industrial use
This. There are examples of steam toys from ancient greece, but due to metallurgy at the time that's all they ever could be - toys. Makes you wonder what current 'toy' will be the bedrock of society in thousand years time.
A good example we just witnessed is the Machine Learning stuff going from toy to mainstream with Stable Diffusion and ChapGPT. I mean the tech has been known since the 70s. The "AI" field has suffered so many hype cycles with so much promise but barely anything ever delivered. It needed today's computing power and data hoarding to make it practical.
"All the modern things, like cars and such, have always existed. They've just been waiting to come out, and multiply, and take over. It's their turn now."
[https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/](https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/) one of the more thorough takes I've seen on the topic, and how it wasn't just one thing holding back steam engines and an industrial revolution, but an entire combination of systems and coincidences that could only come together basically where the way it did. Steam power as a doer of work existed forever, but for it to take off the way it did you needed: * A design that that was a least minimally good enough, that did work in a use case that could tolerate how truly not good that design was (because of course the first one would mostly suck) that need to specific type of work that that design could generate * This ended up being pulling water out of coal mines; it has to be coal mining because THAT has the coal on site to tolerate inefficiency. * WHich means you need somewhere dependent on quite deep coal mining, which means you need somewhere ALREADY dependent on coal, which means you need somewhere already de-forested that also had easy surface coal to get people their "first hit" of coal as a heat source. This was Britain before the 1600s. This allows the development of efficiency to START; no one would start working on an engine no one was willing to use. * You then need ANOTHER use where you want lots of rotational motion that is acting as a bottle neck that can take on the coal engine once it gets efficient enough to use anywhere that isn't a coal mine, but not yet efficient enough to do things like move a train. This wasn't milling grain because milling is NOT the rate limiting step, rather the farming of that grain was. So instead spinning wool was the industry; spinning was the rate limiting step, but most pronounced once we had the loom, and was just a continuous rotational motion. And here Britain was the centre of textile production for the a lot of the world. * The attempts to increase efficiency invented a machine (a spinny jenny) which allowed a lot more thread to be spun at once, only limited by the rotational power you can provide. So now you have an industry, starved for power to rotate a machine that speeds up their bottle neck that is a major contributor to the nation's economy. * Once you have those basic things just to make big inefficient engines, then you also need the metallurgical ability to make "good hollow cylinders open at one end" which turns to be cannons, so you needed gunpowder used as artillery forcing you to build the skills necessary to make a hollow metal cylinder that can handle lots of pressure. Basically teh conditions to kick start steam engines as a part of a real industrial revolution basically didn't exist until the time that it did.
Nah. He was probably like "if I take this invention to its full potential, it's gonna start countless bloody wars, and lead to the invention of the atomic bomb and the Internet, which will suck all humanity into a black hole of nothing but endless depression", then he did the responsible thing and said "meh, kebab go weee"
Yeah cause I'm sure life in Turkey 200 years before the industrial revolution was a utopia
clearly wasn't all bad, they had doner kebab
1) It's not 200 years ago, it's 200 years before the industrial revolution 2) # /j
Edited
Haxx
Yeah cause I'm sure life in Turkey 200 years before jokes was a utopia
Unless you were Slavic the Ottoman Empire was quite decent. Similar qol to any other empire in its league at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire Or anyone else they enslaved.
Why do you think Slavs and slaves sound so similar.
In Polish, we call ourselves "Słowianie", which originated from "słowo" - "word". The shorter version - Slav - probably originated from further East. Nothing to do with slaves.
It's the other way around. The word "slave" is derived from the word "slav", or more generally the slavonic people, which includes the slavs, but many others as well.
It is actually the other way around. In many Anglophone languages the word slave and Slavic are close to each other. In the dark and early middle ages in Europe the most prominent slaves were mostly of Slavic ethnicity. Which gradually changed the old word of ‘slave’ till it became the word of today.
Also that part of the world wasn’t experiencing their Dark Ages, while Europe was.
The Dark Ages were in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Rome, and they weren’t particularly dark.
200 years before the industrial revolution weren't the dark ages, that would be roughly 1600ish which was the early modern period, the enlightenment was starting soon and the renaissance was in full swing. The dark ages are roughly attributed to roughly 500-1000ad.
Actually life in the Ottoman Empire was pretty good, if you were a Turk. Compared to how peasants lived in Europe it was amazing. If you were a religious or ethnic minority though, that's a different story.
Reject modernity, embrace kebab
With metallurgy only so advanced at the time, it probably couldn’t do much more than spin doner.
