Why was Heron of Alexandria's aeolipile (proto-steam engine) not properly developed and made to do useful work? Can one imagine circumstances in which the steam engine, more or less as we know it, could have been invented and spread through the known world in Heron's time? Are there any other of Heron's devices (the slot-machine, the stand-alone fountain, the syringe) which, if circumstances had been slightly different, could have formed part of the panoply of human invention centuries earlier than they did in OTL?
Heron's steam engine
- Thread starter Hypa
- Start date
The reason the steam engine didn't catch on in ancient Rome/Greece was because slave labor was cheap and widely available. That, and the Aeolipile was incredibly inefficient.
Some years ago I saw a document about Creek/Roman technology, and one of the greatest inventor of his time was Heron. Unfortunately they thought that there was no use for this kind of machine, just a toy. If just someone would have said to Caesar how useful this machine would be, for example in ship, there you go. A trimaran with steam-engine would have been somethig. I personally think that it's (dark) Middle Ages and christianity's fault that we are some 700 years behind in technological evolution.
During the middle ages lots of stuff was invented. For example the wind mill and three-field crop rotation in Europe, algebra and the decimal numbers in the middle east and gunpowder and compass in China... The first universities were built then
Nothing from the antiquity was forgotten, in Europe much stuff like literature was ignored, but not forgotten. In both the Arab and Greek empire's the antiquity was in high esteem
The Dark Ages were dark because pagan and illterate barbarians destroyed the infrastructure and urban centers of the Empire. They were far more interested in loot and power than technology. During the Dark Ages the Church was the primary preserver of Roman knowledge, by monastics in the West and in Orthodox Byzantium in the East. Besides the Middle Ages saw considerable technological improvements in metallurgy, architecture (consider the Gothic cathedral), weaponry, shipbuilding and the construction of machines. A Portugese carrack ca. 1400 would have mincemeat of the best ship in Augustus' navy
If it took more labor to produce the firewood needed to fuel the engine than the engine would produce, it would be impractical. But the main reason it was inefficient was related to metals/material science of the time.
Come on, Rome was hardly a center of innovation either.
For the ship example there are many arguements people who don't like change would use, the ship will burn, you'll need so many more people to mine the coal, it will break down, you can't carry enough fuel, etc...
I remember reading that Archimedes despite all sorts of usefull inventions considered his greatest achievement to be a paper on the volume of a sphere contained within a cylinder.
Abdul Hadi Pasha
Banned
If someone had said to Caesar that it would have been useful on a ship, one would have been loaded onto a ship, been way too weak to accomplish anything, and would likely have caused the ship to catch fire and sink, or capsize and sink. For steam engines to be effective, you need metalurgy to progress to the point that adquate pressure could be maintained to provide motive force, and this was not possible until the 19th c.
Even early steamers were so inefficient that they were inferior to sail for all purposes except tugs to guide ships through channels in ports. It wasn't until the 1880s that it was possible to dispense with sail.
Steam engines in the Roman period were only useful for animating toys.
The Greeks/Romans didn't know how to build ships that could sail upwind. So for a significant part of any journey, steam is competing with oars. Still, with the availability of slaves, oars have their advantages- not least reliability.
One possible other problem with an ancient steam-engine is that I don't think the Greeks and Romans needed to pump out their mines. Early OTL (Newcomen) steam engines were used as mine pumps, because you had an unlimited supply of water- important when you haven't got a condenser. The Greeks don't have the flooded mines or (I think) the pump technology.
Overall, though, the aeolipile has a lot of problems even with modern metallurgy- huge rotating steam-spurting boiler, anyone? It's going to be restricted to its OTL uses as a toy and to open temple doors by "divine intervention".
An interesting POD, though, would be the Byzantine Emperor having some steam-powered toys among his collection of automata (roaring lions, singing birds, lifting thrones etc.) and either have a Western visitor document it or have it be stolen by the right person in 1204 (or 1453!). You then have the idea of using steam to do work a few hundred years before Newcomen & Savery.
even if the ancients had improved their metallurgy and made the steam engine efficient, there's another problem looming: how do you fuel the thing? If they use wood, then deforestation will become a problem sooner than in OTL. If they figure out that coal is useful for steam engines, then things get interesting...
That's Hero of Alexandria; Heron was a much later inventor. I've been researching him recently. My favorite reasons his ideas went nowhere are:
o He was a Greek in a Roman Empire, a second-class citizen. The Greeks were most of the big innovators, and they all had the same problem.
o Rome in its Republic was, contra Joseph, innovative, but very much military specialists. Somebody might've been able to sell steam-driven triremes or weapons of war, but would've had trouble selling steam grain mills. But, anyway, he seem's to've been too late for the Republic, so it's a moot point.
o Monarchies (the Empire) have alot more barriers to innovation than liberal constitutions like much of Greece and the mid and late Roman Republic had. But Rome had conquered Greece already, so once its Republic fell, that put the brakes on the smarts for two millenia.
So, I think Hunter's half right - but the long interruption between free societies is, to me, even more important. Which societies have invented the most since their recreation starting in the UK and then US? The democracies, of course, because we don't have to worry about things like the Internet being suppressed by existing elites who hate how their bizmodels are obsoleted and more problems exposed; in unfree societies, it would've developed far, far more slowly.
