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Comment by howmayiannoyyou | Hacker News Reader

> not clear to me that there is a plausible and equally viable alternative path from an organic economy to an industrial one that doesn’t initially use coal and which does not gain traction by transforming textile production

Here, in a nutshell, is an explanation for great power competition. Societal advancement requires step changes in productivity. Leaps in productivity require proximity to means of production. Production requires resources, and resources require access. Access is competitive. Competition breeds conflict, creates winners and losers, and fosters its own forms of advancement and innovation - often at terrible humanitarian short term costs.

Nevertheless, being a winner ultimately means your society persists (Great Britain), and being a loser means your society expires (Roman Empire).

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I think that the term industrial revolution is a bit misleading even, it should be named the fossil fuel revolution. Because cheap and abundant energy is what differentiates the world post industrial revolution from the world before more than anything else

The industrial revolution used water power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industr...

> Improvements to the steam engine were some of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution, although steam did not replace water power in importance in Britain until after the Industrial Revolution

Precisely this. Coal for powering machinery was just at the science experiment stage in the First Industrial Revolution. Water power was the workhorse. Even for iron and steel making, America (which has an abundance of trees) relied primarily on charcoal well into the mid 1800s.

> Water power was the workhorse

Wasn't the workhorse the workhorse before water power, allowing larger scale farming - which itself is another large step in human history towards increased efficiency and mass production that predates both the industrial revolution and the Roman empire.

I believe horses and even people were also used to drive non-agricultural machinery before water and steam.

The underlying theme to all these things feels more like "automation" than any specific energy source which are seemingly arbitrary (whatever is at hand, quite literally sometimes).

The energy source is actually very important, because it dictates how much energy you have to invest to gain extra energy. Using draft animals has a very low rate of return. During my grandparents' time, the draft animals used to produce the food consumed about a third of the total farm produce--and this is likely to be a more efficient farm than any that existed a thousand or two thousand years ago.

Fundamentally, this means you have wildly different costs for energy. Modern electrical energy costs around ten cents per kilowatt-hour. Gasoline fuel costs in the US right now turn out to around eleven cents per kilowatt-hour basis (although obviously an internal combustion engine isn't the same efficiency as a electric engine). By way of comparison, a single workhorse for an entire working day will put out maybe 6 kWh of energy, and the food input requirements for that workhorse are going to cost far more than 60 cents.

Yes, I think thats probably a better way to think of it.

The "water frame" was a key element of the industrialisation, and what was that initially powered by? That's right horses. It was only because they used water later on that it got that name.

The fact that they were basically automating an industry that India had led for centuries, and couldn't compete on wages seems key to the whole thing (and still needed government support to stop the cheap manually produced imports from crushing the early automation).

Another example is the early use of steam engines in iron production, where they were used to pump water, which then did the actual work (because steam engines couldn't rotate yet).

It’s still energy. The difference in power output between a horse and an engine is quite large. You also need cheap energy in order to automate anything. Energy derived from people and horses is expensive.

Bingo. When trees are abundant charcoal is the superior fuel. It’s much cleaner to burn than coal, weighs less and doesn’t require you to mine it out of the ground which is difficult and dangerous.

I’d argue the difficulty of mining and burning coal are what kicked off the industrial revolution. Mines necessitated the invention of coal powered pumps and other equipment. To burn coal efficiently you need iron stoves which drove demand for foundries and metallurgical development. Once you’ve got lots of coal and lots of iron and people who know how to work with it you start getting bright ideas about other things you can do with all that coal and iron.

That would be a good argument for the second half of the first industrial revolution, but in the 1700s (the industrial Revolution starting around 1760 or so), steam power was a footnote.

A footnote that was arguably one of the key driving forces though. Coal was burned in stoves and used in blast furnaces as well as in newfangled Newcomen Engines

Even Canal Mania, the Industrial Revolution mass expansion of boat transport using horses and artificial ditches (all tech familiar to the Romans) kicked off in the 1760s as a way to get coal out of the Duke of Bridgwater's mines.

They already transported the coal by boat, and they copied the idea of artificial canals as an obvious incremental improvement. I'd say the business aspects of canal mania might have been a bigger factor.

So the overly neat "its was all about coal" story doesn't really hang together.

One of the first canals in the UK was built, because someone blocked the river with a weir, so that they could run a watermill. It's all a bit fractal.

Sure, pound locks were an obvious incremental improvement back in the early centuries AD when the Romans built probably the first artificial cuts in the UK.

But it took heavy loads of coal and the economics of canal operating companies halving the coal price in Manchester to convince people it was a good idea to invest in building artificial ditches up hills all over the country to return a profit[1], which of course then opened up scope for new industrial enterprises alongside them. The Romans were perfectly capable of that level of engineering, but they focused on other things, even closer to home.

Agree that "it's all about coal" is too simplistic, but coal was a big deal even before steam mills and trains were commonplace.

[1]not all of them did, obviously. But at least they had limited liability corporations by then...

You coukd say one of the big leaps with canals, beyond the initial ones that expanded/followed existing rivers and remained flat, was the building of aquaducts to take canals across valleys which of course is heavily associated with Romans (though as far as I'm aware that wasn't used for transport of anything but water).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canal_lat%C3%A9ral_%C3%A0_la...

This is essentially a definitional issue - do you define it narrowly, with multiple sequential revolutions along the path of industrialization, or broadly, with multiple phases? The facts are the same either way.

