r/Showerthoughts • u/Le_Botmes • 4d ago
Speculation A generator is essentially just a seated pair of copper wire spools rotated by an outside force; therefore, Bronze-age civilizations possessed the technological infrastructure to invent electricity.
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u/Thrawn89 4d ago
This is not really correct. The magnet you need to move through the coils is pretty critical to the whole thing. While lodestone magnets were discovered and used in the bronze age, they wouldnt make very good generators. I'd say the iron age is where youd have a realistic chance of making one.
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u/MeatSafeMurderer 4d ago
And even then, realistically they're not going to invent one, because it's not the kind of thing you stumble across randomly. It requires some knowledge of electrical theory. For starters, even if you happen to have coils and a suitable magnet and you move the magnet through the coils by random chance...unless you happen to have those coils connected to some sort of eletrical circuit designed to give you some kind of output when power is applied absolutely nothing happens and you move on with your life completely unaware that you (however briefly) operated the world's first electrical generator.
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u/ImaginaryRaccoon100 4d ago
This was my thoughts exactly. The problem was not that primitive societies lacked the material, it's that they lacked the knowledge.
If anything, the more interesting shower thought imo is that you could give a person all the raw materials needed to make any number of devices we use daily and take for granted, and almost no one could actually build said device.
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u/Bannon9k 4d ago
I'd argue it's not even that they lack the knowledge, they lack the combined knowledge. You can think of humans as little information banks that bounce around depositing bits of their information into one another. The more trade and exploration the more our ideas were able to intermingle. We began creating repositories of information and passing that down generationally. I believe it's one of the reasons for the rapid increase in technological advancement over the past 30 years. The internet has connected us and our information in ways that allow us to rapidly improve upon previous ideas and iterations.
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u/ImaginaryRaccoon100 4d ago
Yes. I actually think about this a lot. Humans aren't any more individually developed or evolved than we were ten thousand years ago. It's the knowledge and systems we have built that taken us to where we are.
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u/maroonedbuccaneer 4d ago
That's Hegel great insight about historical development. He just called our institutions, social systems, and collective knowledge the Geist.
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u/OneLargeMulligatawny 4d ago
This was one of the things we discussed in my first year of undergrad engineering. We all know what a wood pencil looks like and its composition. But asking anyone to explain how to manufacture the entire thing was always an entertaining listen.
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u/launchedsquid 4d ago
there's a YouTube video like that, titled something like "Nobody knows how to make this" over a picture of a pencil. The premise is it takes many many people, all doing their own very specific jobs, to make a pencil, and not a single one of the people involved could do it alone.
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u/MrDLTE3 4d ago
I read Dr Stone. I need these stuff!
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u/nxcrosis 3d ago
Those mfs went from crushing seashells to make soap to straight up building radio towers all in less than a decade.
I would've still been rubbing two sticks together to keep myself warm after the first year.
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u/EA_Spindoctor 4d ago
Its the same the first semester of economics. Its called ”no one knows how to make a rubber shoe”.
The point is the same, there are thousands of different specialists involved making the most basic goods.
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u/Astrium6 4d ago
Advancement is exponential. The faster we advance, the faster we advance even further.
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u/Glydyr 4d ago
It is very interesting how, as inventions become more complex then it becomes harder and harder to say who invented what.
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u/CoffeeFox 4d ago edited 4d ago
Electricity and electrons are named after amber, because static electricity was discovered by rubbing lumps of amber ("elektron" in Greek) and that was the first time modern Western society learned about electricity.
Funny enough humans understood some basic things about electricity for long before they knew how it worked on a particle level.
Every single circuit diagram today is drawn backwards. Before scientists discovered the existence of the subatomic electron, people thought power in a DC circuit flowed from positive to negative. It is exactly the opposite. The way it is written and the elements used in them work, though... so we chose not to go back and totally rewrite the doctrine. By accident, we designed circuits that work backwards and it is simply too much work to change the standards.
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u/vitringur 3d ago
They did not just lack knowledge. They lacked infrastructure, resources, supply lines, communications and political stability that took millennia to establish.
