Are technological leaps just a matter of luck?
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Are technological leaps just a matter of luck? Was there anything preventing the Romans from inventing the combustion engine?
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It’s obviously iron and population /thread
Any post below is spam -
A better understanding of metallurgy and thermodynamics for one.
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>Are technological leaps just a matter of luck?
only to some level
>Was there anything preventing the Romans from inventing the combustion engine?
lack of "technological consciousness" which is present today with multiple state and private structures intentionally aiming for technological advance-
Wow anything below the first post is retards
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applies to you
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You’re the retard here you fucking phonespamming tranny.
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Literal tranny retard.
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They pretty much had steam locomotion.
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Metallurgy. It took until the Renaissance until metal working became complex enough to create the parts needed for a real combustion engine. Gears and other parts have to be made within a fraction of a millimeter to work properly and efficiently.
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the antikythera mechanism shows they could do that with bronze at least, maybe they could have done the leap with iron
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Bronze expands and contracts too much with temperature
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yes but the know how to make millimetric adjustments was there, that’s why i specified "If they could have done the leap"
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hmm
perhaps
they did have a standardized production of hydraulic valves and hydraulic pumps, but their sections were usually brass, and were not forced to handle above 5-10 atmospheric pressures
so in order to make sections for steam pressure they would require a lot larger pieces for the sheer mass of the material to be enough to mitigate that it is not blast furnace steel
so imagine massive machinery with sections the size of large rooms, basically a neighborhood sized machine
doable, but with like, 100 000 slaves working on it for years-
this is a somewhat larger mining hydraulic pump from the 1st century AD, and it would still be miniscule for that
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this is a somewhat larger mining hydraulic pump from the 1st century AD, and it would still be miniscule for that
[…]
while this piece is entirely made out of brass, not a single bronze or copper part
Quick reminder that Romans literally had fucking boiler rooms,
and that you could basically pick any random irrelevant Roman colony in Gaul, and that colony will most likely have more pipeline within its walls than the entirety of fucking Han China combined during the early Principate period.-
forgot pic because of Eurocentrism taking me over, sorry
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>rometards poisoning themselves to death with lead in their drinking water
Kek, no wonder the germanic middle ages were so massively better and more advanced.-
that is a myth you retard
modern lead pipes til the 90s were poisonous because the water there was still and pressurized, til opened by faucet ofcancient lead pipes were not heavily pressurized, they had flowing or still water with just one to few atmospheric pressures depending on how high the initial aquaduct was, only valves set the going and stopping of it
the lead poisoning the Romans got was from fucking flavoring their food with it and using it as powder for makeup and other idiotic shit like that,
not pipelines, in fact, their lead pipes would be sedented by minerals and watercress, so there would be a layer of it between the water and the lead within weeks
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> with just one to few atmospheric pressures depending on how high the initial aquaduct was
and because the aqueducts were high enough and provided enough velocity for the water drop in the pipes, the Romans could actually construct pipelines upwards, meaning they had running water in upper fucking floors,
which is fucking unheard of literally anywhere else, at any time, til like the 1840s.
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They made massive containers that they heated up, then you had hot, often even sterilized water
they also had steam coming out of valves and opened endings like a massive kettle pot, but they did not have the idea to try and use brass or bronze to make anything more than funny contraptions from it
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these boilers would be connected to hydraulic valves and faucets, made out of bronze and brass, like these
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There is a random street in Hercunaleum that they unearthed and it had 4 pipelines, one for each purpose, since they had different fucking pressures and temperatures lol
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The antikythera mechanism is a simple contraption compared to steam engines. The thickness of the gears are about 1mm, doesn’t sound bad but this is utterly horrible, the generally accepted measurement is the thou when designing gears and engine parts which is 0.025mm which is 40 times smaller than the gears. For acceptable use in steam engines the measurements used for the acceptable range of deviation in gears was 1/5th of a thou. 0.005mm. Ancient people were quite literally incapable of calibrating to such a small measurement.
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Cumbustion no? But they had something on about steam power. They knew about steam power, I’m not a metalurgist can some one check is Roman iron could withstand 15psi? If so they could make a low pressure steam engine given the knowlage
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Anyone can make steam engines retard it’s just iron wasn’t available
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>calls someone retard
>says some retardation imedialy after
Kek
Anyone can do a steam engine but nodody did until the industrial revolution.
Its as simple as make steam, you have to understand how to employ ot
>muh iron
Roman’s knew how to make steal and early steam engine were made of ironI don’t think that’s the issue early steam engine didn’t have that many precise parts, nothing that a good artisan couldn’t do
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Not any large working one. Parts have to be miniscule to work properly, which the Roman didn’t have the ability to create.
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It did retard, they had all kinds of clocks and precise devices, it’s because Italy has no iron
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italy has iron, especially in tuscany, though+ the empire expanded outside italy
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Which wasn’t populated
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tuscany and the areas outside the empire were populated-
Elbe has not even produced enough iron to give every Roman a sword. It’s useless.
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Most iron was from Iberia, Anatolia, Balkans and Alps
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That’s less than a thousand times less than it is today. It’s irrelevant. They weren’t populated.
