Did the Romans really invent the steam engine and then proceed to never use it for anything ever except as a novelty toy like a fidget spinner
>>18466809>the RomansThey didn't. It was a Greek invention. Story of anything more complex than stacking rocks in the Roman Empire, really.
>>18466809With their material science and manufacturing anything they could manage to do with that level of steam pressure would be much less economical than slave labor
>>18466809No because an engine isn't just a box of pig iron that you boil water inside of you stupid pajeet.
>>18466870Plus it's a reaction turbine instead of a piston engine so the torque was dogshitAnyways the efficiency was probably something like 1/30th that of a newcomen engine
>>18466809The whirly steam toy is a totally different design from the bong's steam piston. The Romans didn't know how to bore into metal precisely to produce the tight fitting piston while the British had centuries of experience with manufacturing cannons. Romans didn't even have windmills, although they had water mills their mechanisms were still too rudimentary and inefficient.>Rome had slavesReddit meme, machines are often orders of magnitude more efficient than a human, machines can be cheaper than slave labor. If they had the knowledge, Roman merchants and collegiums would certainly be using them somewhere. Perhaps not to power grain mills or textile mills but to pump water from their deeper silver mines or some small effect. We'd see it somewhere. They just lacked the technology.
>>18466840>the stacked rocks
>>18466809>fidget spinnerWouldn't it be funny if antigravity was related to fidget spinner like tech?
>>18466889Making fire hot is harder than making roman cement, funnily enough. That's how primitive the technology demonstrated here is.
>>18466889>Greek architecture and construction knowledgeThis dumb ass barbarian....
>>18466809That isn't really a steam engine as we traditionally think of them though is it? That's more akin to a really weak rocket engine-like thing. You couldn't really power anything with that unless it was massive and you were able to accrue a much larger amount of pressure.>>18466879Now this Stirling engine-like thing is a completely different story. What is this? Where did you find this image?
>>18466945http://hotairengines.org/primitive-air-engine/amontons-1699
>>18466809When your economy runs on infinite cheap slave labor, what incentive is there to try and save on labor costs?
>>18466939Domes were very much a Roman thing not a Greek thing
Probably a meme theres also a urban legend that a turkish person created a steam engine but used to cook kebab (based if true)
>>18467085its not a meme
>>18466870I did a back of the envelope calculation in one of those threads once and fond that you need about an 1860s level of steam engine tech to produce as much mechanical energy burning wood as feeding a draft horse hay, the same area of land being used to either grow wood or hay. There's loads of confounding factors, but the earliest steam engines were less efficient by at least an order of magnitude so I feel pretty confident stating that a society without fossil fuels would have rejected something like the newcomen engine on the spot.
>>18467097Heron did not only produce his recoil spinning ball, but also something more similar to a piston engine (apparently the steam pushed water out of a closed container, but it's a similar principle). Efficiency should be much higher.IMO if we hadn't found coal, we would still have become semi-industrial with horse muscle, wind and water power, to the point where eventually steam engines worth fueling with wood would be developed. Just a lot slower.
>>18466809the earliest real steam engines were a lot more complicated and intricate than the toy posted in op
>>18466874you're not roman sanchez
>>18466809try to stay current opnogs invented everything and were kings too
>>18467458Paki got triggered kek. Is it superpower 2030 now?
>>18467484>aieee it must be another brown thirdie o algokek knew it was a seething sanchezyou will never be medyou will never be romanyou will always be a mestizo
>18467492>saaar do not redeem the steam engine
doesn't deny he's a thirdie larping as roman/med kek
The issue is that retards still describe the Aeolipile as a steam engine which isn't strictly accurate. It leads to people like OP wondering why they never put it to useful work since steam is so often associated with industryThe Aeolipile could more accurately be described as a reaction engine or an external combustion reaction engine than a steam engine. Its primary means of locomotion is steam exhaust coming from its nozzles. The reason this is significant is for two reasons; 1.) Actual steam engines use not only the expansion of water into steam, but also utilize vacuum to complete its cycle for extra efficiency, and 2.) reaction engines rely on density and expansion of its reaction source, and water just isn't as dense as a more proper propellant like nitrocellulose is.