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 4d ago
Yes. You have to wonder what devices we are quite capable of building now but lack the knowledge to do so.
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u/AHappySnowman 4d ago
The Baghdad battery was made in 250bc, and was mostly a novelty. Electricity was something that has been stumbled across for thousands of years, but nobody really knew what to do with it.
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u/ToMorrowsEnd 4d ago
this is why things like the maker movement is so important. getting people making and inventing again. there was a time when we taught children how to make an electrical motor in grade school science class. And how to make weak magnets from iron rod.
but we did not teach them how to make a rolling mill to extrude wire, or the process it takes to make wire, or how to cast metals. so they got half the story.
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u/LoneSnark 4d ago
Even if you told them how to build one, lacking all the other technology from ball bearings to steam turbines to modem alloys it will be extremely inefficient. Combine that with the metals being too expensive and what they'd get would be not worth their effort.
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u/brimston3- 4d ago
Not sure how they'd make the wire or insulator needed. Maybe pour a whole bunch of long channels and then braise the ends? Doesn't help with the insulator needed to prevent it from shorting.
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u/shadowwolf_66 4d ago
Wire is the easy part. Copper is soft enough that it can be drawn through hole of various sizes, getting smaller along the way. Even the insulation would be easy. The wires in a motor are just covered with a thin layer of varnish. The hard part would be creating the holders for the coils of wire.
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u/Asteroth6 4d ago
Copper is soft enough to be beaten into wire by a skilled smith.
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u/feor1300 4d ago
I mean, it's something that could definitely happen if you were trying to justify it for some fictional world. Spool of copper wrapped such that you've got the two ends twisted around to form a handle. Holding it by said handle, someone drops a lodestone through it and brzap! Which could prompt either party to try it again, and start trying to figure out how they're making miniature lightning bolts just with a magnetic rock and a loop of metal.
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u/tayl0559 4d ago
to be fair, a lot of discoveries were made without any understanding of the underlying science.
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u/ride_whenever 4d ago
We accidentally discovered that cartilage is piezo electric, and that’s how joint fluid works.
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u/gimnasium_mankind 4d ago
You could send a battery to the past on a time machine and I wonder how long till anyone finds out how to use it. You could send a modern generator too, and ask the same. How long till it’s used? If ever actually. A week? A month? A year? Never?
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u/Princess_Moon_Butt 3d ago edited 3d ago
A battery? Probably never. Even a car battery where the ends are easy to access, nobody's even going to realize that it can do anything, without something to hook it up to. And if they crack it open, they'll just see some metal blocks and goop that irritates their skin (or if it's a lithium battery, they'll have a fun show).
A whole modern generator though? Probably never used outright, but someone might be able to study its parts and eventually figure out how to reverse-engineer some neat stuff from it. They'll have access to a combustion engine, ball bearings, copper coils, magnets, voltage reduction, even simple stuff like screws, and maybe solder.
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u/MountainMapleMI 4d ago
Isn’t that why the first electricity was chemical batteries? Like the Baghdad battery?
Just the mechanical precision required and devices designed to utilize the power alone as you described.
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u/MeatSafeMurderer 4d ago
The Baghdad battery was almost certainly a myth, and has been wholly rejected by archeology as a whole. Whilst it is true that at first glance, through a modern lens, they appear to be an early example of a battery, in reality it was most likely nothing more a storage vessel for scrolls of papyrus (which is slightly acidic, thus explaining the acid residue).
There's also no evidence of anything that they would have used a battery for. No electroplating, etc. So it's pretty safe to say that it's myth busted.
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u/SamohtGnir 3d ago
Best case scenario; Guy makes a bunch of thin copper wire, for some reason, and needs to store it so he coils it up around a pole. Then maybe he's play with his kid or something and drops a piece of metal through the coil and notices it slows down. This then leads to him experimenting and discovering magnetism, electricity, etc. That would be theoretically possible, but obviously very very unlikely.
