This is a topic I've wanted to cover for a long time! Given its complexity we opted for a long-form discussion style to really dive into the details (and even then, this is a quite abridged take on the topic). Hope you enjoy! Also be sure to check out the medieval survival/strategy/sim game Bellwright: rebrand.ly/invictabellwright
This is an old debate and even before I watch your video I can comment on this. Slavery was so important and cheap that if they had machines doing the work of slaves, slaves would no longer be necessary and that would pose an incredible social problem in the form of more slave revolts but it was more than that. Since it was a slave based economy, despite seeming like a semi capitalist, semi socialist agrarian, society, people didn't think in terms of labor saving machines in the way we see it. The economy was based on scarcity as it is today, except the Western world hasn't dealt with famine in a long time and the price of grain was central to ancient economies but Roman society collapsed, IMHO, because of devaluing currency while there was more silver and gold flowing east than back to the West. A massive trade imbalance caused this as well as new sources of silver and gold drying up. Romans spent itself into ruin. Their taxes often only covered the cost of maintaining security. We can debate the Fall of the Roman Empire forever and it wasn't just one thing but if you have an upper class pissing away cash on luxuries and you aren't getting enough revenue, and you can't pay for the defence of the borders under increasing pressure while people's faith in the value of currency and quality of leadership wanes, it's a perfect recipe for a disaster and I'm sure people knew it was coming. I warn any person looking into the past to not view their world through modern eyes and project our views of the world into people in the past. Ancient people were so superstitious they couldn't understand the natural world and invented a god for every thing in their world except us Jews. Romans even started to not trust the gods and sought other faiths, which Christianity gave them. The Byzantine and Sassinid empire exhausted themselves fighting leaving the West and Near East open for a new power Islam to take hold but slavery continued into the 19th century. If you read Adam Smith's wealth of nations he demonstrated that slaves cost more to. Acquire and maintain than free labor and he did predict a civil war because there would finally be a time where it was better to have a poor free labor class vs expensive slaves. The South didn't have slaves in the same numbers as Romans to keep replacing. The were an investment vs expendable. So by 1860, the world was finally ready to end slavery and I have to admit that the emancipation proclamation was to destroy the Southern economy and not based on a moral decision. It was instead a military one. During the peninsula campaign in Virginia, slaves were first listed as contraband and Newport News VA was ground zero for the first instance of this major event in human history. Remember that it took until 164 years ago for our society to do something about the evil of slavery but it still exists in the Congo where pygmies are owned by other black people and despite a superficial ban on slavery, it still exists in Islamic society. China was caught with slaves in Africa already. Hamas forced Jewish hostages to clean their house and apartment to reenact the Qur'an. It's still human perception that rules the slave world. Congoese say they refuse to give up pygmy slaves because it's a status symbol. Romans could never perceive their world without slaves as do cultures that exist today!
How could you dare speaking about the industrial revolution and pretend explaining what led to it without saying the word capitalism ? How in the world ? People left the farms and founded factories ? What kind of liberal fairy tale is that ? Villages were burnt by land owners, with people in it. You ever heard of the enclosure ? The sacralization of private property ?
How could you dare speaking about the industrial revolution and pretend explaining what led to it without saying the word capitalism ? How in the world ? People left the farms and founded factories ? What kind of liberal fairy tale is that ? Villages were burnt by self proclamed land owners, with people in it. Have you ever heard of the enclosures ?
If we would want simulate realistic tech progression in video games. Then there is something like concept of disruptive technologies. So some inventions actually cause negative effects, changing how things are done. The classic example. The ironworks! Contrary to popular believes iron weapon was at least initially weaker then bronze counterparts, but it was way cheaper and did not demand complex trade networks to gain ingredients. So when it was popularized, Bronze Age empires lost they advantage with many small tribes who rapidly could gain equal armament in large numbers. This put the in long run disadvantage leading to Bronze Age collapse (among things). Same with development of feudalism. It basically hammer your tax revenue, but you gain huge buff to bottom up agricultural development. It is basically what did kill Rome. Most players would not like rapidly lost abilities, as such games cheat keeping only positive changes.
An unappreciated factor is the addition of Western Hemisphere crops. Potatoes are the most critical crop brought to the Eastern Hemisphere, and became a critical food source in the 18th century.
@@RovingTroll Even before that, Britain had an "agricultural revolution" before the industrial one due to innovations like Four Field Rotation, better plows and other tools. This was arguably a prerequisite to the Industrial Revolution, as it raised the amount of surplus food, allowing cities to grow.
Stirrups. It's always the stirrups that mess with me. People riding horses for thousands of years, working with leather, and metal. Everybody looking for the best way to bonk somebody from a horse...and they try everything BUT simply attaching a pair of looped ropes to each side of the bottom of the saddle until...what? 750 AD? As a kid, that told me tech was not linear or inevitable.
Somewhere I read that reconstructional archaeologist (and illustrator) Peter Connolly's experiments with the Roman four-horned saddle proved it to be very good at keeping the rider in the saddle. You could even slide down on the side of the horse without falling off by securing your leg under one of the horns. The Romans were among the first to use the solid saddle tree, a necessary prerequisite for using stirrups because of the weight destribution on the horse's back.
Tribalism (in this case, clan system). The thing that hold back many civilizations for thousands of years. You can never became industrial society with tribalism. Tribalism tied vast majority of the people to one clan and to one region, making modern concept of corporation, complex supply chain, mass worker migration, and mass mechanization/industrialization nigh impossible to implement. Thing is, Roman society was tribal in nature. Rennaisance era Western Europe and Ming China were IMO the only major civilizations managed to evolve out of tribalism by the 16th century.
Uh, everyone forgets that huge fact that most western civilizations in Europe didn't need stirrups, because they didn't need horses for combat. Horses are only in their forte' in open areas, like plains and steppes. So, no need to invent stirrups. But, the people who needed to invent them, the Scythians/Parthians et al, did so. Stirrups only became important to western civ through their use in Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium when the western mounted "Knights" discovered their great use in combat. Thus, the Byzantines needed them because they were getting inundated by plains people WITH stirrups from the east and north east.
@@mutteringmale It's not so much that they didn't need horses as it is that the East just used them more heavily and in a way where stirrups benefitted them. Obviously they used horses heavily, for horse archery. They can't keep any hands on the rein when shooting, so a stirrup helps in providing stability as well as control over the horse in the absence of hands. For the Macedonians and Romans, they usually had one hand free for the reins because they weren't really doing anything where a second hand would benefit them, so stirrups are less needed. But it would have been nice I'm sure and perhaps enabled a greater variety of tactics. To note, they used cavalry to cover and/or attack the flanks, and many a battle was determined by the use of these cavalry. So to say that horses weren't needed is very inaccurate.
I didn't say they didn't need horses, but horses were like Maseratis in price for the average peasant and mules!!! More than horses. Peasants had to with oxen, which were much more suited to farm work anyway. That's why horses were the sign of wealth and usually only the nobility rode them.
The steam engine was way more advanced and complicated to produce than most people realize Just the ability to produce a waterproof boiler was actually a huge feat
I once had a look at a period copy of the construction drawings for a Patentee type locomotive from the 1830s. Way, WAY, more complex then people might assume.
@_kalia thry also couldn't do much because they were wildly inefficient, we had rudimentary steam engines for way longer than they actually served a functional purpose other than scientific novelty
@@someguycalledCh0wdah Actually the main problem of steam engine was metallurgy. For instance, Cugnot's fardier from 1770 used a very crude boiler and a very very primitive engine, and it worked, but was hampered by the use of copper and cast iron, which made it very heavy and quite brittle. What changed the game was the discovery of actual chemistry (thanks to Lavoisier) and the use of coal, which led to a better understanding of how to create a much more efficient steel metallurgy. Stream engines have been known to at least 2000 years by then, but the metals to handle it didn't exist before the end of the XVIIIth century. The use of much more reliable, lighter metals allowed for the creation of much more refined engines.
There's a small rail line of historical rail trains here. One of the (now) three trains is a steam train. The cost to fix it is enormous. In part because of the experts but more, because there are specialized parts that aren't made anymore and they used extremely specialized wrenches.
something else not mentioned, that puts together both Material science and steam, Is that While steam is AMAZING, It's damn near useless on an industrial scale without PRESSURE. You need a way to not just make steam, but to contain it, and have it create a lot of pressure, so it can push things like pistons with enough force to move something heavy ( or move itself, like a train ). And to be able to contain those pressures, you need the metallurgy to make vessels that can contain that pressure. That means not just the vessel walls, but things like if it used any kind of rivets, or any other connection with another piece of metal, to form the shape. Then you also need seals that can handle the heat, and hold back the pressure. And that's just the vessel. There's more to a steam engine than just the vessel. The pipes, connection of one pipe to another, Springs to make automatic opening and closing valves There's a chance someone could have easily tried to scale up that spinning steam toy, to do work, but the experiments would have failed, due to them not being able to build up enough pressure to do enough work, to make it all worth it. Many of these different things that they did or did not know and use, are all intertwined, and build on each other. A true industrial revolution would have required quite a lot of different sciences all coming together, to make the entire revolution happen. But, it's super fun to think about just how close they were, or were not, and in what ways they were more advanced than we though, and in the ways they were no where near close.
@@Fearmylogic A Newcomen style engine would certainly be possible in terms of pressure, since it worked at low-single-digit PSI and the negative pressure of condensing steam. High pressure steam was a later development even in the irl industrial revolution due to the difficulty in containing it, but Newcomen engines could have boilers made from relatively primitive materials and methods. That said, the other issue you run into with a Newcomen engine is that you need a wide piston to generate decent force from such low pressure, and that wasn't really possible until tools were invented for making sufficiently cylindrical bores of that size.
early steam engines were soldered copper, humans have been soldering since mesopotamia and rome had access to high quality copper, as well as stronger metals if needed. had someone had the vision, they surely could have overcome the obstacles in front of them with a lifetime or two of engineering. the science was a small barrier compared to the economic base. near all the workers in rome were tied up in agriculture, so there was nobody to fill the supply chains industrial society needed. in 1800 only 35% of brits farmed, for context, with the others selling their labor mostly. and even in that context, it was the bourgeois and petty bourgeois who lead the economic shifts that brought about capitalism, and rome had very very few of these classes, instead having mostly patricians, plebs, and slaves. I wont delve too far in but those classes had incentives that lead them to more efficient production and forming a different relationship between workers and work, those incentives were absent from rome.
I don't think I can put into words how much I love these well prepared discussion videos. Combined with looking at the "unsexy" topics like logistics and industry is just wonderful.
@@stasi0238 He’s got a point about being incomplete, though. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the Roman’s were master architects, but you gotta admit that several of their fields, even their better ones, just don’t match the massive amounts of information that people have today.
“Unsexy” topics are only unsexy to the bubble heads that work in the corporate media. That’s an apolitical statement by the way, it occurs all over the place.
I had a quote posted in my office it read "innovation is a conundrum, it rests when things are good, it thrives on anarchy and chaos". And I think that's valid, and it goes along with another quote "war is the mother of all invention".
@@mboyer68 and both are correct and wrong at the same time. While the most "inventive" periods are well aligned with war time, plenty of inventions or discoveries couldn't have been made in wartime due to the sheer scale of them requiring international collaboration, or the investment of resources into something apparently completely useless.
