Are technological leaps just a matter of luck? Was there anything preventing the Romans from inventing the combustion engine?
Are technological leaps just a matter of luck?
Are technological leaps just a matter of luck? Was there anything preventing the Romans from inventing the combustion engine?
It's obviously iron and population /thread
Any post below is spam
A better understanding of metallurgy and thermodynamics for one.
>Are technological leaps just a matter of luck?
only to some level
>Was there anything preventing the Romans from inventing the combustion engine?
lack of "technological consciousness" which is present today with multiple state and private structures intentionally aiming for technological advance
Wow anything below the first post is morons
applies to you
They pretty much had steam locomotion.
Metallurgy. It took until the Renaissance until metal working became complex enough to create the parts needed for a real combustion engine. Gears and other parts have to be made within a fraction of a millimeter to work properly and efficiently.
the antikythera mechanism shows they could do that with bronze at least, maybe they could have done the leap with iron
Bronze expands and contracts too much with temperature
yes but the know how to make millimetric adjustments was there, that's why i specified "If they could have done the leap"
The antikythera mechanism is a simple contraption compared to steam engines. The thickness of the gears are about 1mm, doesn't sound bad but this is utterly horrible, the generally accepted measurement is the thou when designing gears and engine parts which is 0.025mm which is 40 times smaller than the gears. For acceptable use in steam engines the measurements used for the acceptable range of deviation in gears was 1/5th of a thou. 0.005mm. Ancient people were quite literally incapable of calibrating to such a small measurement.
Cumbustion no? But they had something on about steam power. They knew about steam power, I'm not a metalurgist can some one check is Roman iron could withstand 15psi? If so they could make a low pressure steam engine given the knowlage
Anyone can make steam engines moron it's just iron wasn't available
Not any large working one. Parts have to be miniscule to work properly, which the Roman didn't have the ability to create.
It did moron, they had all kinds of clocks and precise devices, it's because Italy has no iron
italy has iron, especially in tuscany, though+ the empire expanded outside italy
Which wasn't populated
?
tuscany and the areas outside the empire were populated
Elbe has not even produced enough iron to give every Roman a sword. It's useless.
Most iron was from Iberia, Anatolia, Balkans and Alps
That's less than a thousand times less than it is today. It's irrelevant. They weren't populated.
It's far more than any other state back then and the population was larger too. There was no lack of metal
They didn't have very good metalwork. Infact the gauls were better blacksmiths then they were, the only reason Rome was able to smash them was due to their lack of team work until the very end.
the greeks had studied hydraulics and pneumatics and had managed to come up with quite interesting contraptions (including at least one machine which could open the doors of a temple i.e. do major "physical" work), i think the fact that the hydraulic powered contraptions they had (hierapolis sawmill, barbegal mills, ianiculum mills, moselles mills, tidal mills, reverse-overshot wheels etc.) + mass of slaves were the main reason why neither greeks nor romans never bothered to invest more on steam engines
>Was there anything preventing the Romans from inventing the combustion engine?
the ability to make steel in the amount and quality necessary for them to be anything but a novelty, as well as a lack of understanding of petroleum refining