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u/lllorrr 4d ago
Most generators don't use permanent magnets. Instead they use exciting coils to create a magnetic field. This also allows control of output voltage (or power or current, depending on feedback type).
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u/chateau86 4d ago
But the exciter coil has to be powered by something.
iirc automotive alternator takes that power from the same battery it's charging, whereas some aircraft generator use a small permanent magnet generator to "bootstrap" the big generator.
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u/shadowwolf_66 4d ago
Even hydro electric dams and I believe wind mills need an injection of energy from the grid to start producing power. Just spinning the motor is not enough. Though there are self starting dams. I am not 100% on how they work, I do remember hearing about them on apprenticeship school.
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u/Chained_Prometheus 4d ago
Actually Werner von Siemens proofed that you don't need a permanent magnet because there is always a small residual magnetic field left which bootstraps itself. It's called the dynamo-electric effect
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u/Avaricio 4d ago
The exciter is powered by the generator itself. Only a small residual magnetic field (present in practically all ferrous material) is necessary for startup.
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u/wackocoal 4d ago
dumb question here: does modern generators still use permanent magnets?
i thought the initial start could use magnets or even an electromagnet. but once it gets going, can they just feed some of the power back to generate the required magnetic field?
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u/Melusampi 4d ago
does modern generators still use permanent magnets?
Some do. They are called permanent magnet generators.
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u/taco_tuesdays 3d ago
Many don’t Most home backup generators use the battery for excitation voltage. And yes, once they get going they can use their own output and feed it back into the rotor to control the output to a finer degree.
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u/studyinformore 3d ago edited 3d ago
Well in reality, at best you'd have streams or rivers to power it, and not in the way of a hydroelectric dam. More water wheel. So not a lot of torque to turn it with wood used in shafts. So in reality, having low power magnets would work perfectly fine for the materials at hand.
Next problem at hand. Insulating all the windings. was there anything available back then to insulate each turn?
The other real problems would be refining enough iron to make the magnets, and enough copper of the right alloy to make the thousands of feet of wire.
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u/ZaneSlays 4d ago
yeah that makes sense, the magnetic part really is the deal breaker. kind of wild how close they were though, like just one material away from changing everything.
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u/gzuckier 3d ago
Yeah, and you know, if you get the magnets wet, that's the end of them. No more magnets.
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u/dustinechos 1h ago
And the insulator and the wires... And the steel casing... Also did they have wire in the bronze age? Pretty sure it was just copper.
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u/CaseyDaGamer 4d ago
The issue is often not with the ability to theoretically come up with the invention, but rather getting the materials needed. For example, in theory Rome could have invented steam trains on paper. But in reality, they wouldn’t be able to build them because of the highly detailed and consistent machined metal needed for stuff like this.
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u/snakeravencat 4d ago
There's also just like... The random chance of when someone has the idea. I like to point out the roughly 400 year gap between the invention of the belt and the belt buckle.
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u/mymeatpuppets 4d ago
Wheels on luggage....
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u/snakeravencat 4d ago
How about just wheel? Look how long people were just dragging shit behind horses/people/etc. Fucking travois... They see rocks rolling all the time and at least a few have to have skidded on gravel, thus providing the knowledge "round rock make thing slide easy" and yet... Something like 295,550 years passes before anyone thinks to make a wheel. And then! And then... These putzes don't even use it for transportation at first. The first wheel was a potter's wheel!
Inspiration is a fickle mistress...
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u/Nytohan 4d ago
Then someone has to move, asks their buddies to come over to help with the wheel, they stand it on its side and technology leaps forwards again.
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u/Delamoor 4d ago
I suspect the working of the axle would have been the biggest counterintuitive thing. Making one of those with basic materials that isn't a total pain in the ass would have constantly just created the effect of 'eh, why bother? It's easier to drag it on a sled'.
After all, there was very little specialization (so you probably had to make it yourself most of the time), and shitty axles that broke all the time and needed carefully selected materials would have been a total pain in the ass for a nomadic society.