Something that lives rent free in my head: The technological relationship between roman roads and the established standards of the automotive industry. To this day, we can't escape the design choices that were made centuries ago.
The massive amount of tiny factors that need to align is staggering. The importance of screw threads, potatoes, tree types, and so many other things in helping.
Materials science is always the precursor of great change. You can make the most precisely manufactured screw in history, but if it's made of brass or iron it's not very useful. Look at the explosion of new tech in recent history when thermoplastics were invented
@@jakel2837 Could you imagine if we had NOT invented Bakelite before the world wars? Elephants would have been a strategic resource 🤢🤢🤢 Taking the ivory for yourself or, even worse, denying the enemy by wiping out their elephants. And we would have, too, wouldn't we?
When you started speaking to paradigm shifts, I was brought back to my History of Science classes as an undergrad. It's amazing how apparent and subtle truly revolutionary ideas are after the fact. Being locked into a paradigm can be a significant barrier to innovation.
The answer is, very far away. I long thought they could have industrialized, but I've been convinced industrialization required an incredibly precise environment. Namely, a situation where it was economical to develop a steam powered water pump. That only happened because Britain needed coal after depleting its forests, and it was economical to use an inefficient pump to remove water from coal mines, using the very coal to power it.
If the elites were worried a steam powered ship would make rowing slaves unnecessary and hurt the slave market profits, a psychopath like Caligula might burn slaves instead of coal! 😊
Not just that, but all the technology was largely contingent on both other tech developments, AND on the necessity and demand to use such tech innovations. Like, the Byzantines had steam engines on a small scale with their automata, but they didnt have any need or reason to upscale that technology, and they didnt have the metallurgy to do it on an industrial scale, among other issues.
Except that in great Britain and Europe they'd been using water powered vacuum pumps to clear mines for at least 2 centuries before steam powered water pumps. They needed more power to pump from greater depths, it had zilch to do with GB cutting down its trees
honestly man, the absolute best thing about this video is that you guys explained with absolute detail about the factors that caused Industrial revolution and debunking the "Gamingfication" of progress and technological development, because too many times, so many people doesn't understand that it takes far FAR more than just a few fancy tool to start Industrial revolution still related to the context of the Video, although not related to the Roman empire, my country, Republic of Indonesia is part of a newly industrialized country, Indonesia is part of G20, 60% of Indonesian population now lives in urban areas, and Indonesia's manufacturing output, being the absolute largest in southeast asia and one of the top 10 largest in the world still keep increasing rapidly especially due to government's downstreaming program, linking all these factors that you guys already explained with the history of Indonesia's economic development, i can see it all far more clearly now.
That's a facly though as can and don't are two very different things... For exemple only 3 nations or so have made their own 5th gen fighter jets and two are second world meaning they are 30 years or more behind behind the first world nations in every measureable way... But only 1 is first world... Under the falcy you assume they can't because take Germany for exemple they culatorlly are anti war and lack the budget to design one... I and the gamers say they easly have the tech they just choose not to... as if they can't how can't they?
Brianarigan l actually cannot express how genuinely criminaly underated this comment actually is and this world actually genuinely needs more people actually like you in this world and community actually genuinely needs more people actually like you in this world and you actually couldn't have said that actually any better than me lol and long live China and Indonesian friendship ❤😂🎉🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🤝🇮🇩🇮🇩🇮🇩
To have industrial or any kind of technological massive advances you need several things. A long period of good government and no major external threats.] For example, Caesar Augustus, greatest period of peace and prosperity in all the Roman empire. But, if he had come along a couple of hundred years later, even he couldn't have saved Rome.
The roman empire had the political unification and money to make things happen. The "proto industrialization" of 15th century DID eventually lead to the actual industrial revolution.
@@mhdfrb9971 I have heard claimed that the Arsenale was a proto-industrial manufacturing facility. That they discovered how to organise each step of production like on an assembly line, by dividing them into workshops and teams dedicated to a certain task. Then these parts of ships would be kept in reserve, which then could finally be quickly assembled and combined into a new ship in a day. It was one of the most closely guarded secret of the repuclic of Venice.
The primary faction I'm writing for in my fictional setting is largely based on Rome, so this video is tremendously helpful for me figuring out a few of the nitty-gritty details I want to include in passing dialogue or exposition in my story. Thank you so much for this, this is impossibly helpful!
So much was needed. Italian banking innovations, an island made of coal with easy sea access and navigable waterways, a political settlement that split church and state and which placed large amounts of land and capital in the hands of private individuals, ready markets, printing and a ready means for disseminating new ideas, a coffee house culture...
1:18:00 Engineer here, the thing about steam bein able to take more and more heat is not about storing but about the change of pressure you get and how fast it changes, this thing is called superheating and it's used only in the more advanced stema engines like 2nd industrial revolution timeframe, not for sure on the Newcommen engine where most power don't even come from the steam expansion but it's condensation afterwards and the counterpressure from the Atmosphere and so it's sometimes called Newcommen atmospheric engine.
the fireless locomotive, which runs on stored steam independently pre-generated. An example is the Solar Steam Train project in california that tries to revive the tek
Im an hvac tech learning about superheat and supercooling now for gas and oil furnaces lol Didn’t know where he was going with that until he said superheat then it made sense mostly we don’t learn about steam engines
There was social aspects, too. To get enough concentrated/extra labor to get an industrial revolution started, they almost would have HAD to loosen their slave-based economy. I can't imagine that would be easy or possible for the golden era of imperial Rome.
The romans were not the only society with manumission. This is a common trait. Southern slaves were not "culled" to any reasonable degree... @@mutteringmale
@@chillin5703 Yes they were. Certain slaves were moved into the categories of "house Ni.......s" and Field Nig....s". The master determine who got to share a shack and "marry" each other. The trip over culled all the weak. The trip by the arabs to the slave pens on the coast of africa culled them. The biggest culling was when black tribes enslaved other black tribes to sell to the Arabs. They killed all the children, the weak, the old and the maimed for the coffle. Look up "coffle". Almost none of this is taught in our horrible, censored, fake news history classes in the west. BTW. where they were held in Africa was called a "factory". Most of this is censored on goowghol.
Generally slaves are bad for an economy. However many of the free inhabitants of Rome were non-citizens as well, it is very wrong to lump non-citizens and citizens into the same pot as well. It is basically an Empire with inbuilt socially determined colonies which is quite powerful again.
@@mf9463 That is the PC version of history taught in the last 40 years. Careful what you read and who read it to you, and what agenda did they have or unknowingly have, which are 99% of the deadbeat teachers of the teacher's union. Slaves are NOT bad for the economy. Slavery is a bad thing, but that's a very western-centric viewpoint, just as any arab with his little slave boys in Kandahar slave market Afghanistan for little boys.
I wasnt ready holy shit, an incredibly deep and well put together video, I thought about 10 mins in when we're on evolutionary history, "damn this guy should just publish this in a journal", then realised wait no! this is such a better format, why bother?
One thing that I have to comment on is the topic of the steam turbine. As an engineer, it really grinds my gears when people say that 'the Romans missed just one step to inventing a turbine' and follow it by justifying a myriad of reasons for why it didn't happen, without considering just how difficult this supposed 'one step' actually is. I understand that not everyone is aware of it, but I've seen it so often now that I'm just tired of it NGL. I think the best explanation I found for this is a video by the engineering guy, linked below. th-cam.com/video/-8lXXg8dWHk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=vhvthPzgbtXGD9xe. I think that this topic in particular is also one of the 'not enough changes to other technological and scientific spheres of development'. Anyway, I'll end my rant here, great video as always.
Imo, the invention of the steam turbine is the transition into the modern world. The steam expansion engine was the primary engine type up to the 1910s and fits more of the “industrial” period. Surprisingly, it is the rise of the dreadnought battleship and the arms race of that class that advanced steam turbine technology. Steam turbines are still the peak of energy conversion engines today.
I am a mechanical engineer AND fabricator, that can do most of the metal work sheet or solid, hand and machine work in my shop. Transport me in the Roman times and I could not do much, because even the tech from 200 years ago IS COMPLICATED involving a LOT of BIG machinery of all kinds, labs, measuring equipment, hell, decimal system and unified measuring system was not invented. Try multiplying in roman numerals. NO GO.
Yes! They say that tech trees are not realistic... but it's the most accurate representation I can think of. Technologies do have dependencies among themselves, some discoveries make easier to discover others, and of course its not "linear", but tech trees also do not necessarily behave linearly, you can leave one area underdeveloped and focus on other ones, it's just that then you will most likely have some technologies blocked off that might prevent further development significantly. Notice how after we landed on the moon, the technology did not progress much further when it comes to achieving human exploration of space, but that research allowed us to unlock a lot of other (seemingly unrelated) tech that has been used to bump progress in many fields on Earth. Things like satellites were revolutionary for many spheres of our technology, topography, military, communications, weather control, research in pollution, the internet, etc. A lot of technologies like that work transversally.. think for example of computer technology, it made other fields advance in ways that would have simply not been possible.
@@panan7777 You might not be able to right away. However once you start teaching other Romans about more modern systems, science and engineering then you would see a large amount of innovation and change.
Fellas this is an amazing video. The thoughtfulness that was put into this publication is amazing. You guys poured heart and soul into this presentation. Thank you for your history and presentation
Great presentation! Modern people typically view history through the modern contextual lens. It's refreshing to see these past people acknowledged as being smart and resourceful. We don't know what we don't know until we know we didn't know. A similar video will be made about us 300 years from now. Hopefully.
@Cara-39 Yes, but not my point. For example, Rome had many slaves. It was an accepted class of civilization. Were they evil or was it a function of that time's current industrial requirement? We would call it evil. They would call it necessary. If you asked the slaves (mostly Europeans), they would have called it their lot in life. Or, rebelled.
Ever since I got interested in history, back when I was 10 years old, I always claimed that: had the Romans invented the lathe (not that ancient one for wood, but one for metal), then the industrial revolution would've happened about 1500 years earlier. The lathe was smithable with the technology of their time, especially the later period, when they were using the first blast furnaces copied from the chinese to produce better quality metals. People used to think that it was a ridiculous idea when I was a kid, but it seems that this theory is getting more and more support lately, but idk what changed peoples minds... The lathe is considered "the mother of all tools" for good reason! It's just that the population has to "see the potential" of these technologies... if people don't care to change or even don't want to, there won't be change/development.
Apart from how impressive and outright fascinating this is (thank you guys, that was really awesome) - I think Miro should sponsor you 😀 I’ve used it a lot as a PM for project plans, flowcharts, you name it. But what you guys have there is MASSIVE 😀😉 keep up the good work 🤘
What was very recently discovered about Roman concrete (as in this year IIRC), what made it so durable, is that it used a small amount of limestone as part of the aggregate. At first this was thought to be just sloppy using what was available, since the limestone was weaker than the rest of the aggregate. But it turns out that the limestone leaches minerals into the micro-cracking which develops over time, making it self-repairing and thereby more durable.
You're conflating the term Battery with Capacitor. If it stores energy for an extended period of time, it's a battery; if it simply acts as a ballast reservoir for energy to be reintroduced after being shunted out, it is a capacitor.