>>18467498doesn't matter, they got 90-95% of the way thereit's like figuring out the bohr model and then not learning quantum mechanics despite having centuries
>>18467504>doesn't matter, they got 90-95% of the way thereIt does matter because you can't really put something like that to useful work. If the Romans used gunpowder instead of water then maybe. Unless you're suggesting that the Aeolipile isn't that big of a leap to a proper steam engine, which is retarded. It's nothing like a steam engine. Proper Steam engines need a piston, flywheel, valves and valve rods for the intake and exhaust strokes a vessel capable of high pressures.etc and the material science for the kind of tolerances required just weren't there yet.
>>18466891fidget spinners aren't that different when you think about it
>>18466809The Aeolipile was not a steam engine. It was a novelty.https://youtu.be/-8lXXg8dWHk?t=225&si=Jdf3R5kfLs0s7X7XYou need precision manufacturing and an understanding of the mechanics of steam expansion to actually get useful work out of such a device.
>>18467504Here's the problem: I need to create accurate ways of measuring length, angles, time, mass, volume, pressure and temperature. The first two are not too hard to measure even with Roman era tools, but the others?>TimeThe best clocks had an accuracy of up to 15 min maximum until the late medieval period. Pendulums as a timekeeping device won't be made in a reproducible manner until the Renaissance, which is also when Galileo makes his famous "rate of falling" experiments. He could, because he had the technology to create accurate, replicable pendulums to study and use as timekeeping devices.>MassBalances have been around since the Stone Age, but precision mechanical balances won't become a thing until the 17th century. You need precise ways of metalworking and engineering balance knife edges and beams for any hope of chemical precision.>VolumeHere the problem isn't measurement, but standardization. Several units of volume were used everywhere, to the point that two scientists living in different countries wouldn't be speaking in the same units. This wouldn't be solved until the imperial and metric systems being adopted much later.>Pressure and TemperatureWhile you could get a phenomenological understanding of these, you need precise glassblowing and creating even bores on glass surfaces to create graduations for precise temperature and pressure markings for any measuring instrument for these. And of course, without an understanding of gas laws or hydrostatic pressure or thermal expansion, which require the previous advancements in glassblowing, metalworking and standard units to even start, you can't make these.In short, the Romans and Greeks saw this as a toy because that's all they could do with it. Medieval engineering/glassblowing/metalworking advancements hadn't occurred yet.
>>18466809the agricultural revolution happened in many fertile river valleys independently from one another, so we know all that was necessary was a river valley to have an agricultural revolutionHowever the industrial revolution happened only once, and in very unique circumstances. I don't know if it could have happened in any other circumstances.1. Gunpowder has been invented2. the intense military competition between European states has required tremendous investment into metallurgy to develop ever stronger and more durable metal cylinders for building cannons3. due to the high water table, coal mines in certain parts of england flood easily4. a sophisticated legal and banking system with independent courts that respect intellectual property rights, and ready access to capitalThese were the conditions that resulted in the invention of a steam engine. You have to have very strong metal cylinders that won't explode under pressure, a technology which only existed because of cannons. Early steam engines were so inefficient that they required a constant stream of fuel, so the only practical use for them was operating pumps to drain coal mines, where the fuel source was right there. Britain already had the legal system in place as well, so inventors and capitalists could rapidly exploit new inventions without having them stolen out from under them.None of this existed in ancient Rome.
>>18467097>a society without fossil fuels would have rejected something like the newcomen engine on the spotThey didn't use coke to produce steel until after the Newcomen engine. And the reason they switched to coke was due to its higher purity more than a source of energy. Rome would have had access to ample unfettered forests, 18th century Europe had to import timber from Russia or the Americas for this purpose, with limited oak in England for example being used for shipbuilding, much more valuable than reducing it to charcoal and pitch.>>18466870>>18467064Slave labor isn't always more economical than machinery in every single case, if they had the technology they'd be using it somewhere in some niche in the economy where it is profitable. They just lacked the technology. I hate this meme.The industrial revolution and how humanity progressed to he modern world we see today is a fascinating and important topic yet pophistory has an incredibly blunt oversimplified speculative assessment of it and all the normies and redditors lap it up.