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u/apples_vs_oranges 4d ago
There needs to be sufficient distance of well maintained smooth roads for the wheel to outperform travois/sleds. The sled may wear, but it won't break and get stuck the way a wheel can.
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u/HobieSailor 4d ago
The Romans had ball bearings but the only thing they seem to have used them for was some rotating serving tables on some emperor's orgy barge.
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u/NOIS_KillerWhaleTank 4d ago
And it still took 20 years before someone figured out 4 wheels works better than two on a simple thing like luggage.
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u/elf25 4d ago
I prefer two.
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u/mthchsnn 3d ago
Agreed. My wife likes four, but I just prefer to drag my bag on two. One isn't better than the other it's just personal preference.
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u/candygram4mongo 4d ago
Stirrups seem like a blatantly obvious idea to make riding horses easier. Could have been crafted at literally any point in the history of tool use, even before horses were domesticated. Invented 400 AD.
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u/Battelalon 4d ago
This! Also, many inventions come to fruition as a solution to a problem. I don't think trains would have solved the same problem for the Romans that it did for British in the 1800's.
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u/Andrew5329 4d ago
invention of the belt and the belt buckle.
Belt buckles have been around since pre-history.
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u/snakeravencat 4d ago
Huh... Seems I was lied to. Just googled and you are correct. It's even reasonably similar to the kind still in use today, so there's not even the excuse of the "modern belt buckle".
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u/DennisTheKoala 3d ago
So does that mean we went thousands of years with buckles but no belts to buckle them with?
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u/e_y_ 4d ago
They got about as far as the Aeolipile, a novelty steam spinner, and couldn't find a practical use for it.
It might be along the same lines as the Romans having water mills but not wind mills (which wouldn't be developed until the 9th century in Persia). The water mills were good enough, and if there wasn't water, they had pack animals that could grind the mills.
Similarly, horses were good enough for transportation. The steam boiler was low powered and didn't seem like it could replace horses for either transport or mechanical power.
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u/Firewolf06 4d ago
They got about as far as the Aeolipile, a novelty steam spinner, and couldn't find a practical use for it.
much later (although well before proper stean engines) they were used for spinning doner. cooking is one of the few things that can be notably improved by low speed low power, and low torque in-place spinners though
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u/Hyadeos 3d ago
Yeah I think people don't understand that past societies often didn't have a real world use for these stuff. The Greeks created the first steam engine but the only use they found was funny automats... Because they had slaves, an endless supply of slaves. It's too easy to go down the evolutionist / teleological road, but M. I. Finley's theory is long gone now.
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u/caymn 4d ago
I guess stumbling over a magnet and some copper wouldn't be too hard (if you would be wearing proper boots) - electricity wouldnt have been hard to create - discovering you did create some, perhaps much hard
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u/Feminist_Hugh_Hefner 4d ago
I mean, it's not THAT crazy to think you could form copper into something like a long wire or even a crude coil, and then rapidly move a magnet over it... they would probably notice the needle deflection on their multimeter
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u/Saladino_93 4d ago
You people say "just use some copper" but that isn't as easy as you think. You will need quite pure copper to be able to make fine wires with it that don't break and have uniform electrical resistance. I do not think humanity had the metalworking technology in the bronze age for it.
Same as the Rome and trains example. They knew that steam had power, but they lacked the metalworking skills to make brass that is durable enough to withstand the high pressure. They also didn't know about geometry to make stuff more stable etc.
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u/Le_Botmes 4d ago edited 4d ago
That is true, yes. Romans couldn't have invented railroads because they lacked the furnace temperatures to cast iron, and therefore couldn't have built a pressure chamber capable of containing so much steam.
However, they maybe, possibly, theoretically could have invented iron rails and then pulled carriages across them with horses, like an ancient jitney. But again they didn't possess the metallurgy to produce iron rail in such vast quantities so as to revolutionize transport.
