my theory of the industrial revolution
=history =culture =theory
Why did the Industrial Revolution
happen when it did? Why didn't it happen earlier, or in China or India? What
were the key factors that weren't present elsewhere?
I have a theory
about that which I haven't seen before, so I thought I'd post it.
steam power
One popular
conception of the Industrial Revolution is that steam engines were invented,
and then an increase in available power led to economic growth.
This
doesn't make sense, because water power and horses were much more
significant than steam power until well after technological development and
economic growth became fast. (Also, steam engine designs wouldn't have
caused economic growth in Ancient Rome because manufacturing them wasn't
practical at the time.) Steam power being the key factor is now considered a
discredited view by most historians.
agriculture
Agricultural productivity in Europe
improved significantly before the Industrial Revolution, and rapidly
during it. Improvements included:
- plant
selective breeding
- 4-field crop rotation
- heavy ploughs
- horse
breeding
- threshing machines
- roller mills
This reduced the number of
farmers needed, potentially allowing more people to do research, or other
kinds of work with more available technological improvement.
More
people doing research can certainly make it go faster, but there were
already intellectuals and a leisure class before the Industrial Revolution.
The increase in tech development was disproportionate to the non-farmer
population. The UK population also increased, but it was still a relatively
small fraction of the world population, and most of its population growth
happened after 1800.
canals
Britain made
a large canal system that enabled funneling food to London. Combined
with agricultural progress, this enables a large city, and London was the
largest city in the world starting in around 1830.
But by 1830, the
Industrial Revolution was already well underway. There were already large
cities such as Beijing well before that point, so "a large city" was not the
only key factor.
my theory
My view is that
the Industrial Revolution happened due to the combination of:
- a large
city
- European culture
- printing presses with movable type
- a
positional number system with zero
- English spelling reform
culture
If you look at the
inventions of ancient China and ancient Mesopotamia, I think there was less
emphasis on practicality and usage by the common people. For example,
al-Jazari largely made toys for the wealthy, and Zhang Heng made tools for
astrology.
Europe had a long history of continuous warfare, and
unskilled labor was less available than in China. I think that led to a
greater emphasis on practicality of inventions.
intellectual tools
The
Gutenberg Press was invented around 1440. That made it possible to spread
written works much more widely and with fewer mistakes, making communication
faster and reducing the chance that progress would be lost.
Fibonacci
brought Arabic numerals to Europe around 1200, but they remained rare until
after 1450. Between 1470 and 1550, they were spread rapidly by the printing
press. Engineering requires multiplication, and multiplication is much
easier with Arabic numerals than Roman numerals. That change made
calculations faster and reduced their error rates.
The introduction
of the printing press also drove standardization of English spelling.
Originally, written English words didn't directly represent meanings;
rather, sounds/pronunciations were linked to meanings, and different people
had various ways of representing those pronunciations with letters. That
spelling standardization reduced the chances of misreading words and made
reading faster.
error rates and exponentials
Consider a model where knowledge (K) accumulates or decays exponentially
over time, and is also developed with diminishing returns, such as:
K'/time' = a*K + b*K^c (c < 0)
If (a, b,
c) are such that the exponent of knowledge accumulation is positive for smart individuals but negative for interpersonal
communication in a society, then K reaches an equilibrium value, with
occasional peaks from a rare genius or intellectual society, but that
progress later decaying due to imperfect communication and preservation.
The printing press made intellectual work less likely to be lost. Arabic
numerals made calculation errors less likely. Spelling standardization made
misreading text less likely. My theory of the Industrial Revolution is that
those factors collectively reduced the decay of knowledge enough that the
exponent for societal-level knowledge growth went significantly positive up
to much higher levels of intellectual progress.
Then, knowledge
accumulated exponentially in the UK from 1500 to 1800. This led to
agricultural productivity increasing from around 1525, and eventually to the
accumulation of enough societal knowledge for the Industrial Revolution.