What POD to Have Early Industrialization in Roman Period?

Agricola

Agricola

Faeelin said:
Why? Medieval engineers built the Naviglio Grande; there were water powered forges in 14th century England, which the Romans never had as far as we can tell.
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LOL, such channels are trivial from a roman point of view. Roman water engineering was not reached again until the 18th century when french and english engineers started to take care about these big sinkholes called Paris and London. And who says that the romans had no water-mill driven forges? Do you really believe, that they had water driven saw-mills, but no hammer mills?

I am afraid, if industrialization happens in the roman world based on water mills, they simply move the Tiber 100km to the north, because some buerocrat decides, that they need the water over there. ;)
 
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water123

water123

I mean, Rome and the Song Dynasty were the closest to industrializing (with Indus Valley quietly being around 5)
 

Faeelin

Banned
Aqua817 said:
I mean, Rome and the Song Dynasty were the closest to industrializing (with Indus Valley quietly being around 5)
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16th Century Europe was obviously closer! More advanced, proto science, a printing press, sophisticated finance...

What do the Romans got? A single neat watermill which we extrapolate across an empire.
 

Faeelin

Banned
G.Washington_Fuckyeah said:
The Romans used the water from aqueducts to fuel their water mills. That way, they could operate water mills and other industries independently from rivers and other waterways.
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"Faeelin, why do you hate fun?"

"Because no one is impressed by cathedrals, which see hugely complicated engineering achievements, but are impressed by brute force engineering. And because medieval people also used water in mines."
 
Alcsentre Calanice

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
Faeelin said:
"Faeelin, why do you hate fun?"

"Because no one is impressed by cathedrals, which see hugely complicated engineering achievements, but are impressed by brute force engineering. And because medieval people also used water in mines."
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Excuse me but I don't understand your comment. I never discussed cathedrals - I just mentioned what makes sites like Barbegal so exceptional.

On a side note, cathedrals could have been even more impressive (think of domes) if Roman engineering hadn't disappeared, and their decoration could have been more realistic if the medieval artists had oriented themselves by Roman art like the Byzantines did in the Macedonian renaissance.
 
Alcsentre Calanice

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
Faeelin said:
What do the Romans got? A single neat watermill which we extrapolate across an empire.
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Oh oh don't get angry. Roman watermills were found not only in southern France and Asia Minor (a sawmill, but description of watermills in the city of Rome and on the Mosella also survived in ancient literature.

Sure that doesn't say anything about the quantity of watermills (on which we can only speculate due to the lack of archives like the Doomsday Book), but it shows that they were found all over the empire.
 
Alcsentre Calanice

Alcsentre Calanice

Gone Fishin'
Analytical Engine said:
It's not like contemporaries to Byzantium managed to develop scientific thought or anything.
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Sure, if you wait long enough, there will always be some inventions, and if you add them up, you'll get great technological progress like in centuries of medieval history.

The trick is to creat a scientific atmosphere working towards progress, where inventions aren't just accidental but the fruit of team work based on centuries of knowledge. The Library of Alexandria was such a place until many scholars had to leave in 145 BCE.
 

Faeelin

Banned
I've been thinking a little for examples of impressive water management on the Roman scale for medieval Europe, and I can't think of any beyond the nation of Holland.

Hmm.
 
Salvador79

Salvador79

@Faeelin,
thinking about ways for Rome to progress technologically towards some earlier and different *industrialisation doesn`t mean to deny medieval technological progress. Actually, I think it means managing to make the many different medieval achievements happen earlier, under very different circumstances, and thinking about how that could be brought about and what it would change.
 

cerebus

The problem is that we can not agree on the trigger for the OTL industrial revolution. My personal opinion is that it was a unique coincidence of geographic, economic, social and political factors that happened to combine. There are hundreds of examples of abortive industrial revolutions that for some reason, probably unknowable, did not take off. We all have our favourites, venetian arsenal, hand axe production in the alps, Athenian silver mines etc etc

So in order to propose a POD for a Roman Industrial Revolution we would have to identify (worse, agree on!) all those factors and work out how to induce them.

I am reminded of some advice I once received:

Young Me: "How can I be successful and become rich?"
Father : " Well being born the third son of the Duke of Chellfont would have helped"
 

RogueTraderEnthusiast

For me, I think a recent thread covered an important aspect - transmission of knowledge - i.e. make the knowledge cheaper. It doesn't need to be movable type, but being able to print books on the cheap on paper would be transformative - simply because it lowers the cost of technical expertise.

That makes it much more affordable for smaller communities to afford small libraries, rather than (AFAIK) being largely owned by elites. That allows you to have a technical middle class emerge like during the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

It also means ideas can be run past each other. One of the big things holding back mining? Flooding - which needed pumping, which without the vacuum pump is limited to 10m (using the Roman Suction Pump). Having more people being trained enough to investigate the problem, makes it more likely to be solved (as per the 1650s). This is the fostering of innovation that someone discussed earlier (sorry, no credit, at work).

I mean, cheap paper and printing has a whole host of other advantages - including in helping to change the finance industry, which would change a whole mess of things.

So yeah, my PoD would be to introduce high quality, cheap paper and printing - simply to reduce the costs of innovation, and paper.
 
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