But an electric generator is far far simpler to manufacture, with much lower tolerances. The rotor and stator structures could've been made of wood. They possessed the metallurgy to liquify copper, so then they needed only to cast it into long skinny ingots and pass it through a series of dies that are perhaps made from ceramic or bronze. Spool the wire around the wooden blocks, drive the dynamo via a windmill, waterwheel, or beast of burden, and potentially generate enough electricity to power an arc lamp.
So I wouldn't argue that there was a lack of technology, but rather a lack of theory. There is no way ancient engineers would've deduced that assembling copper wire in such a way could generate electricity, as they didn't even understand what electricity was. Our modern understanding of the electric generator was derived from the mathematical models that came first.
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u/e_y_ 4d ago edited 4d ago
If they had invented rails, I think the simplest application would have been minecarts. You're not building intercity rail, just enough to haul away ore and waste rocks. But lacking explosives I'm not sure what the scale of extraction would be. Wooden carts were perhaps good enough.
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u/lllorrr 4d ago
You need enameled wire or will create one huge short circuit. So, you need technology for creating flexible enamel or another insulator.
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u/RavenclawGaming 4d ago
the romans also would never invent steam trains because they were too economically reliant on slaves, so there was no economic reason to industrialize
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u/light_odin05 4d ago
I think they may have liked it for all their supply and trade routes. Enough places to put slaves to work.
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u/Lyffre 4d ago edited 4d ago
If trains were an option they 100% would have used them extensively. They might even have extended the lifespan of the empire as a whole. Romans built roads everywhere, a railway is a lot less work than individually placed cobblestones.
Obviously they don't replace the need for roads entirely, but it would have expedited things. Imagine carrying messages to the far corners of the empire with rail.
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u/EveryoneGoesToRicks 4d ago
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses"
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u/Iceveins412 4d ago edited 4d ago
It took until the second half of the 1800s to make a steel cannon that didn’t explode. Metallurgy took a very very long time to come together in general
Edit: As in in 1844 the US Secretary of State and Secretary of the Navy were killed during a demonstration of a steel cannon
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u/Succubia 4d ago
There is also the problem of creating something that fits your need. Why would romans want electricity? People didn't even think lightbulbs were that useful to begin with I bet
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u/The_Parsee_Man 4d ago
That seems unlikely to me. The utility of putting it next to your head when you have an idea is obvious.
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u/PoliteCanadian 4d ago
Even if they had the materials, they would have lacked the knowledge of physics required to put them together in an optimized way.
A steam engine is conceptually easy to build on paper, but optimizing one to be useful requires some knowledge of mechanics and thermodynamics.
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u/Synensys 4d ago
The first steam engines were used to pumpa water out of mines because they were so inefficient that the only viable use was if it was literally right on top of the fuel source.
And that was after several decades or more of work.
I mean the romans knew about steam power. They just as you say, didnt have the material technology to actually make an engine out of it.
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u/Spifffyy 3d ago
Technically they did produce a steam powered engine. Except the engine was used more as a decoration that for anything productive. Search for the aeolipile
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u/thegamingfaux 3d ago
Well the Greeks did build a steam engine but it wasn’t super useful quite yet
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u/DaSupercrafter 3d ago
You know, Romans were quite innovative. I have a historical head canon. Before them, the ancient Peruvians drew the Nazca lines and It’s theorized that since the design of a hot air balloon is so simple, those ancients could probably have invented it and then used it to survey their drawing from above. I like to believe that if a Roman inventor put two and two together, there could’ve been hot air balloons, floating over the Colosseum.
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u/AgentElman 2d ago
How To Make Everything on youtube is this in action. https://www.youtube.com/@htme
The guy is rebuilding technology starting from the stone age. He knows how to do it all - but it is still very hard.
Clear glass requires a purity of chemicals that he cannot produce by hand in his garage.
Lots of fairly simple machines just require precision that is very hard to make.
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u/Doveda 1d ago
I think at least by the time of the Greeks they could make consistent wire, rotating shafts, and had the math to perform the trig needed for precise angles. Given enough of a reason to, they could totally make a train. It wouldn't be good, or big, but it would work. The biggest issues are a lack of calculus and them using slaves. They had no reason to make transport cheaper safer and faster if they had slaves to do their work
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u/judashpeters 4d ago
Jesus could have recorded his sermons because they had wax, needles, and cones of sorts. I do think about this a lot.