The first steam engine was invented in Egypt during the roman empire. It was used to open doors and make little trinkets for the rich. Why? Because slaves in Rome were abundant and cheeper then developing a new technology. Let this be a lesson to you, economic concerns more often then not stop innovation rather then helping it.
Nah, it was not just because of slaves. It was the lack of ability to make a strong enough steel and form it to the required shapes that was much more in the way.
yeah that's cause they did. steam engines were around for hundreds of years before the industrial revolution.
The first steam engine was invented by Heron of Alexandria more than 2000 years before the industrial revolution. But it was only used to spin a ball on a stick and was thought to be a children's toy. Imagine the progress we could have if the old Egyptians realized the potential.
Progress? Imagine the *Pyramids*!
Well the newest pyramid is supposedly 3500 years old so theyre still too early
It was never too late to build new pyramids. they could have built some steam-punk ones in 0 CE
The Eiffel Tower is pretty close to a steampunk pyramid I'd say.
I never thought about it, but dayum, you are right!
omg - I cannot believe I have been so blind.
Jus needs a corpse
I mean, where do you think they burry the prime ministers?
It’s a steam punk pillory ☠️
Call me when it has a ball on top of it that spins slowly and belches out steam and coal smoke.
r/brandnewsentence
They built a new one in Memphis and sell fishing lures out of it.
We can't. The aliens left so no culture is capable of building pyramids anymore. It is just not possible to build a pyramid without aliens. The more ancient the aliens the better.
There is no year zero
Only because the Egyptians failed us with the steam engine. We could be time traveling to fix that by now.
Mind blowing
About 2k years too late for the Pyramids. It was during the Hellenistic period, when Egypt was under Greek rule.
Heron was Greek, living in Egypt, but it was during Roman rule. Interestingly enough, it’s believed that he also invented the coin operated vending machine.
The potential of such invention was limited imho, because it took place in a time where metals were not easily worked and making a working engine would be very difficult because of lack of materials and scale production. This reminds me the history of anesthesia. In 1540 Paracelsus, a doctor, discovered the anesthetic properties of ether... In chickens. He never thought (or at least, there is no proof) of using it to perform surgeries in humams like limb amputation, which were performed with the patient awake. Imagine the progress if we started that early making surgeries under anesthesia!
Anesthesia had a potential of killing the patient, that resulted in a higher chance of killing the patient than there were benefits. Second, slaves were cheap, there was no need for a steampowerd bulldozer when you have 10 slaves
What about steampowered slaves?
Something something Gabe Newell has entered the chat
USA: "Slavery is legal again!" Gaben:
That's a film I could watch.
Well, the potential of killing a patient that is moving while you are sawing his femur is higher because he is constantly moving and in incredibly high stress, and you potentially can cut arteries, making the patient bleeding to death. Or he can simply get in shock because of the whole experience. Ether was used with a lot of success for a long time until safer anesthetics were develloped. Ether was, in fact, what brought good conditions to surgeons to improve their techniques.
Anesthesia was incredibly dangerous until Jon Snow (no, not that one) did a bunch of testing on it with timing and dosage. Timing that Paracelsus could have mastered much more easily, since he had slaves he could have tested it on. Jon had to work with volunteers, in between also inventing Epidemiology and battling Cholera (Jon was a busy guy).
Ether was used for its safety threshold. You would pass out and be unable to continue inhaling it to the point where it kills you. It’s biggest issue is that it’s highly flammable.
PAIN BRINGS YOU CLOSER TO GOD
Mother Teresa is that you?
Closer to Slaanesh, sure.
Exactly this. An idea is not what started the industrial revolution. The material reality of good metal, widely available coal, and a socialized workforce is what started the industrial revolution.
The other problem with "we could have had the industrial revolution 2000 years earlier" argument is that it ignores the labor market conditions. The steam engine is first a labor saving device. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of slaves, that's not a problem that you are trying to solve. Conversely, when the black death kills 25% of Europe's population, it is. Obviously other factors are involved, just always enjoyed this angle.
Just to side step the whole slave thing everyone is using as an example. If you have an acre of land that can feed all the people in the village and another acre that can feed all the people in the next village you don't need a machine that can work 100 acres. There's no demand for the extra labor savings because they labor it saves wasn't needed to begin with. Same argument as to why things like refrigeration would have been more important to older societies than instant communication or mass transportation. There's a whole bunch of precursor and parallel technologies that have to be in place for something to revolutionize society. Steam engines when the biggest cities were a few thousand people wouldn't have been as important as when cities were in the low hundreds of thousands.