Another way to look at it is that the ancient Greeks actually considered what we considered parts of the Industrial Revolution to be mere toys to be played with and not actually used for work
In reality, probably not close at all. To have an industrial revolution, you must have a society where the incentive to invest in industry is high. Rome's massive amount of slaves hold them back in this regard, as there is no incentive to invest in industry if human labour is dirt cheap. Also, I don't think it could have stopped Rome's fall, which was mostly caused by internal factors such as inflation and political instability.
@@MIKE_THE_BRUMMIE Industrial revolution benefited almost exclusivly England. The investments in Scotland by London were the absolute minimum. The union prevented Scotland from forming trade deals with foreign nations and establishing its own industry.
@@ZOMBIEo07 I agree with you and that disparity was felt in England too from north to south. I'm saying without Wales, Scotland and Ireland...what would England be. I believe in an equal union as peers a Confederate Union where what you're saying would be possible.
@InvictaHistory 33:40 Major historical oversight: People didn't start moving into the cities willingly in England. People were thrown off their land by their landlords, in order to grow cash crops (especially wool), knowing that factories in the cities needed labour (and likely some of them were shareholders). The burning down of peasant houses is where we get the term 'fired'. It's not unique, either - in Russia, St Petersburg specifically had workers directed there by the Tsar. 1:28:00 Also for goodness sake, 1500C is not 50% hotter than 1000C. 0C is ~273K (same unit size, but starts at absolute zero). And because you asked engineers to @ you, steam is not a battery, it's a force transfer mechanism.
But what he means by a "battery" is that you can store energy continuously until it is needed. There is no functional limit to the energy that you can put into it, besides the strength of the vessel, until you want to use that energy. Short of a flywheel there isn't anything comparable that could be made in that era to store energy that I can think of.
Another major flaw at 33:15. In hundreds of PERCENT yes, but that is definitely not 10*, 20* or 30* or even 400(!) times 😳. From I've I've quickly googled and a paper written by a university of California historian Gregory Clark, the output per farm worker in Britain from 1300 to 1850 increased about 4.4* or 440%.
It's a topic mulled over by many. My take is that England common law and property rights is why the industrial revolution could only have happened in Britain first
Maybe because this is the only large place left in the world where you can still voice an opinion, even if google censors many of us? I dream of a day of an absolutely free internet, not one run by the fascisti at gogle.
@@MIKE_THE_BRUMMIE I think it could have happened in ancient Greece had they shared their knowledge amongst the different states. (they had a crappy steam engine but also the tech' to design condensers, valves etc..) I think we can go back to to Henry the 8th and his excommunication from the Catholic church. That made it possible for science to flourish, eventually ending in the enlightenment.
I'm an engineer, not an expert on the Industrial Revolution, but I would have thought you would also need elements such as: * Metrology, with measuring instruments capable of resolution to thousands of an inch/hundredths of a millimetre * A culture and procedures for inspection and quality (for interchangeability) * Thread systems, including tapered and buttress threads * Machines to build machines, i.e. quality lathes and milling machines * Drawing standards, including dimensional tolerancing would be great * Test facilities, machines and methods * Plain bearing materials, eg. phosphor bronze, white metal All of these things are really required AT THE SAME TIME. Ideally you would also want to have the concept of zero, Newtonian physics, algebra, calculus, thermodynamics (vital for efficient steam engines), test facilities, machines and methods etc etc, otherwise you're relying on trial and error. All of these were available to the pioneers of the industrial revolution (although thermodynamics came a bit later, in the 19th century).
Engineer here also. You've got me thinking... their numeral system was far too clumsy for higher level mathematics. I'm sure you'd need an Arabic style number system to get started.
Yeah I agree. The Romans were not that close from what at least I know. The absence of calculus was a major drawback for them. The renaissance era Europe was more advanced than the Roman empire despite some modern myths and they had the better pre-requisites for the industrial revolution.
Engineer with a histroical hobby. Standards for technical drawing was one such accumelated knowledge. It was a little revolution on its own! Many credit Leonardo da Vinci with its origin, but it can be proofen that after da Vincis life, technical drawings that still had no standard were (mostly) made specifically to copy the older (medival/before the first standards) style. This was by chance also one of the reasons, one of my favorite books on Technological Innovations in history, marks one of its cut off points, before 1500! For those of you deeply interested in learning more about the accumulated Knowledge that appeared before the industrial revolution and can read german(!), there exists an old book from 1996, called "Europäische Technik im Mittelalter 800-1400". It is a comprehensive compendium(582 pages + 60 pages of source credits), that goes in depth on the many innovations that happened in Europe from 800 to 1400.
@@arthurswanson3285 no, I woudnt say that they were needed. Arabic stile number systems, where used in acadimia already from 1300 onwards and the old roman system coudnt really be called clumsy. It was more then enough to help create the first banking houses. I can only speak on this in the german culture context, but the arabic numerals only found wide spread addoption after 1530s (thanks to a certain book form 1522) and the big banking house (I know of the Fugger at least doing it) existed befor that and even still a bit after that the fugger are proven to have still used the roman system of the calculation table. This system was very much enough to create some of the most wealthy merchant families there were before the wide spread change to the arabic numeral system, so it is difficult to say. For academic purposes the change had already long happened and I would say that in a way this proves that the calculation system has less to no impact on what we would call the first industrial revolution. It had more to essential of an impact on the later industrial revolutions. So we need to be clear here about which industrial revolution we speak.
@@Enderfine354 There is a reason algebraic and later higher-order mathematics built on arabic numbers, whereas roman numerals are only found in 1970s movies and tv year credits these days.The notation doesnt capture the cyclic repetition of number patterns and cant be extended easily beyond 4 or 5 digits without serious mental overhead. It doesnt capture the abstraction and pattern of scaling inherent in numbers at all. Try to do floating point math, interest rates, or orbitial mechanics in roman notation. I'll wait.
Conclusive summary, great video! Yet I'm missing one aspect here: Information recording, reproduction and distribution, of which the invention of paper and the printing press is crucial. And although the Romans certainly had the skills to build the printing press, there was no paper yet to print on.
@@ryanaegis3544 Paper != papyrus. The surface of papyrus is to uneven to print on. It was manufactured in a time consuming manual process and too expensive to be used in quantities.
Farting onto a candle is technically an external combustion engine, but being able to do that is very different from understanding afterburning turbofans.
The biggest part of the industrial revolution is the ability to spread new ideas for others to chew on because of the printing press. What really held everyone back was the lack of the ability to spread knowledge that the masses could receive and digest. So you could even say the European University system is a key factor that helps lead to the industrial revolution.
Not talking about knowledge/education was a huge miss. That Rome flirted with the printing press but wasn't able to implement it into a standard use technology slowed their progress greatly.
I'm thankful this video was recommended to me. First time I heard about the idea of Romans being somehow industrialised was in Second Image in Alabaster, a short story by Polish author Marek Huberath. Really enjoying those talks. Thank you.
This is the best discussion I've ever seen on this topic, I think. Thank you guys so much for the video! It was fantastic. God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
Early modern Western European societies were too complex, across all fields, for the Romans to emulate. Early modern Western Europe was built on everything that came before. It was not possible for the (West) Romans to jump ahead 14 centuries.
The 1815 map of the British Empire is somewhat misleading as it doesn't show the possessions of the British East India Company, which owned most of India and bits of China. So whilst what became British India wasn't technically owned by the British state in 1815, it was in practice a British possession administered by a private company.
I watched the whole video and I must say its a really good analysis of Roman tech in comparison to british during the Industrial revolution. Especially the lack of
I don’t remember who it was. I think it was Marcus Aurelius that mentioned not having windmills because it would put slaves out of work so they kind of were kicking themselves in the feet and plenty of the younger. He’s talking about companion planting or crop rotation. I’m not sure one or the other. Socrates, shows you how to build a roof at a particular angle to let light in in the winter and keep it out in the summer. This was in memorabilia I believe and was an answer to the wood shortage in Athens at the time. Horodatus tells us that the phridgians had greenhouses and Xenophone tells us in the Anabasis that the same fans had an ingenious way of preserving milk with wax and bottles. Xenophone tells us also in Cyclopedia that the Persians had assembly lines to build shoes 500 years before Christ. And plenty of the elder tells us about a flying saucer, shooting off sparks above Rome, which she describes as a polished shield. I can’t remember whether it was plenty of the younger or Tacitus, who talked about having his slave read books to him while they took a chariot to his summer or winter home, which means they were listening to audiobooks while driving. Just a few other things that you can pick up if you actually bothered to read the classics and while I’m at it, Joseph tells us that the temple in Jerusalem had those little pokey things on the roof to keep pigeons off. So there you go as Solomon would have it there’s nothing new under the sun.
The biggest issue against Rome developing a more industrial system was actually the nature of Rome and the Roman empire. As long as the empire had slaves to do the work and as an expansionist power that also used a tribute system there would never be a shortage of slaves because even if a newly conquered nation had no other wealth to loot it had people who could be sold and no matter how poor a province was it had people who could be sold. While it is possible that Rome could have fielded large calibre air weapons(think USS Vesuvius)or steam powered armoured vehicles or ships(the screw was after all known and had been for centuries)or used railways as mass transport they had no impetus to do so. For Rome as in the Greek states things like steam engines or steam powered air weapons were toys they had other means other than machinery to get work done. In addition in a military sense and Rome was a militaristic state there was no true rival to what Rome already had except China so other than deploying pump powered flame throwers as infantry weapons they did not need to use any new tech
The Romans: Why should we increase production? No one is going to buy our locally made fish sauce. The Hans: Cheng! Increase steel productions! We have orders to some Laowai in the west!
As someone who's become very interested in emotional injuries and that sort of things, don't discount how poorly romans viewed lower classes. In medieval plus Europe the classes seemed to mix more, and there in general seemed to be a sentiment of social mobility and Christian worldviews affecting the way people saw the humble worker. In Rome people weren't seen as worth as much I feel, and so, it was almost like people got huge kicks out of using people to their advantage. in 1700s after this would have just been seen as a waste of resources, but Rome seemed to revel in wasting resources in displays of grandeur. You have to have a culture of wanting to economise and spare people unnecessary work before youe gonna be driven to seek solutions from machines. Rome didnt always do this, and relied heavily on slaves all through the empire.
Thank you for this brilliant video, I enjoyed every minute of it! I really liked the idea of progress not being evident, really changed the way I think!
Unrelated, but I personally think that our modern era fusion reactor attempts are essentially analogous to the Roman aeolipile. A piece of a type of technology that will become vital and foundational in a future era, but unable to be successfully iterated and innovated into a useful form because of both limitations in our knowledge and the fact that there isn’t a specific niche that it’s able to excel in that would then be a foothold into the later advancement and diversification. Modern steam engines only came about because of a specific niche and purpose: to pump water out of mines. The aeolipile could not be translated into a niche within the Roman Empire, even if they tried repeatedly. Like we have. Yes, doing it like this could possibly brute force past the need of a niche for fusion, but finding such a niche would be a game changer for fusion development. We’re using fusion to boil water into steam, something fission is able to do more efficiently and effectively with modern technology. Competing in this niche is pointless and detrimental.
Great points. Scientific knowledge doesn't automatically become functional technology. It takes time and effort, and the ability to combine multiple different ideas into one better solution.
Can you do a video with the same topic but about china? I've read some arguments that the Tang dynasty was close to an industrial revolution, and while I'm not convinced I'd like to hear some in depth discussion about that.
