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为什么罗马没有工业革命？
Why no Roman industrial revolution?
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导读
这篇文章分析罗马帝国为何没有发生工业革命：问题不只是缺少技术点子，而是缺少能让早期蒸汽机等不成熟技术持续迭代的明确应用场景与市场激励，比如英国煤矿排水这样的“杀手级应用”。文章也涉及燃料短缺、冶金条件和古代经济结构等因素。
为什么经久不衰：它把“为什么没有工业革命”从天才发明论转向需求、应用场景和制度条件，今天读仍能帮助理解技术革命如何被具体需求推动。
HN 评论精选
钢的规模化生产依赖长期冶金实验，罗马虽有钢铁雏形却缺关键突破。
还有一条可能通向工业革命的道路——钢铁。英国工业革命建立在铁而非钢上，钢的大规模生产直到1880年代贝塞麦转炉才出现，比成功铁路晚半个世纪。罗马人已知铁和钢，钢质量不高但足以做短剑和一些工具；他们达到“团块”工艺却未再进一步。贝塞麦转炉本身不复杂，难的是冶金：贝塞麦先造出设备，但钢质量起初随机，Mushet 经约一万次实验才找到稳定质量控制方法。
Animats查看英文原文
There's another route to an industrial revolution that might have happened - steel. The British industrial revolution was built from iron, not steel. Mass production of steel didn't appear until the 1880s, with the Bessemer converter. This was half a century after the deployment of successful railroads. Iron and steel was known to the Roman empire. The steel wasn't very good, even by the standards of antiquity, but it was good enough for short swords and some tools. They got as far as the "bloom" process, but no further. Despite this, there was a modest iron and steel industry. A Bessemer converter is a simple thing. It's a big iron vessel lined with brick attached to a furnace and blower. Roman ironworkers could have built one. It's the metallurgy that's hard. Bessemer built the thing, but steel quality was random at first. Robert Mushet, a metallurgist, after about 10,000 experiments, figured out how to get consistent quality from the process. The basic idea, from Wikipedia, is to apply enough heat and air to burn off almost all the carbon in iron ore, leaving pure iron. Then add 'spiegel glanz' or spiegel eisen, a "double carbonate of iron and manganese found in the Rhenish mountains" which was iron, 86…25; manganese, 8…50; and carbon, 5…25. Controlled amounts of manganese and carbon are thus put back into the molten iron, and steel comes out. A number of cultures figured out steel by accident. Thus, Japanese steel, Damascus steel, etc. Various trace additives - vanadium, molybdenum, etc. were used. The Roman empire got as far as mediocre steel. But the process was neither understood nor reproducible at scale. Mass production required enough analytical chemistry to do quality control on the ingredients. So an interesting speculation is what might have happened if an early culture had some people really into finding out what stuff is made of. That leads to analytical chemistry. Some Roman philosopher might have discovered that if you grind rocks to a powder, mix with water, and spray into a steady flame, colored light comes out. If you look at that colored light through a prism, you see sharp lines, in the same places for the same materials, which indicate the elemental composition of the material. If they'd happened to talk to someone in the Roman army responsible for a sword factory having yield problems, they might have gotten some samples of the minerals being used. That might have led to the beginnings of metallurgy quality control. As there is in a modern steel plant, there would be somebody in a little room not too far from the furnaces doing analysis on the raw materials. Steel would still be somewhat expensive, but with a repeatable production process, swords and knives would get better. Then agricultural implements and other tools. If you need to plow hard or rocky ground, a steel plow is a big help. The next big breakthrough in an an agrarian society with some steelmaking capability would be a reaper. The McCormick reaper was the first machine that really boosted agricultural production. That's what kicked the world past sustenance-level agriculture. So that's an unlikely, but not impossible, alternative path to an industrial revolution.
蒸汽机需要煤矿排水这一特定需求驱动，其他地区是否具备仍存疑。
基本论点是：没有明确用例来克服蒸汽机1.0的毛病，就没有激励去完善它；从煤矿抽水是这种发动机的“杀手级应用”，即早期采用者市场。文章说这在古代几乎不存在，即使在适用时期也几乎只在英国存在。我仍怀疑为何拖这么久：欧洲、亚洲、中东没有类似森林砍伐问题吗？是森林砍伐与人口密度的组合吗？
abetusk查看英文原文
The basic argument is that without a clear use case to overcome the version 1.0 troubles of (steam) engines, there was no incentive to work out the kinks and pumping water out of coal mines was the big "killer application" of such motors. That is, pumping water out of coal mines was the "early adopter" market for engine technology: > As we’ll see, this was a use-case that didn’t really exist in the ancient world and indeed existed almost nowhere but Britain even in the period where it worked. I remember reading a blog post by TechnicsHistory [0] (which was on the front page of HN at one point) that makes the same argument. The acoup.blog article goes on to give a reason why coal wasn't needed earlier as the need for heating fuel became scarce when wood became scarce: > Consequently wood as a heat fuel was scarce and so beginning in the 16th century we see a marked shift over to coal as a heating fuel for things like cooking and home heating. I'm still skeptical of why it took so long. Were there no other places in Europe, Asia or the Middle East that didn't have the same deforestation issues? Was it the combination of deforestation and population density? [0] https://technicshistory.com/2021/07/13/the-triumvirate-coal-iron-and-steam/
若青铜时代延长，中东燃料危机可能转向石油，工业革命或更早。
好文，发人深省。也许罗马时代不可能，但也许再早一千年有可能。青铜时代之后进入铁器时代，不是因为铁更好（起初并非），而是青铜依赖铜锡贸易路线，而这些路线在青铜时代崩溃后消失。想象青铜时代再延续几百年：卡迭石战役有数千战车，晚期青铜帝国需要大量武器和青铜；埃及和中东树木稀缺。就像英国耗尽树木转向煤，再多几百年可能迫使埃及寻找木炭替代品；不会是煤，因为中东没有易得煤矿，而会是石油。石油当时已知，希罗多德等记载沥青用于巴比伦城墙。
credit_guy查看英文原文
Great article. Thought provoking. Maybe an industrial revolution could not have happened in the times of the Romans, but I think maybe, just maybe, it could have happened 1000 years before them. The bronze age was followed by the iron age not because iron is a better metal (initially it was not), but because bronze requires trade routes (copper comes from some mines, tin from some other mines), and those disappeared after the Bronze Age collapse. Now, imagine that the Bronze Age had lasted a few hundred years longer. Just one hundred years before the Bronze Age collapse there was the battle of Kadesh [1], where tens of thousands of soldiers squared off. There were 5000 to 6000 chariots altogether. Which means the late Bronze Age empires needed huge quantities of weapons, therefore of bronze. Egypt does not have a lot of trees, and trees are quite scarce in other places in the Middle East. Just like Britain ran out of trees and needed to resort to coal, a few hundred years more of bronze age would have forced Egypt to look for a substitute for charcoal. It would not have been coal, because there are no easily accessible veins of coal in the Middle East. It would have been petroleum. Petroleum was known during those times [2]: More than 4000 years ago, according to Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, asphalt was used in the construction of the walls and towers of Babylon; there were oil pits near Ardericca (near Babylon), and a pitch spring on Zacynthus. Great quantities of it were found on the banks of the river Issus, one of the tributaries of the Euphrates. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kadesh [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum#Early
科学革命是工业革命的前提，文章忽略了这一点。
文章没提科学革命吗？我读了也搜索了。没有科学革命，很难先有工业革命。
mpweiher查看英文原文
No mention of the scientific revolution? (I did a read + a search) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Revolution Difficult to have the industrial revolution without first having the scientific revolution.
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