Kontextmaschine

18th February 2021

Post reblogged from A Never-Ending Tea Party with 205 notes

Hey so a little PSA from your friendly neighbourhood history geek:
when you see one of those long tumblr posts that lays out a dizzying array of innovations the ancient world supposedly had, with the heavy implication that Schools Did Not Teach You The Real Version Of History… a lot of the time those posts are inaccurate, sensationalised, or both.
FOR EXAMPLE:
claim: the Romans had technology that you were never taught about, including steam power!
critical thinking: wait, steam power? that’s the kind of technology that fundamentally changes a society. if the Romans had steam power, they would have spammed it like mad. we’d be digging up roman railroad tracks or dredging up Roman steam ships everywhere in the Mediterranean.
fact-check: the Romans had a doohickey called an aeolipile, which does use steam power to drive a very small turbine. we’re talking “smaller than a breadbox” here. according to Wikipedia, the Romans mostly thought of the aeolipile as a neat demonstration of certain natural laws, with maybe a side of party trick thrown in.
reality: the Romans had steam power in approximately the same way that folks in the 1600s had electricity. ie: they didn’t, really. they weren’t stupid- far, far from it!- but they just didn’t have all the pieces in place that you need to have steam power.
i’m fact-checking a specific claim from one of them here, but this thought process holds true for basically every wild claim that you see on Tumblr. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

I mean I’ll agree that those posts are not contextualizing properly and you’ll end up with worse understanding for hearing them out, but I think they’re calling attention to something real – the Romans DID have steam power.

Like, the idea that you could use fire to heat water into steam and direct its expansion into motive power – that existed! The aeolipile testifies to that, just like Mesosmerican children’s toys testify they were able to figure out the wheel-on-axle as a bearing mechanism

But that didn’t become a thing. Which testifies to the notion that individual invention matters, that Newcomen and Watt weren’t just the ones taking credit for innovation that would inevitably be made, and that it’s still possible that there are known elements of contemporary life waiting for equivalent innovation.

Tagged: history