Recently I ran into this video suggesting that the Roman could have had railroads.
But could they? I would like to posit that no, the pieces were not in place.
Earlier, I ran into these two videos saying the same sort of thing.
Then I ran into this post on Brett Devereaux’s blog concerning the same subject and thought that I could add a few things.
The industrial revolution’s whys and beginnings are harder to pin down that the blog says. Mr. Devereaux says that the two key technologies that drove the Industrial Revolution were James Watt’s steam engine driving spinning jennies in textile mills. There are some problems with this. First of all, Watt’s steam engines were not well suited as mill engine, mostly because of Watt’s prejudice against high pressure steam. Watt’s engines relied on condensing steam to create a vacuum. Here is the oldest operating Watt engine as an example, in Birmingham England:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haarlem_Mill
https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/richard-arkwright
The reality of the start of the Industrial Revolution is more complicated than a single invention or person. It also started earlier than most people realize as a result of several factors. First of all, the deforestation of Britain caused by the demand for charcoal and timber for the navy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0HW4qk8dv4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMFiwj97Cj4
That forced a change to a more available fuel, coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keelmen
This led to some interesting developments, not least of which was the use of plank gravity railroads from the pits to the colleries.
18th c. wooden railway found in Newcastle shipyard
It was on these gravity railroads, used throughout the 18th century, that high pressure steam and iron rails laid on top of the planks came together and things started to really move.
Coincidently, at the same time, there was another sort of revolution going on in Britain, driven by this tool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythe
I’m not sure why scythes were not typically used for harvest throughout most of history, but this video makes some things rather obvious:
A scythe is a far more efficient harvesting tool than a sickle. Now it may be that for most of history that scythes were harder to manufacture, or the authorities were concerned about the tools becoming weaponized, but for most of history, the sickle, as bad a tool as it is, was the harvesting tool most used. In Britain, that changed, and along with other advancements in agriculture created massive increase in agricultural productivity that freed the workforce to make the Industrial Revolution actually work.
Britain was in the unique position of being able to take advantage of the country’s far travelling colonists and merchant marine and the things they brought back to fuel innovation and keep the revolution going I don’t think that it was an accident that crucible steel was invented in Britain in the late eighteenth century and I am sure that Zinc refining was brought back from India, where it had been going on for centuries. That Zinc gave the metalworkers and instrument makers an easily machined and worked Brass and the ability to use that material to make all sorts of things from automatons to muskets, to say nothing of the clocks and watches that allowed Britain sail all over the world.
That was the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. So why didn’t it happen in Rome, or China? Both empires had large industries at some points in time, yet neither tripped over into the qualitative change that Britain did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE2kOjNqvsw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMlj2L7dwro
Roman metallurgy was not unsophisticated and was widespread throughout the empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_metallurgy
https://www.infoelba.com/discovering-elba/history-of-elba/mines/
There is no doubt that the Romans had excellent engineering skills.
https://books.openedition.org/pcjb/405?lang=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
So why no Roman industrial revolution? The largest reason was that for most of the empire, there was no real need to heat in the winter. In early modern Britain, in the grip of the little ice age, not having fuel in winter was a life or death matter. In sunny Italy and Southern France during the warmer climate of the Roman era, winter was a short period of discomfort. As a result the Romans didn’t really need things like chimneys and so never looked at things like draft in a fire. That meant that a lot of processes didn’t have the furnaces that were prevalent in the Industrial revolution, so no optical glass, for instance. For that matter, no window glass.
There is a whole list of things that Romans didn’t have. Spring steel, stirrups, horse collars, printing spinning wheels, gunpowder and so on that were part of the picture in the 18th century. Those seemingly small things had an impact on the early modern Britains and their ability to deal with the changes created by the change over to using chemical rather than muscle power.
The fact is that the Romans probably would have thought of the kinds of things that went on during the Industrial Revolution to something to avoid at all costs. Right up to the end of the Empire, Romans had it pretty good. Also, with things the way they were, revolutions of any kind were very bad thing. Especially to the very risk adverse small crofters that made up the balance of the Empire’s population. So there was no need or impetus to change and Rome remained agrarian.
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