Didnt they use it for automatic doors?
Rome didn't exist, Carnegie mason. What you speak of as Roman invention was created by the Indo-European, and it was thoroughly put to use.
>>18467498>The Aeolipile could more accurately be described as a reaction engine or an external combustion reaction engine than a steam engine. Its primary means of locomotion is steam exhaust coming from its nozzles. The reason this is significant is for two reasons; 1.) Actual steam engines use not only the expansion of water into steam, but also utilize vacuum to complete its cycle for extra efficiency, and 2.) reaction engines rely on density and expansion of its reaction source, and water just isn't as dense as a more proper propellant like nitrocellulose is.interesting isn't it?1) may be useful for
>>18467739>the agricultural revolution happened in many fertile river valleys independently from one another, so we know all that was necessary was a river valley to have an agricultural revolution>However the industrial revolution happened only once, and in very unique circumstances. I don't know if it could have happened in any other circumstances.>1. Gunpowder has been invented>2. the intense military competition between European states has required tremendous investment into metallurgy to develop ever stronger and more durable metal cylinders for building cannons>3. due to the high water table, coal mines in certain parts of england flood easily>4. a sophisticated legal and banking system with independent courts that respect intellectual property rights, and ready access to capital>These were the conditions that resulted in the invention of a steam engine. You have to have very strong metal cylinders that won't explode under pressure, a technology which only existed because of cannons. Early steam engines were so inefficient that they required a constant stream of fuel, so the only practical use for them was operating pumps to drain coal mines, where the fuel source was right there. Britain already had the legal system in place as well, so inventors and capitalists could rapidly exploit new inventions without having them stolen out from under them.>None of this existed in ancient Romethis tooisn't it interesting how most technological advacements were the result of humans wanting to kill each other faster and distancefully?
The romans and Greek cultures were aware of steam power, but the actual thing that makes steam power so powerful is the pressure. And back then it was kinda tricky to achieve that pressure. While not infeasible, it required considerable effort without immediate obvious gain. Basically the power efficiency of steam engines like the temple doors or the aeoliplile was very low, since you had to waste a shitton of burning fire for very irrelevant gains like a rotating thingy or just opening some fucking doors.
Still don't care. Still know it was the Aryans. Verification still not required.
>>18467823It's only when a bunch of concepts/innovations were made, the steam engine became incredibly powerful and the limit was the sky >invention of artificial vacuums>advanced steam generation >pistons and cylindersWhile the latter sounds fairly feasible in Roman times, the former is a bit more complex than just drawing some pressure. (The romans did actually have suction pumps, but they were used in an entirely unrelated manner)
They used steam powered doors on a couple of temples if I recall correctly. To answer your question though Greco Roman metallurgy wasn’t good enough to fully take advantage of steam power.
>>18467838>Greco Roman metallurgy wasn’t good enough to fully take advantage of steam power.Nah, this is false. Roman metallurgy was just fine and high quality iron, copper and lead with skills in creating pipes etc. was more than enough to create a 18th century tier steam engine.The problem lies in the separate innovation >>18467827 requirements that were never made. Why they were never made is a different question, which mostly comes down to cost and incentives.
>>18466889The Pantheon was likely planned by Apollodorus of Damascus, a Hellenized Easterner.
>>18466809They had the technology, the question is, why would they create automata, when they can just throw a bazillion slaves to it.It's no surprise the industrial revolution only happened when we started collectebly agreeing slavery was bad.
>>18467931Early modern england didn't have slaves.
>>18466809the only thing the romans really needed was the protestant christianity to excel them to great industrial heights
