People generally underestimate just how special the conditions of 17th century Britain were.

Somehow something happened that started the modern era of economic, technological and industrial progress. Before then pretty much everyone lived in a Malthusian trap where economic development was temporary at best.

And there’s still not a great deal of consensus on what exactly caused modern economic development to start happening in Britain.

I was studying how those mechanical calculators (like the one in "Hidden Figures") worked, and it struck me that Hero of Alexandria, or whoever made the Antikythra mechanism, could have easily made one. I thought long and hard about why Hero actually didn't make one of them.

The only answer I could come with was this: Nobody asked him to make one.

He had the tools, he had the skills, he had the workshop full of assistants. All he needed was a *purchase order* and we could have had mechanical calculators 2,000 years ago.

If you have minions, ask yourself if you are asking them to work on the right things. If you don't have minions, well ask yourself the same question.

Related:

Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 - Jul 2022 (308 comments)

Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33200864 - Oct 2022 (151 comments)

I've long thought the answer is as simple as it is boring: their metallurgy just wasn't good enough.

Until the industrial revolution itself kicked in, metallurgy was a long and slow slog through incremental improvements in technique. There's no obvious way for a civilization to do a speed run on this process.

I don't think the printing press would have helped. The Chinese had movable type by the 11th century, and it didn't cause an industrial revolution.

The 'tech tree' argument that makes the most sense to me is that, specifically, demand for cannon, lead to enough improvement in metallurgy that steam boilers were something it was possible to construct. That being what really kicked things off. Hero's aeolipile didn't hold to a significant pressure, and if anyone had tried it, their vessel would have ruptured or shattered.

The article highlights that Rome lacked the shift to coal energy, which was crucial for industrialization.

So I wonder if it happened in Britain because it’s colder there.

An historian on youtube has an amazing video called "What wheelbarrows can teach us about world history": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRnwg3dpboc

It talks about how wheelbarrows seem both evident and necessary, and, in certain historical contexts, are none of those things.

We tend to imagine past societies the same as ours, just less technically advanced. But they're not; they're almost alien. The same historian has another video, about time travel to medieval Europe, which I think illustrates this alienness (strong otherness, if you will) of the past really well.

Building a steam engine without knowing about gas laws or the laws of motion seems unfeasible.

You first need an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

See also:

acoup - Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

> Great merchants flourished, but “in order to be truly valued, they eventually had to become rentiers, as Cicero affirmed without hesitation

How does conclusion arise from the provided excerpt, which says: "But of all the occupations by which gain is secured, none is better than agriculture, none more delightful, none more becoming to a freeman"?

Does "agriculture" here somehow means becoming a "rentier"? Maybe "(agricultural) landlord" is implied?

Aristotle was a poor replacement for James Watt.

Why didn't the Dutch have one? They had wind power before England had coal powered engines.

no concept of energy through combustion

Not mentioned: they didn't have coffee?

Because they feared climate change.

Obviously because they had no Scotsmen.

Proving that people who build walls to keep immigrants out do not fare well.

Basically, lack of IP protection = no patent or copyright. Now our patent length is OK, but copyright is far too long. In old Rome, if you made a new process, you locked up the shop and kept it secret. Anyone steal the secret and you could do nothing. There are stories of Roman senators killing inventors to maintain a controlled market. In addition, Rome had zero electronics, and no document tradition via printed books = all hand copies(printing in old China) There some relics that hint at plating cells for silver and perhaps gold, but no firm data