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It’s far more than any other state back then and the population was larger too. There was no lack of metal
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>There was no lack of metal
There was per your own stats you mindless shitposter. -
it’s 80k tons per year which is far more than other state back then., how is that a lack of metal when discussing preindustrial states you retarded subhuman shitstain?
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Literal retardation response. You realize that wouldn’t even provide a 10kg sword to their entire army.
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>sword
>10kg
histlet is obvious -
>a 10kg sword
>which has to get produced annually because after one year swords decay
good lord you are retarded as shit -
It wouldn’t even do it for ten years. 80kt is a useless amount.
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1 gladius=1 kg ca.
total roman soldiers: 400-500.000
assuming 5 to 10% of swords were damaged/broken each year and were not recycled (which they were mostly, so real number is even lower)= 20 to 50k new swords needed per year
total production= 8.250.000 kg ca. per year
surplus iron= around 8.200.000 kglast (you) for (you) baiting retard
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Literal retard you could not even build a large bridge
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those were made with lead you stupid fuck
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Literal fucking retard just throwing out copes and retardation of a pathetically small iron supply
Ignoring that Rome literally has a thousand times less iron than today -
cope and sneed tranny you will never be a real man
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don’t you have anything better to do than baiting?
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It takes zero effort
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>you could not even build a large bridge
lolwut -
>a 10kg sword
a 10kg sword
>a 10kg sword
a 10kg sword
>a 10kg sword
a 10kg sword
>a 10kg sword
a 10kg sword
>a 10kg sword
a 10kg sword -
Literal retard it could be anything 10kg
It could be 3 3kg swords
Don’t be autism about rounding generally phrased examples of numbers -
have a nice day tranny
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>is a obese tranny
>has autism
>calls me tranny -
Anon a typical LONGSWORD weighs less than 1,5kg.
A medieval arming sword weighs less than 1kg, and a gladius would have been even lighter. -
I can’t tell if you’re "not enough iron argument" is top tier bait or you are just a schizo. The steam engine didn’t even start as made fully of iron, they were first used to pp water out of coal mines because although the first steam engines were hilariously inefficient, throwing coal at the problem was still cheaper than paying some wagies to pump water out of the mines all day. If anything the fact that the Roman Empire had so much forest and didn’t have to really so heavily on Coal as early modern Britain did is the reason why it didn’t develop a working steam engine ( a tennis ball that rotates doesn’t count, only things actually used to power something) and then an internal combustion engine.
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They didn’t have very good metalwork. Infact the gauls were better blacksmiths then they were, the only reason Rome was able to smash them was due to their lack of team work until the very end.
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the greeks had studied hydraulics and pneumatics and had managed to come up with quite interesting contraptions (including at least one machine which could open the doors of a temple i.e. do major "physical" work), i think the fact that the hydraulic powered contraptions they had (hierapolis sawmill, barbegal mills, ianiculum mills, moselles mills, tidal mills, reverse-overshot wheels etc.) + mass of slaves were the main reason why neither greeks nor romans never bothered to invest more on steam engines
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>Was there anything preventing the Romans from inventing the combustion engine?
the ability to make steel in the amount and quality necessary for them to be anything but a novelty, as well as a lack of understanding of petroleum refining -
Technology is useless without the economic backing to utilize it and mass produce it.
Even if the Romans had invented a prototype of a combustion engine (which they couldn’t), they wouldn’t have had an "industrial revolution" due to a complete lack of the economic thought and social conditions that enabled it.Real life is more complicated than a videogame tech tree. Technology per se is useless. In the Middle Ages they had the same construction techniques and knowledge of architecture as the Romans, if they wanted to build a huge monument they could do it, thus cathedrals, but they didn’t have developed urban economies, that’s why they didn’t make rows of apartment buildings in their cities like ancient Rome had.
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there wasn’t a pressure for it.
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>overpopulation in the later medieval period
Didn’t it take like 3 centuries for most places to reach early 14th century populations again?
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They already were edging on steam engines in Rome, but why formally invent industry when you have an endless supply of perfectly good slaves?
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>Are technological leaps just a matter of luck?
Yes. But "luck" as you say it is nothing but a dismissive way to mean Providence.
Literally see the greek fire randomly appearing out of nowhere, to help turn the tables on the Moslems, but no gunpowder even though they apparently had many of the same ingredients. Chinese would come up with gunpowder and first barely usable weapons with it. By the time their gunpowder became known to the Western world byzantines had grown perfidious and theefore lost not only their capital to more righteous latins. Their greek fire was also taken from them so they could not employ it again even if they by chance amassed the resources for it. The greeks then played no role in the development of true firearms and cannon that ultimately spelled their doom. Looks like God favored turkish infidels over hereticals byzantines. -
>Are technological leaps just a matter of luck?
No, technological leaps are a matter of white superiority, Jared Diamond soicucks need to go back to /int/
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Problem, Jared diamond?
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I sometimes like to imagine what would happen if I could go back in time and give Julian guns, and maybe a printing press.
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Hopefully you’d have a nice day for giving a shit about that incompetent retard. Christ almighty Julian is the most overrated fucker ever.
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No you should give Elagabalus guns and mass media.
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>Are technological leaps just a matter of luck?
yep
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