I've had this talk with a friend lately and he came up with a somewhat funny solution. His reasoning was slaves. They never had the need to invent machines since they got cheap laborforce already. And even if there was somebody proposing a steamengine to the senate, the slave agenda - which was certainly strong in the Roman world - most likely vetoed against it.
I just wanted to point out around 37:17, you mention gmo’s as seed selection. In agricultural biology, those are 2 distinct things. One is plant breeding (selective processing), the other genetic manipulation (gene splicing). Everyone that does agriculture practices plant breeding, GMO is lab built super-species, not natural pedigree refinement.
Great video! I’d love to see a video on this topic but about China. From what I’ve read recently, it seems to me that the Song Dynasty was very close to an industrial revolution around 1100 until they were conquered by a nomadic steppe people
Great breakdown, great images, great nuance, great video! Thanks for putting this together. I kept putting this 2hr video off, but I am now very glad that I made the time. Many thanks
This was great but there were a few times where the reasoning boils down to "because they didn't" instead of reasons with actual predictive power. I think it's largely a polish issue - they're trying to cram a topic you could write a series of books on into a reasonable length video and do it in a conversational style, so it's to be expected, but its jarring when the majority of the content was so solid.
@@adlfm nope, “Byzantine Empire” called themselves the Roman Empire (Eastern Roman Empire when they first split). The Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806, but I wouldn’t say that counts… Though it could be argued.
Every once in a while I put on an invicta video, and I’m always impressed by the art for the visuals, I’m just curious, is it all one person or does the channel have multiple artists?
I'm kind of surprised it didn't come up much earlier -- the role of the printing press and the mass communication that invention provided. Ancient Rome had nothing of the sort. This initiated a flourishing of literacy and education among broader strata of society. It facilitated a healthy competition among intellectuals to publish and to refute one another.
I made a similar comment. Rome had good knowledge transfer regarding military tactics, but without the printing press they lacked the ability to educate a large percentage of the population. Knowledge drives invention.
An important driver of the industrial revolution in Britain that didn't really get discussed is that labor was very expensive in Britain at the time. The British Empire had a system where the colonies were supposed to sell all their raw materials to Britain and in exchange Britain would sell manufactured goods to the colonies. However, the population of Britain was relatively low to be supplying all the manufactured goods for an enormous global empire, so the cost of labor kept rising in Britain until wages there were the highest in the world. With such cheap raw materials and expensive labor, Britain had far more incentive than other countries to try and replace human labor with machines. Actually, around this time many other countries had access to some of the same labor-saving technologies that Britain had, but those technologies didn't catch on elsewhere because it was cheaper to just hire more people.
Ill work on adding that. This was our main source for much of it "The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World" g.co/kgs/4UvuRBv
I like how this starts with explanation of gaming and what makes Civilization different from real life... I want to add that Civ games have famously fell into some Western-centric stereotypes, for example stirrups defining Middle Ages in 3, that theory was largely debunked since... or things like requiring the wheel early on - Mayans had advanced mathematics (far beyond Greeks, with zero concept etc.) and calendar, but their environment had no use for wheels as llamas aren't really the chariot types and entirety of Mesoamerica is too rocky for wheelbarrows.
As an engineer, I can point out a million things that prevented the romans from getting a working steam engine, but the most important one in my opinion was lacking the philosophy of science. That is to say, a philosophy that doesn't hand out a theory on how the world works, but one that hands out a method for finding out how the world works systematically; you could never build a locomotive with Aristotle's physics model. Like, you can give the 5th grader explanation on how a steam piston works to a roman, and I'm pretty sure they would understand phase transitions from water to steam, pressure working on a moving cylinder head, pistons attached to crankshafts turning oscillating motion into cyclical motion. What that Roman is going to be lacking is everything beyond that understanding. Ideal gas law, temperature and pressure relationships, specific heat, latent heat, heat of vaporization, energy, enthalpy, entropy, every single other boring value and relationship that is measured or derived through constant experimentation and measurement by the engineers and scientists of the industrial revolution. Lacking this language means that the romans wouldn't know what things they need to look to maximize or minimize, they wouldn't know what levers to pull to achieve the desired results, and they wouldn't even know what things to measure or test to see if they even made a better product at the end of it all. This is also ignoring the advances in metallurgical understanding to make these engines, as well as advances in precision manufacturing and measurement that are unimaginably important at every step along this process. All of this derives from a change in the philosophy of the natural world that created an understanding of how things worked that was obtained exclusively from observations and derived properties. I think this change is an incredibly underrated factor that lead to the industrial revolution, and one critically lacking in the Roman empire.
The Romans had Greek science which was the first time science was invented. Unfortunately for the Greeks were convinced that vacuums were impossible. No vacuum force then no steam piston and no practical steam engine. The key development in the English stream engine was the scientific experiments on vacuums and they were able to confirm vacuums produce force. This allowed for the development of the piston. The scientific revolution made the practical steam engine possible.
Could you also say there’s been a cultural shift? There’s probably a clearer awareness of our history and a greater desire to advance technology than ever before.
@@tomh9553 possibly, but that also might be due to the ease of access of information. Global literacy, the internet, pop science using click bait to educate TikTok viewers. It could be cultural but it's also so widespread that it seems more like a natural side effect of having every documentary/research paper/book available to you while you're on the toilet.
One factor they missed which might come under the philosophy section, the industrial revolution started when people realised theyd already discovered most of the world so the only way to secure "immortality" by discovering the secrets of science
The "absolute" rule of roman emperors was not really there for a lot of emperors the senate had eminence authority at times while other emperors would curb stomp their power. The problem wasn't a counterbalance to the absolute rule. that's fine. It's the lack of true inheritance laws and an outdated bureaucracy that was set up by an unstable senate, which was itself was designed for a city state with very little real government restructuring outside of the provincial reforms
Just like today, the senate is a pestilence fostered on us by well meaning but ignorant signers of the constitution who learned nothing about Roman history, except what they read their British centric classes in the "classics". The greatest empires in the world and the longest periods of prosperity has always been benevolent, intelligent dictatorships. Democracy is very short term aberration in history, and soon to be forgotten as the horrible very short termed experiment in democracy in Athens led to cannibalism, Athens burning to the ground and the diaspora of thousands who had two nickels to rub together fled screaming to other safer spaces where the voting mob couldn't get to them. We see the same thing here in USA, where the two nickel holders are fleeing screaming out of big cities and liberal run areas to safer and better areas in the USA.
Great children’s book trilogy I read (as a child) about this topic: Fireball by John Christopher. The premise was that in an alternate world just like ours, the Roman Empire never fell because a certain leader survived a battle that in our world had killed him. He returned to Rome and stabilised things such that the empire continued until the AD 1980s, when two boys from our world slipped through some kind of portal into that Roman world and disrupted the status quo and brought down the empire 1500 years too late. As a result of the empire being stabilised, none of the disruption in our world existed to catalyse all the technological and societal evolution that gave us the modern world, and things continued rather stagnantly as they’d always been in the Roman Empire. Consequences included a much larger more advanced Aztec empire, Viking colonies in Canada, and the Chinese eventually inventing primitive steam engines and firearms. Moral is, sometimes instability breeds faster progress, at least in the technological and scientific realms, if not the social sector.
I was really hoping for more of a discussion on the projection of the Roman empire had it not collapsed. Rather than a "it wasn't possible and would take 1600 more years". I do appreciate the video, but the discussion is always about if the Roman empire had not collapsed how much sooner this all would have happened. And in my opinion, it definitely would have been sooner, the dark ages are called that for a reason, it was a recession.
Guys, the video is amazing! Thank you for the sources and all the love you put here. Question: what year/period is the distorted map of population concentration representing? I guess it is after Trajan, since the map includes Dacia, right? And secondly, was made by you or.was extracted from one of your sources? If it came from a paper/book, which one?
This is a topic I've wanted to cover for a long time! Given its complexity we opted for a long-form discussion style to really dive into the details (and even then, this is a quite abridged take on the topic). Hope you enjoy! Also be sure to check out the medieval survival/strategy/sim game Bellwright: rebrand.ly/invictabellwright
This is an old debate and even before I watch your video I can comment on this. Slavery was so important and cheap that if they had machines doing the work of slaves, slaves would no longer be necessary and that would pose an incredible social problem in the form of more slave revolts but it was more than that. Since it was a slave based economy, despite seeming like a semi capitalist, semi socialist agrarian, society, people didn't think in terms of labor saving machines in the way we see it. The economy was based on scarcity as it is today, except the Western world hasn't dealt with famine in a long time and the price of grain was central to ancient economies but Roman society collapsed, IMHO, because of devaluing currency while there was more silver and gold flowing east than back to the West. A massive trade imbalance caused this as well as new sources of silver and gold drying up. Romans spent itself into ruin. Their taxes often only covered the cost of maintaining security. We can debate the Fall of the Roman Empire forever and it wasn't just one thing but if you have an upper class pissing away cash on luxuries and you aren't getting enough revenue, and you can't pay for the defence of the borders under increasing pressure while people's faith in the value of currency and quality of leadership wanes, it's a perfect recipe for a disaster and I'm sure people knew it was coming.
I warn any person looking into the past to not view their world through modern eyes and project our views of the world into people in the past. Ancient people were so superstitious they couldn't understand the natural world and invented a god for every thing in their world except us Jews. Romans even started to not trust the gods and sought other faiths, which Christianity gave them. The Byzantine and Sassinid empire exhausted themselves fighting leaving the West and Near East open for a new power Islam to take hold but slavery continued into the 19th century. If you read Adam Smith's wealth of nations he demonstrated that slaves cost more to. Acquire and maintain than free labor and he did predict a civil war because there would finally be a time where it was better to have a poor free labor class vs expensive slaves. The South didn't have slaves in the same numbers as Romans to keep replacing. The were an investment vs expendable. So by 1860, the world was finally ready to end slavery and I have to admit that the emancipation proclamation was to destroy the Southern economy and not based on a moral decision. It was instead a military one. During the peninsula campaign in Virginia, slaves were first listed as contraband and Newport News VA was ground zero for the first instance of this major event in human history. Remember that it took until 164 years ago for our society to do something about the evil of slavery but it still exists in the Congo where pygmies are owned by other black people and despite a superficial ban on slavery, it still exists in Islamic society. China was caught with slaves in Africa already. Hamas forced Jewish hostages to clean their house and apartment to reenact the Qur'an. It's still human perception that rules the slave world. Congoese say they refuse to give up pygmy slaves because it's a status symbol. Romans could never perceive their world without slaves as do cultures that exist today!
How could you dare speaking about the industrial revolution and pretend explaining what led to it
without saying the word capitalism ?
How in the world ?
People left the farms and founded factories ? What kind of liberal fairy tale is that ?
Villages were burnt by land owners, with people in it.
You ever heard of the enclosure ? The sacralization of private property ?
How could you dare speaking about the industrial revolution and pretend explaining what led to it
without saying the word capitalism ?
How in the world ?
People left the farms and founded factories ? What kind of liberal fairy tale is that ?
Villages were burnt by self proclamed land owners, with people in it.
Have you ever heard of the enclosures ?
What if Roman empire wold survive until Industrial Revolution? It is simple. It did.
Balcanization of Rome was direct result of changes in technology.