Having lots of slaves didn't keep Athens from inventing lots of things, or pre-unification China. The steam engine still lets you get more production from your existing slave base, so that seems wrong to me. IMHO, Needham's clearly wrong.
But, yeah, Christian intolerance's why most of those tech goodies we did have were developed outside Christian Europe. There was nothing to choose between today's Taliban and the late Roman Empire or most western european monarchies, most of whom were fanatically intolerant.
o He was a Greek in a Roman Empire, a second-class citizen. The Greeks were most of the big innovators, and they all had the same problem.
o Rome in its Republic was, contra Joseph, innovative, but very much military specialists. Somebody might've been able to sell steam-driven triremes or weapons of war, but would've had trouble selling steam grain mills. But, anyway, he seem's to've been too late for the Republic, so it's a moot point.
o Monarchies (the Empire) have alot more barriers to innovation than liberal constitutions like much of Greece and the mid and late Roman Republic had. But Rome had conquered Greece already, so once its Republic fell, that put the brakes on the smarts for two millenia.
So, I think Hunter's half right - but the long interruption between free societies is, to me, even more important. Which societies have invented the most since their recreation starting in the UK and then US? The democracies, of course, because we don't have to worry about things like the Internet being suppressed by existing elites who hate how their bizmodels are obsoleted and more problems exposed; in unfree societies, it would've developed far, far more slowly.
Having lots of slaves didn't keep Athens from inventing lots of things, or pre-unification China. The steam engine still lets you get more production from your existing slave base, so that seems wrong to me. IMHO, Needham's clearly wrong.
But, yeah, Christian intolerance's why most of those tech goodies we did have were developed outside Christian Europe. There was nothing to choose between today's Taliban and the late Roman Empire or most western european monarchies, most of whom were fanatically intolerant.
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Michael Busch
Directly responding to the OP:
This POD has been used as the basis of a published book (James White, The Silent Stars Go By, 1991). I quite like the book, although the first couple of hundred years of divergence aren't that plausible - the only reason the history develops as it does is that White was Irish and therefore liked the idea of a Pax Hibernia. But half way through the narrative, it is 1492 and an Orion-type generation ship is departing at 0.1 c ...
This POD has been used as the basis of a published book (James White, The Silent Stars Go By, 1991). I quite like the book, although the first couple of hundred years of divergence aren't that plausible - the only reason the history develops as it does is that White was Irish and therefore liked the idea of a Pax Hibernia. But half way through the narrative, it is 1492 and an Orion-type generation ship is departing at 0.1 c ...
There's a major problem with this statement.
It ignores the fact that during the Dark/Middle ages the Catholic church was the center of knowledge and protected many discoveries made by the Roman empire.
Discoveries that were useful to the Church, not in general.
The Church may have kept libraries of knowledge, but it was still none-the-less intolerant of science, and anything that questioned the church or threatened its authority that could have been developed would have been suppressed.
Bill Cameron
Banned
Hypa,
Because it would be hard to develop such a design even with our knowledge of metallurgy, thermodynamics, and engineering.
For the aeolipile to provide any significant work, you'll need to constantly inject feed water into a spinning sphere and monitor water levels within that sphere too. The only way to provide feed water is through the shafts the device rotates on and would you care to guess what sort of seals you'll need on those shafts? That would be a tough job in 2009, let alone Heron's time.
Yes. They abandon the reaction jet whirly-gig design and use pistons instead.
The syringe could lead to pistons which can be used in many different ways. Also, it was the manner in which Heron used pulleys and counterweights that was new, not the pulleys or counterweights themselves. Most of Heron's devices were simply temple toys competing priests in Alexandria used to attract worshipers and their money. Sadly, they were viewed in that manner rather than as prototypes for future devices.
The presence of slavery is the usual excuse people trot out in this rather repetitive What If, that and a lack of any real understanding of the actual engineering involved, but the slavery excuse fails any real scrutiny. After all, the US and other nations had slaves while building railroads and industrializing.
What you need is a significant paradigm shift in Classical thinking for Heron's toys to be seen as having any use beyond that of mystifying temple goers.
Bill
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I tried a thread like this too. As did dozens of other members. The basic reasons the engine failed boil down to: poor metallurgy, abundance of slaves, not labor efficient because more slaves to haul fuel than labor saved by using engine.
It wouldn't have taken off for the same reason the Medieval steam engines didn't take off - way too ineficient.
There's a good reason why the industrial revolution (in Europe) started in the seventeenth century...
There's a good reason why the industrial revolution (in Europe) started in the seventeenth century...
Stephen
Banned
Slaves are not the reason. The steam powered spinning top has no use other than as a toy. You need great advances in metalurgy, maths and phisicks before somthing as effiecient or powerful as a Newcomen or Watt engine can be built. You also need an aplication where prototypes can be tried and refine, somewhere where there lots of fuel and a machine which requires lots of repetitive and strenuous work, like a water pump in a coal mine. A large enough coal mine will also require a canal network to deliver these bulk goods to a large consumer base of a country with a timber crisis and overpopulated beyond the usual malthusian limits by the tribute from an empire.
Rome only meets one of these prerequisits.
Rome only meets one of these prerequisits.