AHC: Alternative Industrializations?

fasquardon

Workable Goblin said:
I would cautiously suggest that possibility of a "long slow" industrial revolution that skips from mechanical to electrical hydropower. The main question in my mind is how linked copper mining and refining was to the coal-iron-steel complex; if it was relatively independent, then one could plausibly develop the cabling industries needed to produce electrical generators and motors without necessarily developing steam engines and the like in the interim. This could really be quite interesting (and is also of interest for post-apocalyptic scenarios, of course).
Click to expand...

I wonder about what methods could be used to output the amount of brick or concrete needed to build electrical dams in sufficient volume and how viable they'd be for a society stuck in an agrarian paradigm.

Mechanization had been slowly building since the dying days of the Roman Republic so my feeling is that eventually even without coal and oil a "machine and scientific revolution" would occur. Proving such a hunch would take more detailed knowledge than I possess however. ERoI is pretty fiendish to calculate given how complex even the simplest supply chain is. Also, I hesitate to call such a revolution "industrial" since I am not sure how far capital would replace labour in such a scenario.

fasquardon
 

Jürgen

Jared said:
Well, iron/steel and/or textiles, as I noted. Textiles have several features which make them very amenable to mechanisation and associated industrialisation. They are an essential item (food, clothing and shelter being the basics of human existence) and made up a large part of household budgets in the pre-industrial era. They are lightweight and non-perishable, which means that they can be transported for very long distances without incurring huge transportation costs. They are essentially in demand all throughout the world, so get cheap textiles and you can sell them almost anywhere.

And perhaps most important of all, for most pre-industrial textile fibres (except silk) most of the final cost was in the cost of the weaving, not in the basic fibre. These very high labour costs meant that any inventions which reduced the cost of labour (spinning wheels, spinning jennies, etc) led to a significant reduction in the cost of the final product. This meant that they could be made cheaper quite easily, sold to more people, etc.

The OTL Industrial Revolution was really two revolutions, which in their early stages proceeded largely independently from each other: textiles and the coal/iron/steel complex. (There was some overlap, but they could probably have proceeded independently, leading to a slower but still meaningful industrial revolution). Textiles followed their own path, with the power for the machines largely coming from water power in the early stages. If I remember right, the majority of textile factories were powered by water power until sometime like 1830. Steam engines became important later, but not in the formative stages.
Click to expand...

I know in Denmark traditional windmills stayed competitive into the early 20th century, while homemade (non-fancy) pottery produce by individual families ( the so-called Jydepotte) was exported until the WWI. Traditional manufacturing stayed somewhat competitive until rising wages killed them.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

fasquardon said:
I wonder about what methods could be used to output the amount of brick or concrete needed to build electrical dams in sufficient volume and how viable they'd be for a society stuck in an agrarian paradigm.
Click to expand...
Well, we have historical examples of fairly large dams being built by pre-industrial peoples, e.g. the Jawa Dam; of course, those were earthen dams, mostly, but I'm not sure you couldn't adapt an earthen dam to produce hydropower if you were sufficiently clever. And, of course, you don't actually need a dam to produce hydropower, just large amounts of hydropower. The way I see it, hydroelectricity would initially be an upgrade to existing mechanical hydropower systems, replacing all the complex gearing and drive shafts with electrical wiring. Hence, at first it would not need any new dam construction.

The obvious value of hydroelectricity would probably, however, drive development of better hydroelectric locations and the development of new manufacturing techniques using electricity to create larger amounts of concrete and other materials for building specialized hydroelectric dams. You might also see the development of wind power to bring electricity to places where there's no real hydroelectric potential. Probably this would kick off the "iron and coal" phase, to the extent that it hasn't happened already, since you can use electricity to manufacture iron and steel in an electric furnace...
 

fasquardon

Workable Goblin said:
Well, we have historical examples of fairly large dams being built by pre-industrial peoples, e.g. the Jawa Dam; of course, those were earthen dams, mostly, but I'm not sure you couldn't adapt an earthen dam to produce hydropower if you were sufficiently clever. And, of course, you don't actually need a dam to produce hydropower, just large amounts of hydropower. The way I see it, hydroelectricity would initially be an upgrade to existing mechanical hydropower systems, replacing all the complex gearing and drive shafts with electrical wiring. Hence, at first it would not need any new dam construction.

