I've been down the rabbit hole of was Rome about to industrialise.
I can't believe people think that Hero's steam engine was anything close to a 1700's steam engine such as the Newcomen engine.
They use very different principals. The power of industrial steam engines comes from the pressure it generates when water evaporates to steam vs the roman one only needing steam to move. It creates very little power in comparison.
That's not even mentioning the other engineering abilities the Romans are missing such as high pressure valves and the shear quantity of good quality iron it takes to make it work.
by theother64
11 Comments
Hero of Alexandria basically invented a spinning lawn ornament while Newcomen was trying to power the entire world.
When will people learn that reddit post title is not meant to be part of the meme?! Caption your memes properly!
I’ve never seen someone have that confusion at her than in web novels , which kind of is the lowest form of media.
Despite what Romaboos think, Rome was really no more technologically advanced than any other civilisation of its or even later time periods, which they consider to be barbaric in comparison to Rome. They were able to perform some impressive engineering with what they had, but the reality was that they were just as far away from industrialising as the Kingdom of Wessex or the Frankish kingdom.
Alors you should note that Rome would not have industrialised , because of slavery, why would you do better tool that are expensive and need coal or other burning things to work if you could put more slave .
Also all they had was iron and it is not the most appropriated things.
Trying to industrialised it would have just sink fund and made the empire collapse quicker.
Rome was not about to industrialize for one very simple reason: they lacked the metalurgical know-how to make the fine parts required for a proper steam engine.
The steam engine has behind it 1500 years of metalurgical knowledge and trial and error that made casting the parts to build it and then replicate it more or less exactly possible.
Rome did not have that.
It may be a shitty steam engine, but it is powerful enough to spin [Doner Kebab](https://www.historicmysteries.com/science/steam-engine/38285/), all you will ever need
You need really good steel to make a steam engine capable of anything useful. Ancient Greeks didn’t have that.
Honestly, if the Song Dynasty were European, we’d have more rome weebs asking the much more interesting question of what if they got the steam engine first.
They were metallurgically advanced for their time (and for some reason like always was until well after the industrial revolution), and they had coal and coke and was using it for steel. They already had things they were automating with water wheels.
There is no way anyone boiling water wouldn’t know steam could move things. It’s a much bigger jump to pressurizing enough steam to move something heavy.
Brett Devereaux has a great blog post on how far away Rome was from a ‘Roman Industrial Revolution’.
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/
People keep forgetting the industrial revolution was less “oh shoot when steam evaporates it can move things!” And more a metallurgic triumph than anything.