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First steam turbines were made in ancient Rome. Took us almost 2000 years to commercialize them :)

TIL the Romans invented the first steam engine but didn’t seem to grasp its revolutionary potential and used it mostly as a party trick:

>> TIL the Romans invented the first steam engine but didn’t seem to grasp its revolutionary potential and used it mostly as a party trick

I guess they were civil engineers, not mechanical engineers.

Why automate/industrialize when you have literal slaves?

Wikipedia's history of this is very nice: