Automata were basically clockwork figures that did all sorts of things, many dating back thousands of years. But I wonder, did any engineer ever decide to start a major project with the idea that these machines could have some key use? I'm not talking about robot soldiers attacking the enemy with swords, but something more realistic, like one configured to write and sign letters so officials and kings wouldn't have to spend hours doing such tasks, a fully mechanized castle, some kind of clockwork-powered vehicle, or some kind of mechanism that fires projectiles for use on battlefields?
Aside from Da Vinci's designs (which only remained on paper), there isn't much on the subject, but I'd like to know if there were ever any real plans (or if there was a prototype, possibly lost or destroyed) to create something like this using mechanics based on gears and gravity, in times when steam power hadn't yet been implemented. I wonder how technology would have evolved if there had been complete investment in the development of those mechanisms, as was later done with steam. How might technological development and industrialization have changed in this timeline of history?
by Upset-Captain-9115
2 Comments
A system of gears and clockwork like devices takes a lot of work and does little of value. You have to get skilled craftsmen to forge all that metal, work all that metal, craft all the gears, and then design some device to use it for. Clocks are kinda useful because you can just build one, put it in a town square, and springs and gears are pretty good for keeping time. You’re not going to build some kind of clockwork device that will plow a field, harvest your crops, or transport them to market because that’s not something gears are good for doing. You’re also not going to save energy, because clockwork takes more energy than it consumes. You can have some guy who lives near the town square to wind that clock every morning so it doesn’t lose time. But the farmer who wants to plow his field is better off just doing it himself.
The major reason that steam engines came about in the 19th century was because of advances in iron refining and manufacturing. If you had a lot of workers who were skilled you could build ironworks that produced huge amounts of iron at a fraction of the price. So all of a sudden you had all sorts of cheap iron tools, like nails, hammers, chains, and manacles to slap on your slaves to get them to do work for you.
There ended up being a surplus of iron, and peopel started building pretty simple tanks you could put water in, and then heat up the water by burning wood or coal beneath it, creating steam. Your tanks didn’t need to be complicated precise gears, just big ugly tanks that held a seal.
Once you had the steam, you had a source of tremendous energy that you could actually do work with. Instead of turning a whole bunch of gears and dials, you could just power a water pump that suctioned all of the water out of your coal mine. Or you could power a single driving wheel and make a train. The train required iron rails to go on, but hey, iron was cheap now. So you could load up all your crops and livestock on cars and take them to town to sell. A few years later, a few more advances, and you had steam powered tractors to plow your fields to grow more crops. All the things that clockwork and simple gears couldn’t do.
Of course steam engines soon became more and more complicated, and you needed high quality machining and tooling to make them. But now you could use steam power to run your lathes and mass produce it, without needing the exacting handscrafted measurements now being used to make pocketwatches instead of large clocks.
The keys to converting this craft into technology was energy and mathematics.
Romand andGreeks had some amazing mechanisms, but they relied on water pressure run by gravity in many cases, which is not a powerful energy source unless you can handle high pressures in long pipes.
Another barrier to progress was their limited mathamatical skills. Without a positional number system it is hard to develop the calcalus needed to develop machines.
In the 18th century we had both conditions fully in place – plenty of coal and sophisticated mathematics and thus the industria revolution began.
Edit: Third conditions: materials engineering. Timber and cast iron are not enough to develop a technology. Sophisticated steel (as mentioned by u/Ill-Dependent2976) is also a condition.