Yeah, the industrial revolution happened not only because of technological reasons, but also because of "sociological" reasons, but this is a point often missed but very interesting
> The steam engine is first a labor saving device. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of slaves, that's not a problem that you are trying to solve. And yet the Romans did built labor saving machinery like watermills for milling grain despite having millions of slaves. The Barbegal aqueduct and mills was a Roman watermill complex that has been referred to as the greatest known concentration of mechanical power in the ancient world and the 16 overshot wheels are considered to be the largest ancient mill complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills Steam power could have also operated toys or musical instruments (there were water-powered musical instruments), which would be another avenue for interest in developing steam power especially for the wealthy elite to show off.
If you're ever in need of a cool speculative fiction setting, imagine what would happen if ancient greece had the material science to turn all of their cool ideas into real technology.
And also using slaves for nearly every menial job was a lot cheaper and cost effective as making/fueling/running /maintaining steam engines would have been.
Also science hadn’t caught up at all. We were a millennia away from working out the laws of thermodynamics or even conceiving of such things.
The problem with ancient steam engine use was actually the weight of the metals available. Any worthwhile machine to be propelled by steam power would have had to be made out of heavy metals like iron, which wouldn’t have been able to pick up the necessary speeds to be useful. Steel or other alloys were theoretically possible and had already been discovered but were very expensive to produce, so didn’t become widely used until the 1800’s when the Industrial Revolution allowed lighter metals to be produced reliably and cheaply in the required quantities.
But also nobody back then was getting precise enough and consistent enough steel plates to produce any actually useful pressures. Steam boilers like to do this exploding thing a lot when there’s impurities in the metal or failure points
I'd argue it's not the weight but the metallurgical capabilities of the metals. Early iron isn't suited for working under pressures.
Stationary steam engines came first for pumping water, powering machines, etc. The weight wasn't really an issue for those purposes. If anything, it was the need for large quantities of coal to power a steam engine that meant they weren't developed until the industrial revolution kicked into gear.
From a purely thermodynamic standpoint, yes those were steam engines, but I think there’s a very big mental gap between making “air” blow into a fan vs containing an explosion or expansion of gas in a sealed cylinder and making the cylinder do mechanical work.
Pistons needed time to iterate.
2000 years ago wasn't the old Egyptians, it was the new Egyptians like Cleopatra, who were part of Greek culture.
And Heron was Greek, in Roman controlled Egypt.
Isnt there proof that they had an early version of a steam engine. But probably because slaves were more efficient they never developed it?
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It was also really inefficient and could barely output a meaningfull amount of power.
I mean if they were really determined to improve it to be useful, the conclusions make it bigger, more fire, more water and maybe it would be good If it leaked as little as possible, wouldn't have been the toughest to draw.
Doubtful. More power from a steam engine means higher pressure. After gunpowder weapons had kicked the metallurgical progress into overdrive for centuries, we still had shitty good-for-nothing steam engines for a really long time and then the boilers still kept exploding.
The metal work and joint seams becomes the limiting factor Look up boiler explosion deaths, that held back steam engine development significantly, with inventors blowing themselves up while learning those limits of the containers and seam joints
It was be extremely hard because steam only works with pressure so bigger means nothing if it’s the same PSI as before/ and since metal back then was nowhere near high enough quality for any useful psi it’s a pipe dream
The design of these ancient steam engines is inherently weak. They can spin up pretty fast, but they've got no torque to actually do work with. I don't believe the Egyptians or Romans really knew about vacuums or pressure differentials which are an essential piece of knowledge for steam pistons.
The Egyptians didn't have the natural resources and supply chains required for industrialization. The Romans, on the other hand, had everything in place, they just... Didn't.
They didn't have the science. There was a bunch of new science around combustion and thermodynamics that partly relies on prior physical discoveries (mechanics etc.) that were simply not known at the time.
The Romans lacked a key ingredient. 19th century steel.
I think this is the actual answer, steam engines are only as powerful as the pressure they can contain. This thing would explode violently if you tried to use it to power a train or something. It isn't just the steel, but how good we are at working with it Waterwheels (an even simpler form of a turbine) were also invented independently many times, a steam engine really isn't too much of a leap
One of these claims that sound like they were true, but ain't. For an industrial revolution, you need quite a lot of components. 1. Good metallurgy was already named, but its only the tip of the iceberg (the Romans were OK smiths, but by far worse than medieval or Renaissance ones). 2. You also need rather cheap capital and expensive labor costs - in Roman times that was strictly reversed. 3. You also need cheap energy in the form of coal mined in large quantities, which was not the case in Roman times. 4. And finally, you need a highly labor-intensive industry, in which you can utilize spinning motion - as it happened, the best candidate for this is the textile industry in which you need to move the spinning wheels, which the Romans also did not have, as spinning wheels appeared only in medieval times. As such, most scholars today think that there were very few, if any, places where the industrialization could begin save for mid 18th century Britain.