Personally, I prefer the latter view, on account of how the various stages interacted. Water-powered mechanical fabric manufacture greatly expanded the use case for rotary-output steam engines, and both technologies took off synergistically when the latter became available with sufficient efficiency. Mechanized manufacture greatly expanded the use case for mechanized transport...

> The industrial revolution used water power.

No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydropower). Steam engines used coal, ie fossil fuels. By your defintion, even nuclear plants would be "water power".

> No. "Water power is the use of falling or fast-running water to produce electricity or to power machines"

Which is what powered most factories throughout the industrial revolution. Not using electricity obviously, machines would be connected by belt to overhead power shafts, which were connected to a water wheel.

I think coal is exaggerated. The early industrial Revolution, especially in the US, relied much more heavily on water power to drive machinery than coal. In fact, for the First Industrial Revolution, steam power was a footnote. Coal was used for making steel in England, but America primarily used charcoal for iron and steel well into the mid to late 1800s.

Coal enabled faster scale up in the Second Industrial Revolution and on into the 1900s, but it was not essential for industrialization.

The argument here is that coal was specifically necessary to iterate the steam engine to the point that it was viable even on dearer fuel.

In the context of railroads, at least in the US, railroads were primarily reliant on wood fuel for steam power during the First Industrial Revolution. But until steam engines became efficient enough to the point that Stephenson could build his Rocket, a steam locomotive powered even by coal wouldn't make for a viable railroad. So without coal, you get no railroads, and without railroads, I doubt you get to the Second Industrial Revolution because inland bulk transport is still too limited.

But again, steam power was irrelevant to the economy in the early part of the first industrial Revolution (1760-1800). The first industrial revolution relied at first almost exclusively on water power. Mills and bellows and such were designed to run on water power. Power loom was designed at first for water power. And a lot of the early steam-powered equipment was actually water-powered, with the steam engine serving to pump water to run the machines.

Coal wasn’t essential for the first industrial Revolution, except maybe to keep Britain from freezing to death in the winter.

The coal-essentialism argument is partially an anachronism as water powered machinery was supplanted by steam (and later electricity) in the Second Industrial Revolution.

It seems like the earliest practical steam engine was the Newcomen Engine which wikipedia dates to 1712. It was extremely inefficient so it was pretty much used only at coal mines to pump water out. That water had to go somewhere and formed a canal system in England that helped take the coal to market. I think the problem with trying to find the cause of or the source of a phenomenon like the Industrial Revolution is that it's obviously multi-causal. And the inter-related bootstrap process is fascinating.

This seems to be a common thread here in the forum, but I'm very confused. You yourself claim that the steam engine was essential for pumping water - what does the "steam was irrelevant" side actually think would have provided enough energy to pump that much water? Not anything whose caloric output depended on the input from farmers' fields, for sure, those were used for other consumers. Steam for the first time gave access to an energy source independent of feeding someone or something oats, that wasn't constrained to being next to the perfect stream.

Not to mention that TFA actually has an example of a steam engine driven industry that was central to the GDP of the UK, pretty much destroying the "it was only water, never coal" argument.

Rivers provided the power for water. Steam engines were a kind of hack to allow you to run pump powered machines away from rivers, but this was a tiny proportion of the first part of the industrial Revolution.

And perfect streams weren’t required, just water falling a certain height. Headraces and tailraces were dug to distribute water power to places nearby but not directly on a river. I’m thinking of cities like Minneapolis built on rivers whose industry (milling grain to flour) was powered precisely by such water-driven machines.

This is partly a geographical/topological thing. The Northeast US--which is mostly what we're talking about--has a lot more fast flowing rivers and streams than England. So it was natural to site mills on those rivers and build waterworks to extract power from the water.

Hmmm. This argument would be a lot more convincing IMO if the Roman Empire had expired because it lost out to a more industrialized neighbor. Rather, it mostly just collapsed under its own weight.

Rome wasn't defeated per se; it more or less rotted from within, as the value individuals got out of the society did not match the value put in and the center failed to hold. That was a risk of their economic and societal model independent of the existence / non-existence of an industrial society contemporary to them; there was nothing about Rome's arrangement that guaranteed perpetual stability.

>> just collapsed under its own weight.

I mean, it suffered a series of military defeats at the hands of Germanic peoples.

That was just a consequence of internal collapse, which prevented Romans from properly defending themselves, as they successfully did in previous centuries.

> collapsed under its own weight

That is a productivity/innovation issue at its core.

the Roman Empire institution collapsed, their form of society still exists and it's still at the hearth of many western civilizations. roman law, sewer and water systems, flushing toilets, aqueducts, roads, concrete, wellness centers, baths, and much more. they are all inventions of the romans that shaped the western culture, helped the social aspect of what we call "society" develop and brought higher living standards where they were not present, things that today still define the difference between developed countries and developing ones.

Paris, Milan, London, they did not know what a sewer system was and what "hygiene and cleanliness" meant, before romans made them a standard for the empire.

This seems a very extreme oversemplification that explains nothing.

It would have been a little hard for the romans to industrialize textiles... they didn’t have spinning wheels!

A spinning wheel is not required to industrialize textile production since it's just a convenient way to use a spindle. What you'd need is industrial-scale frame jacks to allow one person to run dozens of spindles at the same time plus an external power source to apply.

Same goes for milling (grist and saw), smithing, or any of dozens of other artisan crafts that were obviated by the development and application of external power sources.

which book do i read to unpack this

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