The obvious value of hydroelectricity would probably, however, drive development of better hydroelectric locations and the development of new manufacturing techniques using electricity to create larger amounts of concrete and other materials for building specialized hydroelectric dams. You might also see the development of wind power to bring electricity to places where there's no real hydroelectric potential. Probably this would kick off the "iron and coal" phase, to the extent that it hasn't happened already, since you can use electricity to manufacture iron and steel in an electric furnace...
Click to expand...

Well, earthen dams require more repairs, with means less energy surplus available for the rest of the economy. Wooden working parts similarly are less efficient at transferring energy and also burn up more resources due to needing more frequent replacement...

I think a dam-fed revolution would require some fairly effective forestry techniques, since it seems to me that a minimum for this would be enough charcoal production to supply some amount of steel.

I wonder if New England and Scandinavia could manage that?

fasquardon
 

Windows95

Banned
Albrecht said:
Arab Golden Age, a reformed, secularised and modernized Ottomon Empire, a united Nordic Empire, a stronger and a more unified German or Baltic states are the best candidates I can think of, other than China.
Click to expand...
Why do you think the Arab Golden Age is the alternative candidate of industrialization?
 

Windows95

Banned
Hassan-i-Sabbah said:
Industrialization based on hydropower is a good possibility.
Click to expand...
But don't you need coal and energy for industrialization, or machines?
I don't think the Abbasids have the vast amount of hydropower resources to power their machines, and plus, what about electricity.
 

Deleted member 123260

Windows95 said:
But don't you need coal and energy for industrialization, or machines?
Click to expand...

Not really. Energy can be gained from other sources. What do you think alternative energy is?

I don't think the Abbasids have the vast amount of hydropower resources to power their machines, and plus, what about electricity.
Click to expand...

You just need energy which can be gained from hydropower and hydropower just needs rivers and other bodies of water. Electricity is a by product of energy production.
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

fasquardon said:
Well, earthen dams require more repairs, with means less energy surplus available for the rest of the economy. Wooden working parts similarly are less efficient at transferring energy and also burn up more resources due to needing more frequent replacement...
Click to expand...
It's still a significant advancement over using manual or animal labor. More importantly, remember that this would come after the development of textile manufacturing along the same lines as IOTL in the 1700s and early 1800s, which already relied on run-of-the-river or simple dam-fed hydropower transmitted using mechanical shafts rather than electrical wires. Even if you can't build concrete dams or afford steel machines, hydroelectricity is still far more flexible and capable than that.

I'm also skeptical that considerations of "available energy surplus" or "energy efficiency" or "EROEI" have any actual utility in the real world. In principle, yes, higher EROEI is better. In practice, it seems to me to be virtually impossible to come up with any kind of sensible figures in these areas, much less use them to predict which technologies are more or less effective.

fasquardon said:
I think a dam-fed revolution would require some fairly effective forestry techniques, since it seems to me that a minimum for this would be enough charcoal production to supply some amount of steel.
Click to expand...
I think steel turbines would be a later development. Think waterwheels with generators attached, at least at first.
 

fasquardon

Hassan-i-Sabbah said:
Coal isn't a fossil fuel. Fossil fuels are oil.
Click to expand...

Coal is absolutely a fossil fuel.

Workable Goblin said:
It's still a significant advancement over using manual or animal labor. More importantly, remember that this would come after the development of textile manufacturing along the same lines as IOTL in the 1700s and early 1800s, which already relied on run-of-the-river or simple dam-fed hydropower transmitted using mechanical shafts rather than electrical wires. Even if you can't build concrete dams or afford steel machines, hydroelectricity is still far more flexible and capable than that.
Click to expand...

Oh yes, it is most certainly an improvement over muscle power. The question is not "is this useful", the question is "does the provide the surplus value to allow re-investment into improvement for enough iteration cycles to result in something that can support serious industry".