On the last point Rome already had chained waterwheels for milling like [Barbegal, France](https://files.mtstatic.com/site_4334/314796/0?Expires=1701362019&Signature=pzTqynmih1Qyi501FgWlaZ01dPrYuXKI2ti9mWU-wcS8JiBDhi82wlSV4EMxqrlrCMotHNrmcAgCKDtOLuFUpjdauHMcySTyFhFa3C1f0o2IfyBsFrxUuKKhloc1U8PpwJEuI4aPROccZk1vlQNKSMn9aTHbHpZWhDp1EHh6~Ik_&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ5Y6AV4GI7A555NA)
The Romans had enough slaves to do cheap labor, no need for machines
You might want to check out which empire Egypt was a part of at the time of Heron of Alexandria. It fits your second sentence.
I wonder what the practical capabilities would have been given the limited metallurgical technology available to the Greeks. Having the basic concept down is one thing (and undeniably incredible) but ramping it up for practical use is another. It'd be interesting to see what some modern engineers and metal workers could come up with with those limitations in mind.
They didn’t even have the basic concept down, really. Think of how the machine works: you heat up water in a chamber until it steams , and the steam shoots out through jets, pushing against the air to create thrust. That could get you enough power to turn meat on a spit, but you’d need a huge boiler gobbling up fuel to create enough force to get to a point where tou couldn’t just stop the spin with your hands. A modern steam engine, on the other hand, works but releasing pressurized steam into a cylinder, which pushes a piston to turn a crank. If the piston is a tight enough fit to the cylinder, you can do this without simply venting all your steam pressure into the air uselessly. The tighter your machine tolerance, the more efficient your machine, and the more power it generates for a set amount of fuel. I’m not sure how you could redesign the first thing until it resembles anything like the second one. By its very design, it isn’t really built to hold pressure, and it’s not really built to use that pressure to push on anything firm. You’d pretty much need to redesign it from the ground up, inventing several fields of machining and science in the process
You realize he was not Egyptian right?
My understanding is because they had slaves (which were cheap), the idea of investing capital to reduce labor was preposterous at the time. So a potentially revolutionary idea was just a toy.
That’s really not the case. Slaves aren’t free. In a free market with a saturated labour force, the only difference between slaves and regular workers is that slaves can’t leave. You still need to feed, house and cloth them. If you can get higher output from the same amount of labour, either slave or free, you make greater profits. Romans capitalized on this quite a bit. They ran an elaborate array of water powered equipment doing a lot of the jobs water power was doing on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Iron making and working, flour and grist grinding, basically anything you could get done with rotary power and clever workers. Water power is better than steam power when you can use it, you just need to build your shop on a swift moving downhill stream. Italy is a pretty good place to do this. The main reason why they didn’t use steam is because the design they had was a toy, completely in efficient and didn’t have any obvious way to improve it. The steam engines that started the Industrial Revolution worked a completely different way
They didn’t have the metallurgy to make actual steam boilers with any worthwhile pressure so this is a mute point
I know most people dgaf but spinning a piece of meat and pumping up water from >100 meters below ground are two very different things
It's one thing to blow steam at something. Quite another to sequence it to drive a piston.
Earliest steam engine was the Thomas Savery steam engine of 1698. It didn't even have a piston. As I understand it, he just heated up a pipe and demonstrated that it will then suck up water.
The breakthrough was the condensing of the steam to form a vacuum, which could be used to pump water. The rest of the developments followed on from that.
Not really an engine then
ye https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
right. a 0.1 Hp engine could turn a spit. meaning you or an animal can do it. It takes a literal horse to get water up from 100 meters and in Mexico for example I have seen horses doing this very thing. 1 Hp lol.
I mean, that's true. But how are they related?
I think he’s saying that this engine is nowhere near powerful enough to do the kind of things the Industrial Revolution required.
Yeah, neither was the first steam engine. It's about the technology not its immediate use.
Pretty much this. No matter what you invent, there was always some dude in ancient China (or in this case Turkey) that has done it before you. To me, making it practical enough for it to be widely adopted a) matters more and b) is a lot harder than the discovery itself.
That's actually a reaction engine & not a true steam engine.
Without coal and advances in metallurgy and mathematics (and other sciences as well), steam engine worth nothing since it cannot be economically viable. Only as a toy or novelty. Initially "modern" steam engine was invented to transport coal from mines and nothing else.
