Steampunk reality check - what could actually be built

[oldskoolpunk]

Looking at 19th century technology, it's worth thinking about what could actually be built, and what inventions would have sped up technological progress.

Steelmaking was figured out rather late in history. Not until the Bessemer process was developed around 1855-1860 was there a way to produce good steel in high volume at low cost. Even then, the process was touchy.  Reliable control of temperature and steel composition was difficult, and steel quality varied. The Bessemer process was fast, but in some ways too fast; by the time manual analysis could check how the process chemistry was going, the cycle had completed, and it was too late to adjust temperature, blower speed, and additives.

Suppose that, around 1855, someone had developed a mechanical analyzer for the gases produced by the process, and had coupled it up to an analog mechanical computer as a process control system. (Modern steel mills have comparable equipment). That would be a very steampunk invention, yet buildable with the technology of the period. Steel quality would have improved many decades earlier than it did.

What would have changed?  The Titanic, we now know, sank because its steel plates were below their brittle transition temperature and cracked far more easily than expected.  That phenomenon wasn't understood until the 1920s.  Today's steels are good enough for Arctic icebreakers.  Early iron warships had poor strength to weight ratios ("The Admiralty is opposed to the building of iron ships on the ground that iron is heavier than water and will sink".)  Many early iron warships sat far too low in the water, and some sank in heavy seas without any help from the enemy.  (See HMS Captain). The Royal Navy went through several generations of bad ship designs in the 19th century, and not until HMS Dreadnought (1906) did they finally get it right. With better control over steelmaking, the first good battleships might have come 20 years sooner.

That's enough for tonight.

[pakled]

Well...it's fun to discuss. The Babbage engine (mark 2? Someone jump in if I get it wrong... would have had a memory, registers, and a few other things that would have been the distant ancestor of the modern computer.

Long before this, the Jaquard (sp?) looms had punch-card equivalents that allowed for patterned cloth at reasonable prices. Something like this could have been done.

I think the main difference would have been precision; the original steam engine had a 1/8th" clearance on the sides of the cylinder! I believe Ramsden (sp? the guy who made the telescopic eyepiece) came up with a method of cutting with true precision, so it might have been done.

IIRC - the Titanic, in addition to having questionable rivets (they're still asking questions today... also had watertight bulkheads that didn't go all the way up, so once the first one spilled over, they gradually all did.

But, it might have been possible to do some basic controls on mechanical devices, etc.

[Captain]

There are uncountable and most unrecorded inventions that almost worked or "caught on" at an earlier point in time:

http://nautilus.fis.uc.pt/st2.5/scenes-e/elem/e01310.html



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Huntsman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_steam_road_vehicles



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine



If even one new gadget were to have come out earlier it could have potentially driven the demand for improved machining, standard calibrations, new material productions (including steels), etc... which in turn could have provided the fundamentals for other devices at an early time.  That butterfly/hurricane thing.

Since ideas are what this exercise is really about; imagine sci-fi writers becoming popular a century or two earlier than they were.  I could see Benjamin Franklin publishing such stories if they had been offered to him. 

Then there is how frustratingly easy it could have been to reverse engineer simple technology based on advanced science like:  nitroglycerin, bazooka, crystal radio/spark gap transmitter, hydrofoil, wankle engine, penicillin, antiseptics, and rogallo wing.

[von Corax]

Well...it's fun to discuss. The Babbage engine (mark 2? Someone jump in if I get it wrong... would have had a memory, registers, and a few other things that would have been the distant ancestor of the modern computer.

In fact, I believe the Babbage Analytical Engine (the "mark 2," as you put it) would have been Turing-complete ie. it would have been capable of running any algorithm a modern PC can run. In principle, you could even port something like Bioshock to run on a Babbage, although you would have absolutely hellacious controller lag and a rather disappointing frame-rate.

[Captain Lyerly]

As Robert Heinlein once said, “When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before.”

Partly it is societal needs; partly it is the science/technology/engineering basis that is required; but most of these inventions - of the higher sort, anyhow - require an agglomeration of different minor inventions to work.

There were exceptions.  The steam road coaches of the 1830s came so close; but they were regulated out of existence pretty quickly.  And, at the time, they weren't really  that much better or cheaper than horse-drawn vehicles.  If the regulators had not been unduly influenced by the horse people, a few more developments and improvements would have had steam buses and cars on the roads in the 1850s - and the American Civil War might have been fought using steam tanks.  Can't you just see JEB Stuart commanding a tank regiment?

Well, we are all about what-if, here.  I think that one particular change, having the Turnpike Acts not passed in such a way as to discourage steam coaches, would be enough to power an entire series of Turtledove novels - are you listening, Harry? 

Who can think of another single, simple change that could have made everything different?



Z

[chicar]

Here some reading who can be usefull:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions#19th_century

Also, we should not throw away the potential of the impact of pre-victoria uchronia on the victorian era. For instance, imagine than some sort of plague in the first century caused a economic crisis in the Roman Empire, who now enable to rely solely on slaves, get the industrial potential of Hero of Alexandria's eliopyle. If we assumed than ecologic conscience have been later invented, imagine how the 19th century would have looked like if the industrial revolution arrived 1700-ish years earlier.