If we would want simulate realistic tech progression in video games. Then there is something like concept of disruptive technologies. So some inventions actually cause negative effects, changing how things are done. The classic example. The ironworks! Contrary to popular believes iron weapon was at least initially weaker then bronze counterparts, but it was way cheaper and did not demand complex trade networks to gain ingredients. So when it was popularized, Bronze Age empires lost they advantage with many small tribes who rapidly could gain equal armament in large numbers. This put the in long run disadvantage leading to Bronze Age collapse (among things). Same with development of feudalism. It basically hammer your tax revenue, but you gain huge buff to bottom up agricultural development. It is basically what did kill Rome.
Most players would not like rapidly lost abilities, as such games cheat keeping only positive changes.
An unappreciated factor is the addition of Western Hemisphere crops. Potatoes are the most critical crop brought to the Eastern Hemisphere, and became a critical food source in the 18th century.
@@2whostruckjohn great point.
for real man, I'm indian and I feel bad for my ancestors because potato curries are fire, and we use tomatoes in basically every meal nowadays
That combined with nitrogen fixation methods developed during the 1800s. The industrial revolution was also a revolution in chemistry.
@@RovingTroll Even before that, Britain had an "agricultural revolution" before the industrial one due to innovations like Four Field Rotation, better plows and other tools. This was arguably a prerequisite to the Industrial Revolution, as it raised the amount of surplus food, allowing cities to grow.
What does that have to do with the Romans? All root crops saved millions of lives during the 100 years war and such, but that came much later.
Stirrups. It's always the stirrups that mess with me. People riding horses for thousands of years, working with leather, and metal. Everybody looking for the best way to bonk somebody from a horse...and they try everything BUT simply attaching a pair of looped ropes to each side of the bottom of the saddle until...what? 750 AD?
As a kid, that told me tech was not linear or inevitable.
Somewhere I read that reconstructional archaeologist (and illustrator) Peter Connolly's experiments with the Roman four-horned saddle proved it to be very good at keeping the rider in the saddle. You could even slide down on the side of the horse without falling off by securing your leg under one of the horns. The Romans were among the first to use the solid saddle tree, a necessary prerequisite for using stirrups because of the weight destribution on the horse's back.
Tribalism (in this case, clan system). The thing that hold back many civilizations for thousands of years. You can never became industrial society with tribalism.
Tribalism tied vast majority of the people to one clan and to one region, making modern concept of corporation, complex supply chain, mass worker migration, and mass mechanization/industrialization nigh impossible to implement.
Thing is, Roman society was tribal in nature.
Rennaisance era Western Europe and Ming China were IMO the only major civilizations managed to evolve out of tribalism by the 16th century.
Uh, everyone forgets that huge fact that most western civilizations in Europe didn't need stirrups, because they didn't need horses for combat. Horses are only in their forte' in open areas, like plains and steppes.
So, no need to invent stirrups.
But, the people who needed to invent them, the Scythians/Parthians et al, did so.
Stirrups only became important to western civ through their use in Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium when the western mounted "Knights" discovered their great use in combat.
Thus, the Byzantines needed them because they were getting inundated by plains people WITH stirrups from the east and north east.
@@mutteringmale It's not so much that they didn't need horses as it is that the East just used them more heavily and in a way where stirrups benefitted them. Obviously they used horses heavily, for horse archery. They can't keep any hands on the rein when shooting, so a stirrup helps in providing stability as well as control over the horse in the absence of hands. For the Macedonians and Romans, they usually had one hand free for the reins because they weren't really doing anything where a second hand would benefit them, so stirrups are less needed. But it would have been nice I'm sure and perhaps enabled a greater variety of tactics. To note, they used cavalry to cover and/or attack the flanks, and many a battle was determined by the use of these cavalry. So to say that horses weren't needed is very inaccurate.
I didn't say they didn't need horses, but horses were like Maseratis in price for the average peasant and mules!!! More than horses. Peasants had to with oxen, which were much more suited to farm work anyway.
That's why horses were the sign of wealth and usually only the nobility rode them.
Came here from the job search meme.
Edit December 1st: I found the job. Ladies and gentleman we got em😎.
@@basbroekhoven226 same lol
Men of culture I see
Came here during my workhours
Here here🫡
Same
The steam engine was way more advanced and complicated to produce than most people realize
Just the ability to produce a waterproof boiler was actually a huge feat
I once had a look at a period copy of the construction drawings for a Patentee type locomotive from the 1830s.
Way, WAY, more complex then people might assume.
@@cdev2117 To be fair, locomotives are a very advanced steam machine. Early stationary engines were much much simpler.
@_kalia thry also couldn't do much because they were wildly inefficient, we had rudimentary steam engines for way longer than they actually served a functional purpose other than scientific novelty
@@someguycalledCh0wdah Actually the main problem of steam engine was metallurgy. For instance, Cugnot's fardier from 1770 used a very crude boiler and a very very primitive engine, and it worked, but was hampered by the use of copper and cast iron, which made it very heavy and quite brittle. What changed the game was the discovery of actual chemistry (thanks to Lavoisier) and the use of coal, which led to a better understanding of how to create a much more efficient steel metallurgy. Stream engines have been known to at least 2000 years by then, but the metals to handle it didn't exist before the end of the XVIIIth century. The use of much more reliable, lighter metals allowed for the creation of much more refined engines.
There's a small rail line of historical rail trains here. One of the (now) three trains is a steam train. The cost to fix it is enormous. In part because of the experts but more, because there are specialized parts that aren't made anymore and they used extremely specialized wrenches.
something else not mentioned, that puts together both Material science and steam, Is that While steam is AMAZING, It's damn near useless on an industrial scale without PRESSURE. You need a way to not just make steam, but to contain it, and have it create a lot of pressure, so it can push things like pistons with enough force to move something heavy ( or move itself, like a train ). And to be able to contain those pressures, you need the metallurgy to make vessels that can contain that pressure. That means not just the vessel walls, but things like if it used any kind of rivets, or any other connection with another piece of metal, to form the shape. Then you also need seals that can handle the heat, and hold back the pressure. And that's just the vessel. There's more to a steam engine than just the vessel. The pipes, connection of one pipe to another, Springs to make automatic opening and closing valves
There's a chance someone could have easily tried to scale up that spinning steam toy, to do work, but the experiments would have failed, due to them not being able to build up enough pressure to do enough work, to make it all worth it.
Many of these different things that they did or did not know and use, are all intertwined, and build on each other. A true industrial revolution would have required quite a lot of different sciences all coming together, to make the entire revolution happen.
But, it's super fun to think about just how close they were, or were not, and in what ways they were more advanced than we though, and in the ways they were no where near close.
@@Fearmylogic A Newcomen style engine would certainly be possible in terms of pressure, since it worked at low-single-digit PSI and the negative pressure of condensing steam. High pressure steam was a later development even in the irl industrial revolution due to the difficulty in containing it, but Newcomen engines could have boilers made from relatively primitive materials and methods.
That said, the other issue you run into with a Newcomen engine is that you need a wide piston to generate decent force from such low pressure, and that wasn't really possible until tools were invented for making sufficiently cylindrical bores of that size.
Romans had heat distribution substations in use which had thermal chambers, also see the excavations on Herculaneum of some of the more recent finds.
think of how many deaths there were due to not knowing about mechanical load
Gauge blocks or Johansen blocks were also a major breakthrough that enabled allowed much greater precision between multiple locations.
early steam engines were soldered copper, humans have been soldering since mesopotamia and rome had access to high quality copper, as well as stronger metals if needed. had someone had the vision, they surely could have overcome the obstacles in front of them with a lifetime or two of engineering. the science was a small barrier compared to the economic base. near all the workers in rome were tied up in agriculture, so there was nobody to fill the supply chains industrial society needed. in 1800 only 35% of brits farmed, for context, with the others selling their labor mostly. and even in that context, it was the bourgeois and petty bourgeois who lead the economic shifts that brought about capitalism, and rome had very very few of these classes, instead having mostly patricians, plebs, and slaves. I wont delve too far in but those classes had incentives that lead them to more efficient production and forming a different relationship between workers and work, those incentives were absent from rome.
I don't think I can put into words how much I love these well prepared discussion videos.
Combined with looking at the "unsexy" topics like logistics and industry is just wonderful.
Invicta does a hella good job!
Roman didn’t have the scientific revolution. They had Greek science but it was primitive and incomplete.
@@MrWolfstar8"primitive" 😂😂
@@stasi0238 He’s got a point about being incomplete, though. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the Roman’s were master architects, but you gotta admit that several of their fields, even their better ones, just don’t match the massive amounts of information that people have today.
“Unsexy” topics are only unsexy to the bubble heads that work in the corporate media. That’s an apolitical statement by the way, it occurs all over the place.
Found this video on Instagram via a procrastination meme.
I'm looking forward to it.
omg me too. was it the one that was like [ mom: hows the job search going? me:]
@@Garlicandonions
YES THAT EXACT ONE
I had a quote posted in my office it read "innovation is a conundrum, it rests when things are good, it thrives on anarchy and chaos". And I think that's valid, and it goes along with another quote "war is the mother of all invention".
@@mboyer68 time is the mother of knowledge
The wrongest quote ever. Not the first one not the second
@@redakteur3613 Indeed. Necessity is the mother of invention. But war does tend to be pretty good at creating necessity.
@@jamesgravil9162 you are trying to convince yourself in your worldview which doesn’t have anything to do with reality
@@mboyer68 and both are correct and wrong at the same time. While the most "inventive" periods are well aligned with war time, plenty of inventions or discoveries couldn't have been made in wartime due to the sheer scale of them requiring international collaboration, or the investment of resources into something apparently completely useless.
Something that lives rent free in my head: The technological relationship between roman roads and the established standards of the automotive industry. To this day, we can't escape the design choices that were made centuries ago.
Elaborate?
@@android175 Horses. The width of horses.
@@Le_Mef ohh thats a good one.
Modern roads are great, all the damage is done by trucks. If we didn’t have trucks roads could last long.
@@Le_Mef oh you mean those super tight streets in Italy and old towns of France and the like...
The massive amount of tiny factors that need to align is staggering. The importance of screw threads, potatoes, tree types, and so many other things in helping.
Being able to make something flat
Something round
Precise width, height, length
Possible at tiny hands tool scales but not at industrial scales.
Materials science is always the precursor of great change. You can make the most precisely manufactured screw in history, but if it's made of brass or iron it's not very useful. Look at the explosion of new tech in recent history when thermoplastics were invented
@jakel2837 or even just thermoset plastics, that played a prominent part in military technology.
@@jakel2837
Could you imagine if we had NOT invented Bakelite before the world wars? Elephants would have been a strategic resource 🤢🤢🤢
Taking the ivory for yourself or, even worse, denying the enemy by wiping out their elephants.
And we would have, too, wouldn't we?
When you started speaking to paradigm shifts, I was brought back to my History of Science classes as an undergrad. It's amazing how apparent and subtle truly revolutionary ideas are after the fact. Being locked into a paradigm can be a significant barrier to innovation.
The answer is, very far away. I long thought they could have industrialized, but I've been convinced industrialization required an incredibly precise environment. Namely, a situation where it was economical to develop a steam powered water pump. That only happened because Britain needed coal after depleting its forests, and it was economical to use an inefficient pump to remove water from coal mines, using the very coal to power it.