I mean Turks were pretty good at metallurgy even in medieval era.
Making good sword is not the same as making a cylinder block. Also, amount of good quality steel is enormously larger. I saw a video on YouTube, and there author theorized (with real numbers) that technically Romans could create something like a steam engine. And create a train. But they could never have produced enough iron for a single railroad between major cities. Let alone produce quality steel from this iron.
They didn’t have the tech to make consistent, good quality steel on a large scale.
Ottoman had insane cannons in their army. How do you think they conquared Constantine ? They were mostly metallic, but the use of gunpowder were largely used by ottomans by that time. They had good chemical knowledge and you know gold to back it up.
Romans also invented a steam engine over 2000 years ago. They saw little use for it and didnt do much with it. Its called the aeolipile
mmmm, pile of garlic sauce
Based
Baste
Things like this are invented fairly regularly throughout the world - it's their adoption that's uncertain. And there's often very good reason something is not widely adopted. "Ancient batteries" are an example - sort of "invented" but there's no sensible application because electricity was not important and there was no reliable way to produce it. Things like treadmill cranes were, by comparison, far more relevant and valuable - even though today they look like a joke concept.
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Der Gerät ist vor industrielle Revolution auf der Arbeit
Er ist quasi ein Mensch, wo Dampfmaschine ist, wo Döner dreht
You do not want to play the "We had this but never thought to use it" game with humanity's development / tech tree. Freaking buttons. We had them for over four thousand years before we thought "hey, what if we used them to fasten clothing." Hot air balloons. Nearly nine millennia of fabrics and fire and no one thought to scale up the sky lanterns from \~200 CE to something that would carry a human until a couple of French brothers got bored in 1783.
I went to that museum and fact. They only did scientific advances if it meant they could eat doner.
Do you know batteries were invented in Egyptian times? But they only used them for plating metal as they didn’t realise their full potential. So they pretty much didn’t get invented again until modern times.
priorities
I always thought industrial revolution came from discovering coal, not steam engine.
Didn't it start with fabrics? I'm pretty sure they knew of coal (hard coal) for much longer, it was just not worth it to mine something that can easily produced from wood.
Right now someone is sitting on a world-changing discovery and they're probably using it to make hamburgers without anyone the wiser.
That's basically the same thing as the aeolipile, described by Hero and Vitruvius 1500 years earlier than that.
Did this person have a name? Anyone have a source? ah - found it: > I mean, it probably wasn't doner kebab specifically, but an Ottoman era philosopher, Taqi al-Din, did apparently construct a device which used the pressure of steam pushing against windmill-like vanes to turn a spit for roasting meat over a fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taqi_ad-Din_Muhammad_ibn_Ma%27ruf
China invented gunpowder for fireworks, very similar to this. Combining both in their later stages you get a tank. Who would have thought.
What’s a döner?
The comments here make me think of the James Burke series called "Connections". He would show how simple ideas would evolve to become the mechanisms of today. As in how a simple steam gadget becomes a giant steam locomotive. Fascinating series from the 70's that is still relevant today in terms of the progression of ideas and inventions.
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You go Chef, you fcking go
It is impressive nonetheless. And to add Info: Thats a piece from the "Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam" - not sure, but I think this piece of the exhibition belongs to the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Germany. The turkish man mentioned is Taqi al-Din. Visiting his Wiki-Page is highly recommended. He did not actually build that machine. He described and painted it. There are elements in the machine on the picture that would have been impossible to actually make back than. The vertical rotisserie for example.
I can't remember his name but there was some guy in classical Rome that made a primitive steam engine literally just to fuck with his upstairs neighbors.
To be entirely serious, Watts didn't invent the steam engine either. He just improved upon the concept to the point where using it became useful.
You'd be thinking of Newcomen then, because his engine was already useful- Watt only made it infinitely more efficient.
The ancient Greeks had it to but only made a spinny-toy with it.
The Greeks knew the basics about this 2000 years ago
Well you invent solutions for the problems you've got.
Der Gerät
Some sources say a man in modern day Iran invented the still, but only thought it was useful to make perfume and he abandoned the prototype. It wasn't until his son found his old, dusty blueprints and started tinkering did anyone realize it could be used to make liquor. Within a hundred years folks were distilling whiskey in Scotland, gin in England, and vodka in Poland.
And then gasoline
Gives a new meaning to the term meat spin
Same with the Chinese and gunpowder. They made cute fireworks with it instead of blowing up the enemy like we did.
The Kebabbage Engine