What is the most advanced a pre-industrial society can be?

Water wheel is going to pump water to homes to drive hydraulic appliances?
Depends on the kind of water engines and appliances being used. Some high-pressure ones were fundamentally driven by steam engines or other fossil fuels, but some of the lower pressure ones weren't. @Escape Zeppelin has already provided one useful link to how various forms of water power were used historically, but just to repeat it, see: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/water-power/ and the various links which are within it.
 
Wouldn't someone eventually invent a Stirling engine? In theory, there's nothing stopping any society with decent skills at machinery and metallurgy (like early modern Europe) from inventing a Stirling engine.
The first society to invent a Stirling engine would be tempted to go full Draka on their neighbours.

A Stirling Engine is not, strictly speaking, a Steam Engine. It's a heat engine, which if we can find a stationary source of strong head could actually be quite a useful tool industrially speaking. It could be, for example, used as a means of capturing geothermial power by building sites near natural heat vents to create presses or as all-weather winders (for clockwork spring battery-boxes) or compressing air into canisters for pneumatic systems. I imagine you'll have to have the insulators/conductors shifted by muscle power and the fitting of the air canisters onto an airtight loading nozzle might be a bit fine work to have fully automized to a part of the machine itself in earlier modles, but so long as one is willing to accept the volume and likely limitied mobility to make up for the low size-output ratio I can see them as having a high place in heavy industry.

Water wheel is going to pump water to homes to drive hydraulic appliances?

I presume in a world where hyraulic appliances are common we aren't going to be drawing it a long distance via pipes in bursts the same way we do electricity. Off the top of my head, I could see buildings getting installed with water tower like systems (Which would have the added bonus of having built-in systems to collect rainwater) which one gets a contract to have filled (or is filled as a public utility) with X amount of water every X period of time. This would be used to supply the provided the water supply for the device itself while generating some of the power the appliance needs as it flows down through piping via the magic of gravity. As for the rest, the appliance would need to be plugged into a source of energy; maybe a home pneumatic system, and any long-distance infastructure of transport powered by a combination of wind, waterwheel, and animal/muscle power.

Though, now that I think that through, since the POD I pointed out to make coal non-viable (The lack of an effective water pump to get access to most subterranian coal deposits until other technology is well-developed and established enough to make infant steam engines economically unproductive, thus never adopted to the point that motivates it to develop behyond a "technological dead end") would mean that system would have to come in late and only once hyrdaulics have been well-established. Perhaps realistically getting this situation to occur is tricker than I initially thought...

I'll mull things over a little more, but if anybody comes up with any ideas as to how to get hydraulics infrastructure up without somehow getting access to cheap coal please contribute it to this thread.
 
A Stirling Engine is not, strictly speaking, a Steam Engine. It's a heat engine, which if we can find a stationary source of strong head could actually be quite a useful tool industrially speaking. It could be, for example, used as a means of capturing geothermial power by building sites near natural heat vents to create presses or as all-weather winders (for clockwork spring battery-boxes) or compressing air into canisters for pneumatic systems. I imagine you'll have to have the insulators/conductors shifted by muscle power and the fitting of the air canisters onto an airtight loading nozzle might be a bit fine work to have fully automized to a part of the machine itself in earlier modles, but so long as one is willing to accept the volume and likely limitied mobility to make up for the low size-output ratio I can see them as having a high place in heavy industry.

I'm not an engineer, but from what I get, all a Stirling engine needs is a heat source, which although steam/coal is a great source of heat, you could use a lot of alternative sources. Biofuel is pretty useful for these Stirling engines--process the manure from animals working alongside the Stirling engine into fuel for the Stirling engine, and for that matter, you could even process the excrement from the human workers for fuel for burning, which would improve sanitation.

Solar power is pretty useful too for this.
 
I'll mull things over a little more, but if anybody comes up with any ideas as to how to get hydraulics infrastructure up without somehow getting access to cheap coal please contribute it to this thread.

It doesn't seem impossible, just difficult. After all, the industrial revolution was majority water powered for the first 40 years. They're already operating heavy machinery like pumps off of water wheels and using equipment like hydraulic accumulators so building up a hydraulic power network seems more an investment and economic issue than a purely technical one.

Perhaps in the 1830's or 40's a big steam engine explodes in London causing a coal fire that burns a large portion of the city. In the aftermath the public demands a safer alternative and Parliament decrees that factories in London must use hydraulic power instead of coal. The economic advantage of locking coal out results in the creation of several competing London hydraulic companies and a boost in turbine research. While expensive, the new system proves remarkably popular with the public since there's significantly less smoke, risk of fire, and fewer smokestacks around the city. Newspapers and yellow journalism jump on the bandwagon by declaring that London's health was improving and that coal smoke is clearly poisoning everyone, stoking a paranoia about coal. With London's success and the technological refinements coming out of it other places begin to adopt similar systems. "New Safety hydraulics instead of that nasty coal that will murder your family in a terrible fire". Several company factory towns in New England convert over. By 1850 or 60 it's common for the homes of the wealthy to be connected to this new water grid, providing both water but also power for the first in-home appliances. Urban heating and hot water are increasingly provided by a combination of this and the existing gas distribution system for lighting. City fires (which were a huge problem in the 1800's) are increasingly rare. This in turn creates a whole new demand for canal and dam construction to provide more power and water.