If the elites were worried a steam powered ship would make rowing slaves unnecessary and hurt the slave market profits, a psychopath like Caligula might burn slaves instead of coal! 😊
That and all the required intervening discoveries in metallurgy.
@@TheTrueAdept 💯 You needed cannon technology
Not just that, but all the technology was largely contingent on both other tech developments, AND on the necessity and demand to use such tech innovations. Like, the Byzantines had steam engines on a small scale with their automata, but they didnt have any need or reason to upscale that technology, and they didnt have the metallurgy to do it on an industrial scale, among other issues.
Except that in great Britain and Europe they'd been using water powered vacuum pumps to clear mines for at least 2 centuries before steam powered water pumps. They needed more power to pump from greater depths, it had zilch to do with GB cutting down its trees
honestly man, the absolute best thing about this video is that you guys explained with absolute detail about the factors that caused Industrial revolution and debunking the "Gamingfication" of progress and technological development, because too many times, so many people doesn't understand that it takes far FAR more than just a few fancy tool to start Industrial revolution
still related to the context of the Video, although not related to the Roman empire, my country, Republic of Indonesia is part of a newly industrialized country, Indonesia is part of G20, 60% of Indonesian population now lives in urban areas, and Indonesia's manufacturing output, being the absolute largest in southeast asia and one of the top 10 largest in the world still keep increasing rapidly especially due to government's downstreaming program, linking all these factors that you guys already explained with the history of Indonesia's economic development, i can see it all far more clearly now.
That's a facly though as can and don't are two very different things... For exemple only 3 nations or so have made their own 5th gen fighter jets and two are second world meaning they are 30 years or more behind behind the first world nations in every measureable way... But only 1 is first world... Under the falcy you assume they can't because take Germany for exemple they culatorlly are anti war and lack the budget to design one... I and the gamers say they easly have the tech they just choose not to... as if they can't how can't they?
@@GreenBlueWalkthrough You spelled "ACKUHYALLY" wrong
@@raigarmullerson4838lmao
Brianarigan l actually cannot express how genuinely criminaly underated this comment actually is and this world actually genuinely needs more people actually like you in this world and community actually genuinely needs more people actually like you in this world and you actually couldn't have said that actually any better than me lol and long live China and Indonesian friendship ❤😂🎉🇨🇳🇨🇳🇨🇳🤝🇮🇩🇮🇩🇮🇩
@@raigarmullerson4838yes but actually no
The medieval period too with its proto industrialization from the late 1400s on would be another good topic on the theme of industry.
The rise of the Burgher middle class and the development of labour saving presses and mills was the foundation of European manufacturing
That would be the Venetian Republic
To have industrial or any kind of technological massive advances you need several things. A long period of good government and no major external threats.]
For example, Caesar Augustus, greatest period of peace and prosperity in all the Roman empire. But, if he had come along a couple of hundred years later, even he couldn't have saved Rome.
The roman empire had the political unification and money to make things happen. The "proto industrialization" of 15th century DID eventually lead to the actual industrial revolution.
@@mhdfrb9971 I have heard claimed that the Arsenale was a proto-industrial manufacturing facility. That they discovered how to organise each step of production like on an assembly line, by dividing them into workshops and teams dedicated to a certain task. Then these parts of ships would be kept in reserve, which then could finally be quickly assembled and combined into a new ship in a day. It was one of the most closely guarded secret of the repuclic of Venice.
The primary faction I'm writing for in my fictional setting is largely based on Rome, so this video is tremendously helpful for me figuring out a few of the nitty-gritty details I want to include in passing dialogue or exposition in my story. Thank you so much for this, this is impossibly helpful!
So much was needed. Italian banking innovations, an island made of coal with easy sea access and navigable waterways, a political settlement that split church and state and which placed large amounts of land and capital in the hands of private individuals, ready markets, printing and a ready means for disseminating new ideas, a coffee house culture...
It's amazing how well put together this is for education! You and other youtubers of the same caliber are such a massive resource!
Most YTbers :
*10-30 minutes*
Invicta :
*110 MINUTES*
1:18:00 Engineer here, the thing about steam bein able to take more and more heat is not about storing but about the change of pressure you get and how fast it changes, this thing is called superheating and it's used only in the more advanced stema engines like 2nd industrial revolution timeframe, not for sure on the Newcommen engine where most power don't even come from the steam expansion but it's condensation afterwards and the counterpressure from the Atmosphere and so it's sometimes called Newcommen atmospheric engine.
i love the ‘ engineer here’s opening 😂.
the fireless locomotive, which runs on stored steam independently pre-generated. An example is the Solar Steam Train project in california that tries to revive the tek
Im an hvac tech learning about superheat and supercooling now for gas and oil furnaces lol
Didn’t know where he was going with that until he said superheat then it made sense mostly
we don’t learn about steam engines
There was social aspects, too. To get enough concentrated/extra labor to get an industrial revolution started, they almost would have HAD to loosen their slave-based economy. I can't imagine that would be easy or possible for the golden era of imperial Rome.
@@mutteringmale Nobody said others didn’t. Why are you so desperate to defend Roman/western slavery unprompted lol.
The romans were not the only society with manumission. This is a common trait.
Southern slaves were not "culled" to any reasonable degree...
@@mutteringmale
@@chillin5703 Yes they were. Certain slaves were moved into the categories of "house Ni.......s" and Field Nig....s". The master determine who got to share a shack and "marry" each other.
The trip over culled all the weak.
The trip by the arabs to the slave pens on the coast of africa culled them.
The biggest culling was when black tribes enslaved other black tribes to sell to the Arabs. They killed all the children, the weak, the old and the maimed for the coffle. Look up "coffle".
Almost none of this is taught in our horrible, censored, fake news history classes in the west.
BTW. where they were held in Africa was called a "factory".
Most of this is censored on goowghol.
Generally slaves are bad for an economy. However many of the free inhabitants of Rome were non-citizens as well, it is very wrong to lump non-citizens and citizens into the same pot as well. It is basically an Empire with inbuilt socially determined colonies which is quite powerful again.
@@mf9463 That is the PC version of history taught in the last 40 years. Careful what you read and who read it to you, and what agenda did they have or unknowingly have, which are 99% of the deadbeat teachers of the teacher's union.
Slaves are NOT bad for the economy. Slavery is a bad thing, but that's a very western-centric viewpoint, just as any arab with his little slave boys in Kandahar slave market Afghanistan for little boys.
I think something that gets overlooked often in this topic is education and how much of an impact that has had
I wasnt ready holy shit, an incredibly deep and well put together video, I thought about 10 mins in when we're on evolutionary history, "damn this guy should just publish this in a journal", then realised wait no! this is such a better format, why bother?
Anyone come here from the job search meme
Here
You know it!
@@mrekkreal5291 same Bru
One thing that I have to comment on is the topic of the steam turbine. As an engineer, it really grinds my gears when people say that 'the Romans missed just one step to inventing a turbine' and follow it by justifying a myriad of reasons for why it didn't happen, without considering just how difficult this supposed 'one step' actually is. I understand that not everyone is aware of it, but I've seen it so often now that I'm just tired of it NGL. I think the best explanation I found for this is a video by the engineering guy, linked below. th-cam.com/video/-8lXXg8dWHk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=vhvthPzgbtXGD9xe. I think that this topic in particular is also one of the 'not enough changes to other technological and scientific spheres of development'. Anyway, I'll end my rant here, great video as always.
Imo, the invention of the steam turbine is the transition into the modern world. The steam expansion engine was the primary engine type up to the 1910s and fits more of the “industrial” period. Surprisingly, it is the rise of the dreadnought battleship and the arms race of that class that advanced steam turbine technology. Steam turbines are still the peak of energy conversion engines today.
I am a mechanical engineer AND fabricator, that can do most of the metal work sheet or solid, hand and machine work in my shop. Transport me in the Roman times and I could not do much, because even the tech from 200 years ago IS COMPLICATED involving a LOT of BIG machinery of all kinds, labs, measuring equipment, hell, decimal system and unified measuring system was not invented.
Try multiplying in roman numerals. NO GO.
Yes! They say that tech trees are not realistic... but it's the most accurate representation I can think of. Technologies do have dependencies among themselves, some discoveries make easier to discover others, and of course its not "linear", but tech trees also do not necessarily behave linearly, you can leave one area underdeveloped and focus on other ones, it's just that then you will most likely have some technologies blocked off that might prevent further development significantly.
Notice how after we landed on the moon, the technology did not progress much further when it comes to achieving human exploration of space, but that research allowed us to unlock a lot of other (seemingly unrelated) tech that has been used to bump progress in many fields on Earth. Things like satellites were revolutionary for many spheres of our technology, topography, military, communications, weather control, research in pollution, the internet, etc. A lot of technologies like that work transversally.. think for example of computer technology, it made other fields advance in ways that would have simply not been possible.
@@panan7777 You might not be able to right away. However once you start teaching other Romans about more modern systems, science and engineering then you would see a large amount of innovation and change.
Fellas this is an amazing video. The thoughtfulness that was put into this publication is amazing. You guys poured heart and soul into this presentation. Thank you for your history and presentation
How's the job search Going?
@@peterpumpkineater697 we saw the same Instagram post 😭
@@peterpumpkineater697 I came from instagram too
@@peterpumpkineater697 that's why I'm here...
not so well tbh
Damn it's really that obvious?
Watching this video and playing Rome Total War, good time.
The development of engines happened together with the development of calculus. I can't imagine developing calculus using roman numerals.
Great presentation! Modern people typically view history through the modern contextual lens. It's refreshing to see these past people acknowledged as being smart and resourceful. We don't know what we don't know until we know we didn't know.
A similar video will be made about us 300 years from now. Hopefully.
Ancient Rome's achievements have long been admired and acknowledged, which is why it continues to be relevant all these many centuries later.
@Cara-39 Yes, but not my point. For example, Rome had many slaves. It was an accepted class of civilization. Were they evil or was it a function of that time's current industrial requirement? We would call it evil. They would call it necessary. If you asked the slaves (mostly Europeans), they would have called it their lot in life. Or, rebelled.
“How’s the job search going” brought me here. And i am jobless
The dual host dialogue format makes a smooth presentation delivery difficult, but this was still very informative. Thank you.
Craziest, most brilliant stuff ever found on youtube. You two are smart!
Ever since I got interested in history, back when I was 10 years old, I always claimed that: had the Romans invented the lathe (not that ancient one for wood, but one for metal), then the industrial revolution would've happened about 1500 years earlier.
The lathe was smithable with the technology of their time, especially the later period, when they were using the first blast furnaces copied from the chinese to produce better quality metals.
People used to think that it was a ridiculous idea when I was a kid, but it seems that this theory is getting more and more support lately, but idk what changed peoples minds...
The lathe is considered "the mother of all tools" for good reason!
It's just that the population has to "see the potential" of these technologies... if people don't care to change or even don't want to, there won't be change/development.
Perhaps the best prepared lecture from a big YT channel that I have seen.
Apart from how impressive and outright fascinating this is (thank you guys, that was really awesome) - I think Miro should sponsor you 😀 I’ve used it a lot as a PM for project plans, flowcharts, you name it. But what you guys have there is MASSIVE 😀😉 keep up the good work 🤘
I'm playing CIV VI with the Romans... and was asking myself exactly these kind of questions. So cool you elaborated a video about this!!