Workable Goblin said:
I'm also skeptical that considerations of "available energy surplus" or "energy efficiency" or "EROEI" have any actual utility in the real world. In principle, yes, higher EROEI is better. In practice, it seems to me to be virtually impossible to come up with any kind of sensible figures in these areas, much less use them to predict which technologies are more or less effective.
Click to expand...

Have you ever looked closely at how GDP is calculated? Lemme tell you, that's one messy sausage inside the neat casing, and if what goes in is too different, you end up in a sausage that cannot be usefully be compared to another sausage (not to mention if the two sausages are minced up via different techniques). I think ERoI is similar. It is a useful idea, but the big benefits will await the time when all ERoI sausages are made to the same standard.

fasquardon
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

fasquardon said:
Oh yes, it is most certainly an improvement over muscle power. The question is not "is this useful", the question is "does the provide the surplus value to allow re-investment into improvement for enough iteration cycles to result in something that can support serious industry".
Click to expand...
Well, if you want to phrase it that way...obviously yes. But of course phrasing it that way hunting and gathering provided sufficient "surplus value to allow re-investment into improvement for enough iteration cycles". It only took about a million years or so and several bootstraps up past hunting and gathering...but I never said that hydroelectricity would be fast (indeed, I specifically said it would probably be slow) or final. Just that textile mills and other water-powered industries could eventually transition to electrical transmission of power, then others could utilize that power for other industrial purposes (transportation, steel production, etc.). That could very well lead to hydroelectricity becoming obsolete once better methods are developed using it as a staging point, much the same way that IOTL mechanical hydropower became obsolete (or, indeed, how hydroelectricity, despite initially being the primary source of electrical power everywhere, is now rather a secondary source in most places).

fasquardon said:
Have you ever looked closely at how GDP is calculated? Lemme tell you, that's one messy sausage inside the neat casing, and if what goes in is too different, you end up in a sausage that cannot be usefully be compared to another sausage (not to mention if the two sausages are minced up via different techniques). I think ERoI is similar. It is a useful idea, but the big benefits will await the time when all ERoI sausages are made to the same standard.
Click to expand...
I never said that GDP was better.
 

fasquardon

Workable Goblin said:
Well, if you want to phrase it that way...obviously yes. But of course phrasing it that way hunting and gathering provided sufficient "surplus value to allow re-investment into improvement for enough iteration cycles". It only took about a million years or so and several bootstraps up past hunting and gathering...but I never said that hydroelectricity would be fast (indeed, I specifically said it would probably be slow) or final. Just that textile mills and other water-powered industries could eventually transition to electrical transmission of power, then others could utilize that power for other industrial purposes (transportation, steel production, etc.). That could very well lead to hydroelectricity becoming obsolete once better methods are developed using it as a staging point, much the same way that IOTL mechanical hydropower became obsolete (or, indeed, how hydroelectricity, despite initially being the primary source of electrical power everywhere, is now rather a secondary source in most places).
Click to expand...

Well, yes, this is my own feeling as well. But it's just a gut feeling. It would be a difficult thing to demonstrate.

Workable Goblin said:
I never said that GDP was better.
Click to expand...

Fair enough - I happen to think GDP is a useful sausage.

fasquardon
 
Workable Goblin

Workable Goblin

Hassan-i-Sabbah said:
@Workable Goblin

This may not be the right thread for this but would permaculture mitigate climate change.
Click to expand...
I don't know? I'm a physicist, not a botanist or agronomist, so I'm really not the best person to ask. But based on what I know some permaculture practices could be beneficial in climate change scenarios by sinking carbon into the soil at enhanced rates or by producing food ecosystems with somewhat more resilience to climate change effects than conventional agriculture. These are not likely to be especially large, though.
 

Albrecht

Banned
Continuing the Arab Golden Age and the fuels needed, its possible for Hydropower to drive industries powered by electricity. But you first need to discover Electricity and Thermodynamics for that. One way or the other, you need some heat related fuel. See, even today 75+℅ of energy we get come from thermal sources including the renewable Solar Thermal power?

So that puts them at a requirement for a fuel. That's not an issue, if they kick off an Age of Enlightenment by staying in that trend during the Abbasid era, they could have used Oil to fuel the Industrial revolution. This Abbasid Empire could stretch from Atlantic to almost the Western China.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top
Top