At least that's one idea.

Coal is clearly has the advantage in areas where water and waterwheel suitable rivers are less common but the industrial base in this history is remaining much more confined to those initial areas. I think eventually coal-powered pumps for this new hydraulic system are almost inevitable but they're more like central power plants instead of everybody burning coal.

I did come across this crazy gem though while looking up turbines: It's in French but it's "Hydraulics applied. New system of locomotion on the railways." a method for fluid bearings and hydraulic propulsion for locomotives in 1853. https://books.google.com/books?id=4CtWAAAAcAAJ
 
I think the trick would be delaying or butter flying away the concept of the steam powered pump being used to drain out subterranean coal mines. Without access to cheap coal (wood is a whole lot less efficient), the steam engine becomes less economically viable compared to water, wind, and tensile power (Especially if you develop automated methods using the first two, like water wheels attached to complex gearboxes, and clockwork spring conglomerates to create a kind of tensile battery system). Advances to produce more and greater efficiency 'generators' down an alternate tech path and you can eventually reach a point where the infrastructure is laid down enough and power production cheap enough to render early steam engines unpractical commercially

Thats a big ask. You could delay steam pumps, sure. But to the point where incompatible infrastructure is widespread? Given that there really isn't anything incompatible, an even bigger ask.
 
The Dutch used, and still use, wind power to pump out water from their below-sealevel polders.
I only found a Dutch Wikipedia article, but google translate is a thing.
Don't overestimate this. Almost all were replaced in the 19th century by gemalen: fossil fueled pump stations. The article says that there's only one place left that really uses wind power as the headpump, and that is probably more for nostalgic/touristic than for practical reasons.

besides that we used already in the 17th century a lot of peat as a heating fuel.
 

Deleted member 67076

How about radios? The earliest ones as far as I know weren't very complicated to build.
 
I'm not an engineer, but from what I get, all a Stirling engine needs is a heat source, which although steam/coal is a great source of heat, you could use a lot of alternative sources. Biofuel is pretty useful for these Stirling engines--process the manure from animals working alongside the Stirling engine into fuel for the Stirling engine, and for that matter, you could even process the excrement from the human workers for fuel for burning, which would improve sanitation.

Solar power is pretty useful too for this.

Oh Din the STENCH...

That's certainly an option, but I think solar or geothermal heat is probably a better option. Dung has a fairly high value as fertilizer, after all, and if the engine dosent need to be moved you could tap into heat sources which don't require hauling in supplies in order to get larger engine sizes and thus industrially useful levels of force.

It doesn't seem impossible, just difficult. After all, the industrial revolution was majority water powered for the first 40 years. They're already operating heavy machinery like pumps off of water wheels and using equipment like hydraulic accumulators so building up a hydraulic power network seems more an investment and economic issue than a purely technical one.

Perhaps in the 1830's or 40's a big steam engine explodes in London causing a coal fire that burns a large portion of the city. In the aftermath the public demands a safer alternative and Parliament decrees that factories in London must use hydraulic power instead of coal. The economic advantage of locking coal out results in the creation of several competing London hydraulic companies and a boost in turbine research. While expensive, the new system proves remarkably popular with the public since there's significantly less smoke, risk of fire, and fewer smokestacks around the city. Newspapers and yellow journalism jump on the bandwagon by declaring that London's health was improving and that coal smoke is clearly poisoning everyone, stoking a paranoia about coal. With London's success and the technological refinements coming out of it other places begin to adopt similar systems. "New Safety hydraulics instead of that nasty coal that will murder your family in a terrible fire". Several company factory towns in New England convert over. By 1850 or 60 it's common for the homes of the wealthy to be connected to this new water grid, providing both water but also power for the first in-home appliances. Urban heating and hot water are increasingly provided by a combination of this and the existing gas distribution system for lighting. City fires (which were a huge problem in the 1800's) are increasingly rare. This in turn creates a whole new demand for canal and dam construction to provide more power and water.

At least that's one idea.

Coal is clearly has the advantage in areas where water and waterwheel suitable rivers are less common but the industrial base in this history is remaining much more confined to those initial areas. I think eventually coal-powered pumps for this new hydraulic system are almost inevitable but they're more like central power plants instead of everybody burning coal.

I did come across this crazy gem though while looking up turbines: It's in French but it's "Hydraulics applied. New system of locomotion on the railways." a method for fluid bearings and hydraulic propulsion for locomotives in 1853. https://books.google.com/books?id=4CtWAAAAcAAJ

I'm not saying you can't put up hydraulic rather than coal/steam infrastructure; the trick is getting into a position where the former is the more convenient and economical choice on a large enough scale to hamstring steam engine development early enough to allow for hydraulics to cement their preeminent position. I like what you're doing with complimenting the heating of water by using the byproduct waste heat of the gas lighting system... though I was under the impression the primary gas used was coal gas?

One issue I see with this scenario is that it could very easily lead to London not developing into a key industrial center, which leads to steam still being adopted on a large scale in other regions and thus still becoming the main power source. Though if this happens in several British industrial centers in quick succession... That could convince the industrialists that steam engines are so inherently unstable that any efficiency benefit they have would be vastly overshadowed by the capital lose they cause.
 
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