Love how you took a more serious, well thought out, and documentary style approach to this video as compared to purely entertainment/animation!
What was very recently discovered about Roman concrete (as in this year IIRC), what made it so durable, is that it used a small amount of limestone as part of the aggregate. At first this was thought to be just sloppy using what was available, since the limestone was weaker than the rest of the aggregate. But it turns out that the limestone leaches minerals into the micro-cracking which develops over time, making it self-repairing and thereby more durable.
You're conflating the term Battery with Capacitor. If it stores energy for an extended period of time, it's a battery; if it simply acts as a ballast reservoir for energy to be reintroduced after being shunted out, it is a capacitor.
Another way to look at it is that the ancient Greeks actually considered what we considered parts of the Industrial Revolution to be mere toys to be played with and not actually used for work
In reality, probably not close at all. To have an industrial revolution, you must have a society where the incentive to invest in industry is high. Rome's massive amount of slaves hold them back in this regard, as there is no incentive to invest in industry if human labour is dirt cheap. Also, I don't think it could have stopped Rome's fall, which was mostly caused by internal factors such as inflation and political instability.
English property rights and common law
Considering the industrial recolution started in an idependent Scotland, no.
@@egoalter1276 England/Scotland and the legal system was English common law the reason why we were great is because of the union
@@MIKE_THE_BRUMMIE Industrial revolution benefited almost exclusivly England. The investments in Scotland by London were the absolute minimum. The union prevented Scotland from forming trade deals with foreign nations and establishing its own industry.
@@ZOMBIEo07 I agree with you and that disparity was felt in England too from north to south. I'm saying without Wales, Scotland and Ireland...what would England be.
I believe in an equal union as peers a Confederate Union where what you're saying would be possible.
@InvictaHistory
33:40 Major historical oversight:
People didn't start moving into the cities willingly in England. People were thrown off their land by their landlords, in order to grow cash crops (especially wool), knowing that factories in the cities needed labour (and likely some of them were shareholders). The burning down of peasant houses is where we get the term 'fired'.
It's not unique, either - in Russia, St Petersburg specifically had workers directed there by the Tsar.
1:28:00
Also for goodness sake, 1500C is not 50% hotter than 1000C. 0C is ~273K (same unit size, but starts at absolute zero).
And because you asked engineers to @ you, steam is not a battery, it's a force transfer mechanism.
But what he means by a "battery" is that you can store energy continuously until it is needed. There is no functional limit to the energy that you can put into it, besides the strength of the vessel, until you want to use that energy. Short of a flywheel there isn't anything comparable that could be made in that era to store energy that I can think of.
Another major flaw at 33:15. In hundreds of PERCENT yes, but that is definitely not 10*, 20* or 30* or even 400(!) times 😳. From I've I've quickly googled and a paper written by a university of California historian Gregory Clark, the output per farm worker in Britain from 1300 to 1850 increased about 4.4* or 440%.
do not disrespect Romanovs
I love how a 2 hr video has been up for less than 20 minutes, and the keyboards warriors are already throwing in.
It's a topic mulled over by many.
My take is that England common law and property rights is why the industrial revolution could only have happened in Britain first
Maybe because this is the only large place left in the world where you can still voice an opinion, even if google censors many of us?
I dream of a day of an absolutely free internet, not one run by the fascisti at gogle.
Its a really, really interesting subject tho'... so many "what ifs" to consider :)
@@MIKE_THE_BRUMMIE I think it could have happened in ancient Greece had they shared their knowledge amongst the different states. (they had a crappy steam engine but also the tech' to design condensers, valves etc..)
I think we can go back to to Henry the 8th and his excommunication from the Catholic church. That made it possible for science to flourish, eventually ending in the enlightenment.
You don't watch TH-cam at 5x speed? 😂
Such a well researched video, great work man
Omg alternate history on the Roman Empire by Invicta!!!! My day is made 🎉
I'm an engineer, not an expert on the Industrial Revolution, but I would have thought you would also need elements such as:
* Metrology, with measuring instruments capable of resolution to thousands of an inch/hundredths of a millimetre
* A culture and procedures for inspection and quality (for interchangeability)
* Thread systems, including tapered and buttress threads
* Machines to build machines, i.e. quality lathes and milling machines
* Drawing standards, including dimensional tolerancing would be great
* Test facilities, machines and methods
* Plain bearing materials, eg. phosphor bronze, white metal
All of these things are really required AT THE SAME TIME.
Ideally you would also want to have the concept of zero, Newtonian physics, algebra, calculus, thermodynamics (vital for efficient steam engines), test facilities, machines and methods etc etc, otherwise you're relying on trial and error. All of these were available to the pioneers of the industrial revolution (although thermodynamics came a bit later, in the 19th century).
Engineer here also. You've got me thinking... their numeral system was far too clumsy for higher level mathematics. I'm sure you'd need an Arabic style number system to get started.
Yeah I agree. The Romans were not that close from what at least I know. The absence of calculus was a major drawback for them. The renaissance era Europe was more advanced than the Roman empire despite some modern myths and they had the better pre-requisites for the industrial revolution.
Engineer with a histroical hobby.
Standards for technical drawing was one such accumelated knowledge.
It was a little revolution on its own!
Many credit Leonardo da Vinci with its origin, but it can be proofen that after da Vincis life, technical drawings that still had no standard were (mostly) made specifically to copy the older (medival/before the first standards) style.
This was by chance also one of the reasons, one of my favorite books on Technological Innovations in history, marks one of its cut off points, before 1500!
For those of you deeply interested in learning more about the accumulated Knowledge that appeared before the industrial revolution and can read german(!), there exists an old book from 1996, called "Europäische Technik im Mittelalter 800-1400". It is a comprehensive compendium(582 pages + 60 pages of source credits), that goes in depth on the many innovations that happened in Europe from 800 to 1400.
@@arthurswanson3285 no, I woudnt say that they were needed. Arabic stile number systems, where used in acadimia already from 1300 onwards and the old roman system coudnt really be called clumsy.
It was more then enough to help create the first banking houses. I can only speak on this in the german culture context, but the arabic numerals only found wide spread addoption after 1530s (thanks to a certain book form 1522) and the big banking house (I know of the Fugger at least doing it) existed befor that and even still a bit after that the fugger are proven to have still used the roman system of the calculation table. This system was very much enough to create some of the most wealthy merchant families there were before the wide spread change to the arabic numeral system, so it is difficult to say.
For academic purposes the change had already long happened and I would say that in a way this proves that the calculation system has less to no impact on what we would call the first industrial revolution. It had more to essential of an impact on the later industrial revolutions.
So we need to be clear here about which industrial revolution we speak.
@@Enderfine354 There is a reason algebraic and later higher-order mathematics built on arabic numbers, whereas roman numerals are only found in 1970s movies and tv year credits these days.The notation doesnt capture the cyclic repetition of number patterns and cant be extended easily beyond 4 or 5 digits without serious mental overhead. It doesnt capture the abstraction and pattern of scaling inherent in numbers at all. Try to do floating point math, interest rates, or orbitial mechanics in roman notation. I'll wait.
Conclusive summary, great video!
Yet I'm missing one aspect here: Information recording, reproduction and distribution, of which the invention of paper and the printing press is crucial. And although the Romans certainly had the skills to build the printing press, there was no paper yet to print on.
Paper existed at least two thousand years before in Egyupt, and never went extinct.
@@ryanaegis3544 Paper != papyrus. The surface of papyrus is to uneven to print on. It was manufactured in a time consuming manual process and too expensive to be used in quantities.
Farting onto a candle is technically an external combustion engine, but being able to do that is very different from understanding afterburning turbofans.
This has been my greatest What If in history ever since i learned about the massive waterwheel mill complex
Wow! The level of detail and careful thought put into this video is amazing!
Wow, an almost 2 hours marathon on such an interesting topic. I've only just started, but this is going to be exciting.☕
a follow up video would be amazing, you did a great job summarizing the idea so far
The biggest part of the industrial revolution is the ability to spread new ideas for others to chew on because of the printing press.
What really held everyone back was the lack of the ability to spread knowledge that the masses could receive and digest. So you could even say the European University system is a key factor that helps lead to the industrial revolution.
Not talking about knowledge/education was a huge miss. That Rome flirted with the printing press but wasn't able to implement it into a standard use technology slowed their progress greatly.
Really enjoyed this talk. Fascinating from start to finish!
I'm thankful this video was recommended to me. First time I heard about the idea of Romans being somehow industrialised was in Second Image in Alabaster, a short story by Polish author Marek Huberath. Really enjoying those talks. Thank you.
Honestly love coming across these type of videos
Fascinating episode, thank you very much for making it!
Like probably most people who watch this at 2am, I'm here from the job search meme.
I would love to hear more about all of these topics individually like multi-hour lectures please
Mom: How’s the job search going?
This is the best discussion I've ever seen on this topic, I think. Thank you guys so much for the video! It was fantastic.
God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
Early modern Western European societies were too complex, across all fields, for the Romans to emulate. Early modern Western Europe was built on everything that came before. It was not possible for the (West) Romans to jump ahead 14 centuries.
Phantastic discussion. Very well done!
The 1815 map of the British Empire is somewhat misleading as it doesn't show the possessions of the British East India Company, which owned most of India and bits of China. So whilst what became British India wasn't technically owned by the British state in 1815, it was in practice a British possession administered by a private company.
That game in the ad looks genuinely interesting for once!
Rome didn’t fall, it carried on in the East for a thousand years and still didn’t have an Industrial Revolution
Dua Christianity .....
I watched the whole video and I must say its a really good analysis of Roman tech in comparison to british during the Industrial revolution. Especially the lack of
quick manufacturable steel is an important step to industrialisation
I don’t remember who it was. I think it was Marcus Aurelius that mentioned not having windmills because it would put slaves out of work so they kind of were kicking themselves in the feet and plenty of the younger. He’s talking about companion planting or crop rotation. I’m not sure one or the other. Socrates, shows you how to build a roof at a particular angle to let light in in the winter and keep it out in the summer. This was in memorabilia I believe and was an answer to the wood shortage in Athens at the time.
Horodatus tells us that the phridgians had greenhouses and Xenophone tells us in the Anabasis that the same fans had an ingenious way of preserving milk with wax and bottles. Xenophone tells us also in Cyclopedia that the Persians had assembly lines to build shoes 500 years before Christ. And plenty of the elder tells us about a flying saucer, shooting off sparks above Rome, which she describes as a polished shield. I can’t remember whether it was plenty of the younger or Tacitus, who talked about having his slave read books to him while they took a chariot to his summer or winter home, which means they were listening to audiobooks while driving. Just a few other things that you can pick up if you actually bothered to read the classics and while I’m at it, Joseph tells us that the temple in Jerusalem had those little pokey things on the roof to keep pigeons off. So there you go as Solomon would have it there’s nothing new under the sun.
