I posed the question to the Claude and Perplexity in deep research mode, and they produced these articles:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/e536be5d-999a-4158-842e-f2fbc9b7a28d
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/the-post-at-https-www-lesswron-S4Tsth3ZTJap_4znEWMknA
They both reference Francis Bacon's 1627 utopian book New Atlantis, in which he apparently describes a fictional state-sponsored research institute producing mechanical vehicles, flying machines and submarines. Several other 17th century writers, including John Wilkins and Robert Boyle, speculated along similar lines, and when Papin built an early steam engine prototype in 1690, he also envisioned it being used in transportation.
Looks like none of them really grasped that automation might produce something as profoundly strange as our modern civilization, however. Even late 18th century thinkers like Erasmus Darwin who recognized the early steam engines as big deal seem to have mostly only expected a revolution in transportation, rather than in everything.
Nice! Papin is a very natural addition, very interesting thinker who probably warrants his own post. I spoke with Jason Crawford and he raised to my attention another figure for consideration: Christopher Van Berg in 1636, though it seems he was more so just listing machines than describing a revolution driven by machine power.
I feel that Huygens still came the closest as he considers applying a portable source of power, the importance of a power to weight ratio, and how such an engine could be applied not just to transportation but also industry and construction. That said, I have yet to find anyone who truly appreciated the level of social change inherently conjoined to industrialization.
Editor’s note: Post 2/30 for Inkhaven
Why did the philosophers fail to anticipate the industrial revolution? I often find myself wondering. On the one hand, you could argue that they weren’t in the business of predicting the future. But on the other hand, I’m sure if you plucked Plato and his students from The Academy and dropped them off in 1910, they’d probably have a few things to say about it. The most transformative event of the past ten thousand years is surely interesting to curious observers of the human condition. But then again maybe it’s not so surprising. Predicting the future is hard. Predicting an exponential at the start of said exponential is even harder.
So did anyone do it? And if so, who was the earliest? Could anyone possibly predict industrialization in antiquity? The middle ages? The age of the printing press? When did the first mind dare to pull back the veil of agriculturalism and sneak a glimpse at the dazzling, terrifying spectacle of the industrial age? We’ll never know for sure of course. But I present two candidates:
Christiaan Huygens
Christiaan Huygens was a brilliant Dutch scientist and mathematician active during the Dutch Golden Age. This isn’t a Wikipedia entry, so I won’t bother going into too much detail but I’ll mention that among many other achievements, he discovered Saturn’s largest moon Titan and invented the pendulum clock (building off Galileo’s insights). In the 1670s, he also designed the gunpowder engine, a very early kind of combustion engine that utilized gunpowder as its fuel source. In theory, this primeval engine could raise over a thousand pounds (Huygens at one point mentions raising 3,000 pounds over 30ft) but was never actually constructed. Historians today debate whether it could have been built at all. Less than half a century later, Newcomen would build his steam engine and interest in combustion engines faded for the following century. But even more interesting than Huygens’s failed combustion engine was the intellectual rabbit hole it led him down.
-Christiaan Huygens, 1673
Prophetic. I found this quote originally in a strange polemic by a French scholar which argues that the British delayed the industrial revolution by over a hundred years. I’m not sure I buy his arguments, but to my delight, the quote is, as far as I can tell, the real deal.
So there’s our first candidate. 1673. Not bad, the early period of industrialization in Britain would begin by the mid-18th century but much of what he describes would only be developed well into the 19th century and his words were written some 230 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
But, another challenger appears!
Roger Bacon
This second candidate is a stranger case. I’ll open with the quote:
Roger Bacon, c. 1260
Also sounds eerily prophetic. A little background on Roger Bacon. He was a medieval friar and polymath famous for his ingenuity and early developments of empiricism. He was also the first known European to describe gunpowder (unless this part of his works was a later forgery as some scholars believe).
Unlike Huygens, Bacon does not directly identify the exact motive power for these machines for these machines but he does seem to describe at least the transportation revolution element of industrialization. As far as I can tell, this passage is quite a bit more famous than Huygens’s quote, which is very obscure. However, this translation is a bit generous and ignores a lot of context. In the following line of his writing Bacon writes:
Bacon isn’t attempting to predict the future here and the commonly circulated quote is misleading. He’s describing machines which he believes have already been developed at various times throughout history by various inventors. And he goes even further than that, asserting he personally has seen many of these inventions (aside from flying machines). I’m honestly not exactly sure what he’s talking about with regard to what he has seen. But what I can say is that Bacon lived during a time that was at once both exciting and one in which the information environment was deeply polluted.
Active during the reverberations of the Renaissance of the 12th century, Roger Bacon had access to a much wider corpus of classical texts than his earlier predecessors but also had access to a large variety of pseudepigrapha and it would have been virtually impossible for scholars at the time to distinguish between genuine and forged works in many cases. Because of this, among other things, Bacon believed Alexander the Great had used a submarine.[4]
So I’m less confident about counting Bacon’s claim. There is an inherent fuzziness to this game after all, because what counts as “predicting the industrial revolution” is a nebulous concept. That said, in addition to the haziness of what exactly he’s referring to, Bacon does not so much describe a world transformed by industrialization but rather lists a smorgasbord of wondrous machines. Roger Bacon is a difficult figure to assess, with some scholars professing his status as a visionary thinker, almost a modern man dropped into medieval times. Others are far more cautious, describing him as more of a product of his environment and questioning whether some of his works were in fact later forgeries. To truly have an informed opinion I would have to read far more of his works than I have currently made my way through.
Are there other Candidates?
I leave the reader here with a request. I have found two candidates thus far, two thinkers who arguably anticipated the industrial revolution. But I suspect they are not alone. If anyone out there is able to find more candidates, please message me, I’d be very excited to hear about them.
Oeuvres complètes. Tome XXII. Supplément à la correspondance. Varia. Biographie. Catalogue de vente
Original French:
(Translated to English via Google Translate)
Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White (page 134)
Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (footnote 29)
Original Latin:
(Translated to English via Google Translate)
The Letter of Roger Bacon Concerning the Marvelous Power of Art and of Nature and Concerning the Nullity of Magic