The biggest issue against Rome developing a more industrial system was actually the nature of Rome and the Roman empire. As long as the empire had slaves to do the work and as an expansionist power that also used a tribute system there would never be a shortage of slaves because even if a newly conquered nation had no other wealth to loot it had people who could be sold and no matter how poor a province was it had people who could be sold. While it is possible that Rome could have fielded large calibre air weapons(think USS Vesuvius)or steam powered armoured vehicles or ships(the screw was after all known and had been for centuries)or used railways as mass transport they had no impetus to do so. For Rome as in the Greek states things like steam engines or steam powered air weapons were toys they had other means other than machinery to get work done. In addition in a military sense and Rome was a militaristic state there was no true rival to what Rome already had except China so other than deploying pump powered flame throwers as infantry weapons they did not need to use any new tech
The Romans: Why should we increase production? No one is going to buy our locally made fish sauce.
The Hans: Cheng! Increase steel productions! We have orders to some Laowai in the west!
As someone who's become very interested in emotional injuries and that sort of things, don't discount how poorly romans viewed lower classes.
In medieval plus Europe the classes seemed to mix more, and there in general seemed to be a sentiment of social mobility and Christian worldviews affecting the way people saw the humble worker.
In Rome people weren't seen as worth as much I feel, and so, it was almost like people got huge kicks out of using people to their advantage. in 1700s after this would have just been seen as a waste of resources, but Rome seemed to revel in wasting resources in displays of grandeur.
You have to have a culture of wanting to economise and spare people unnecessary work before youe gonna be driven to seek solutions from machines.
Rome didnt always do this, and relied heavily on slaves all through the empire.
How's the job search going
Thank you for this brilliant video, I enjoyed every minute of it! I really liked the idea of progress not being evident, really changed the way I think!
Unrelated, but I personally think that our modern era fusion reactor attempts are essentially analogous to the Roman aeolipile. A piece of a type of technology that will become vital and foundational in a future era, but unable to be successfully iterated and innovated into a useful form because of both limitations in our knowledge and the fact that there isn’t a specific niche that it’s able to excel in that would then be a foothold into the later advancement and diversification. Modern steam engines only came about because of a specific niche and purpose: to pump water out of mines. The aeolipile could not be translated into a niche within the Roman Empire, even if they tried repeatedly. Like we have. Yes, doing it like this could possibly brute force past the need of a niche for fusion, but finding such a niche would be a game changer for fusion development. We’re using fusion to boil water into steam, something fission is able to do more efficiently and effectively with modern technology. Competing in this niche is pointless and detrimental.
Great points. Scientific knowledge doesn't automatically become functional technology. It takes time and effort, and the ability to combine multiple different ideas into one better solution.
Can you do a video with the same topic but about china? I've read some arguments that the Tang dynasty was close to an industrial revolution, and while I'm not convinced I'd like to hear some in depth discussion about that.
Now do one on how close the Song dynasty was to industrialisation
They don't have steam engin concept.....
I've had this talk with a friend lately and he came up with a somewhat funny solution.
His reasoning was slaves. They never had the need to invent machines since they got cheap laborforce already.
And even if there was somebody proposing a steamengine to the senate, the slave agenda - which was certainly strong in the Roman world - most likely vetoed against it.
I just wanted to point out around 37:17, you mention gmo’s as seed selection. In agricultural biology, those are 2 distinct things. One is plant breeding (selective processing), the other genetic manipulation (gene splicing). Everyone that does agriculture practices plant breeding, GMO is lab built super-species, not natural pedigree refinement.
No. GMO is simply any Genetically Modified Organism. And Breeding in any capacity does fall under that umbrella term
This is exactly the sort of thing I love on TH-cam. Thank you.
Great video! I’d love to see a video on this topic but about China. From what I’ve read recently, it seems to me that the Song Dynasty was very close to an industrial revolution around 1100 until they were conquered by a nomadic steppe people
Great breakdown, great images, great nuance, great video! Thanks for putting this together. I kept putting this 2hr video off, but I am now very glad that I made the time. Many thanks
This was great but there were a few times where the reasoning boils down to "because they didn't" instead of reasons with actual predictive power. I think it's largely a polish issue - they're trying to cram a topic you could write a series of books on into a reasonable length video and do it in a conversational style, so it's to be expected, but its jarring when the majority of the content was so solid.
Love this. May be my favorite video from Invicta ever.
Rome fell in 1453… so closer than most people realize.
@@musashi.miyamoyo what do u mean
@@musashi.miyamoyo more like 1204
@@amirreza6088😂
@@amirreza6088 It's when Eastern Roman Empire ended up.
@@adlfm nope, “Byzantine Empire” called themselves the Roman Empire (Eastern Roman Empire when they first split).
The Holy Roman Empire ended in 1806, but I wouldn’t say that counts… Though it could be argued.
Every once in a while I put on an invicta video, and I’m always impressed by the art for the visuals, I’m just curious, is it all one person or does the channel have multiple artists?
1:16 BRO I NEVER SEEN YOUR FACE BEFORE YOUR ✨HANDSOME✨
I'm kind of surprised it didn't come up much earlier -- the role of the printing press and the mass communication that invention provided. Ancient Rome had nothing of the sort. This initiated a flourishing of literacy and education among broader strata of society. It facilitated a healthy competition among intellectuals to publish and to refute one another.
I made a similar comment. Rome had good knowledge transfer regarding military tactics, but without the printing press they lacked the ability to educate a large percentage of the population. Knowledge drives invention.
I got this on my regular TH-cam feed after seeing this in instagram. Not even real
An important driver of the industrial revolution in Britain that didn't really get discussed is that labor was very expensive in Britain at the time.
The British Empire had a system where the colonies were supposed to sell all their raw materials to Britain and in exchange Britain would sell manufactured goods to the colonies. However, the population of Britain was relatively low to be supplying all the manufactured goods for an enormous global empire, so the cost of labor kept rising in Britain until wages there were the highest in the world.
With such cheap raw materials and expensive labor, Britain had far more incentive than other countries to try and replace human labor with machines. Actually, around this time many other countries had access to some of the same labor-saving technologies that Britain had, but those technologies didn't catch on elsewhere because it was cheaper to just hire more people.
Could you please link sources in the description?
Ill work on adding that. This was our main source for much of it "The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World" g.co/kgs/4UvuRBv
Wow@@InvictaHistory
@@InvictaHistorythanks you.
@@InvictaHistory Thank you!
Awesome. I want that book.
I like how this starts with explanation of gaming and what makes Civilization different from real life... I want to add that Civ games have famously fell into some Western-centric stereotypes, for example stirrups defining Middle Ages in 3, that theory was largely debunked since... or things like requiring the wheel early on - Mayans had advanced mathematics (far beyond Greeks, with zero concept etc.) and calendar, but their environment had no use for wheels as llamas aren't really the chariot types and entirety of Mesoamerica is too rocky for wheelbarrows.
As an engineer, I can point out a million things that prevented the romans from getting a working steam engine, but the most important one in my opinion was lacking the philosophy of science. That is to say, a philosophy that doesn't hand out a theory on how the world works, but one that hands out a method for finding out how the world works systematically; you could never build a locomotive with Aristotle's physics model.
Like, you can give the 5th grader explanation on how a steam piston works to a roman, and I'm pretty sure they would understand phase transitions from water to steam, pressure working on a moving cylinder head, pistons attached to crankshafts turning oscillating motion into cyclical motion. What that Roman is going to be lacking is everything beyond that understanding. Ideal gas law, temperature and pressure relationships, specific heat, latent heat, heat of vaporization, energy, enthalpy, entropy, every single other boring value and relationship that is measured or derived through constant experimentation and measurement by the engineers and scientists of the industrial revolution. Lacking this language means that the romans wouldn't know what things they need to look to maximize or minimize, they wouldn't know what levers to pull to achieve the desired results, and they wouldn't even know what things to measure or test to see if they even made a better product at the end of it all. This is also ignoring the advances in metallurgical understanding to make these engines, as well as advances in precision manufacturing and measurement that are unimaginably important at every step along this process.
All of this derives from a change in the philosophy of the natural world that created an understanding of how things worked that was obtained exclusively from observations and derived properties. I think this change is an incredibly underrated factor that lead to the industrial revolution, and one critically lacking in the Roman empire.
The Romans had Greek science which was the first time science was invented. Unfortunately for the Greeks were convinced that vacuums were impossible. No vacuum force then no steam piston and no practical steam engine.
The key development in the English stream engine was the scientific experiments on vacuums and they were able to confirm vacuums produce force. This allowed for the development of the piston.
The scientific revolution made the practical steam engine possible.
Could you also say there’s been a cultural shift? There’s probably a clearer awareness of our history and a greater desire to advance technology than ever before.
@@tomh9553 possibly, but that also might be due to the ease of access of information. Global literacy, the internet, pop science using click bait to educate TikTok viewers. It could be cultural but it's also so widespread that it seems more like a natural side effect of having every documentary/research paper/book available to you while you're on the toilet.
so the scientific revolution?
One factor they missed which might come under the philosophy section, the industrial revolution started when people realised theyd already discovered most of the world so the only way to secure "immortality" by discovering the secrets of science
The "absolute" rule of roman emperors was not really there for a lot of emperors the senate had eminence authority at times while other emperors would curb stomp their power. The problem wasn't a counterbalance to the absolute rule. that's fine. It's the lack of true inheritance laws and an outdated bureaucracy that was set up by an unstable senate, which was itself was designed for a city state with very little real government restructuring outside of the provincial reforms
Just like today, the senate is a pestilence fostered on us by well meaning but ignorant signers of the constitution who learned nothing about Roman history, except what they read their British centric classes in the "classics".
The greatest empires in the world and the longest periods of prosperity has always been benevolent, intelligent dictatorships.
Democracy is very short term aberration in history, and soon to be forgotten as the horrible very short termed experiment in democracy in Athens led to cannibalism, Athens burning to the ground and the diaspora of thousands who had two nickels to rub together fled screaming to other safer spaces where the voting mob couldn't get to them.
We see the same thing here in USA, where the two nickel holders are fleeing screaming out of big cities and liberal run areas to safer and better areas in the USA.
Great children’s book trilogy I read (as a child) about this topic: Fireball by John Christopher. The premise was that in an alternate world just like ours, the Roman Empire never fell because a certain leader survived a battle that in our world had killed him. He returned to Rome and stabilised things such that the empire continued until the AD 1980s, when two boys from our world slipped through some kind of portal into that Roman world and disrupted the status quo and brought down the empire 1500 years too late. As a result of the empire being stabilised, none of the disruption in our world existed to catalyse all the technological and societal evolution that gave us the modern world, and things continued rather stagnantly as they’d always been in the Roman Empire. Consequences included a much larger more advanced Aztec empire, Viking colonies in Canada, and the Chinese eventually inventing primitive steam engines and firearms. Moral is, sometimes instability breeds faster progress, at least in the technological and scientific realms, if not the social sector.
So the legends were true; the video really exists
This is the most insane video concept and I LOVE it
I was really hoping for more of a discussion on the projection of the Roman empire had it not collapsed. Rather than a "it wasn't possible and would take 1600 more years".
I do appreciate the video, but the discussion is always about if the Roman empire had not collapsed how much sooner this all would have happened.
And in my opinion, it definitely would have been sooner, the dark ages are called that for a reason, it was a recession.
Guys, the video is amazing! Thank you for the sources and all the love you put here. Question: what year/period is the distorted map of population concentration representing? I guess it is after Trajan, since the map includes Dacia, right? And secondly, was made by you or.was extracted from one of your sources? If it came from a paper/book, which one?
hows the job search going guys?