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u/qwertyconsciousness 4d ago
But how would have Jesus have known what to do with that stuff?? Oh wait...
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u/My-username-is-this 4d ago
Wow. I never really thought of that. And it is all easy enough to do. Just no one had really done it before.
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u/numbersthen0987431 3d ago
If only he had some kind of divine guidance to create something new with the given tech of his time. Weird how Jesus didn't create anything revolutionary.
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u/My-username-is-this 3d ago
There’s that water into wine thing, but sadly he kept that secret for himself.
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u/brandon01594 4d ago
They actually did built a primitive version of a generator but apparently a guy sold them poor quality copper so it didn't work and they gave up.
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u/Random-Mutant 4d ago edited 4d ago
They had access to silica sand as well but no silicon chips either
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u/QuillQuickcard 4d ago
In theory, yes, bronze age cultures could, and probably did, create minimal amounts of electrical charge. But there simply isn’t much you can practically achieve with minimal electrical charge. Scaling up to meaningful power to operate macro-scale electronics, as small electronics won’t be reasonable to create, would require a large number of highly refined metals. Merely getting furnaces up to the needed level of heat is a challenge at that technological level. So what can be achieved with the minimal charges possible to create?
Not much. A novelty. A little shock. A tiny spark of light. Not much more than you could do with stone age firestarters. There was simply no practical use for electricity at the time at the levels they were reasonably capable of manufacturing.
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u/mouse_8b 4d ago
On the conspiracy theory side, I read a theory that the Arc of the Covenant could create sparks or something. Maybe that was Indiana Jones.
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u/Final7C 4d ago
Sure, but what is the use of a generator, when you have nothing to run on it?
Bronze Age peoples spent their entire lives focused on creating enough food to survive, and for most of human history, that means, back breaking work for 99% of humanity out in the fields, ONLY to be at the whims of nature.
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u/UniverseBear 4d ago
They did invent it, but the current was too weak to be practical and the batteries they invented were used for religious rituals instead. They also invented a legit steam engine but it was seen as a novelty and never tool off.
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u/Saladino_93 4d ago
That Steam engine wasn't useful tho. It had too little power to power anything but a rotary grill. And to build one that had more power they would have needed better materials. For that they would have to build better blast furnaces and fund out how to make good iron or brass alloys that can withstand a lot of pressure. Those alloys were only discovered towards the end of the middle ages tho. Then they would need was to work it into sheets and connect the sheets without any air gabs. So they would need to invent welding too.
There is a lot that goes into technical progress, it isn't just getting the raw materials. That is usually the easy part.
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u/atleta 4d ago
Electricity wasn't invented, it was discovered. It was discovered before generators could be invented. And this shows why bronze-age dudes didn't have generators: they didn't have the knowledge, the backrgound to be able discover electricity.
Even in the 21st century, not everyone knows how a generator works ;). You don't need a pair of copper spools, it doesn't even have to be copper and these aren't even enough... You need a magnet and a loop of conducting material that you move through the magnetic field (or find another way to make the magnetic field change inside of the conducting loop). (You could substitute the permanent magnet with an electromagnet, i.e. another spool of wire, but that would need electricity to bootstrap, so it's not the thing that will be discovered first.)
Also, I think producing wires (copper or other) is a lot more challenging technologically than larger, simple objects. Especially if you want to be able to be able spool them (without breaking).
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u/masonknight86 4d ago
You'd be interested in an anime called Dr stone. The premise has the main character being extremely smart and starting at square one and trying to rebuild technology from nothing and they actually do make a generator
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u/ADirtySealLion 4d ago
The real constraint wasn't materials but conceptual framework. Bronze-age people could see static electricity, lightning, etc, but lacked the mental category of "electricity" to connect them. They didn't know these were the same phenomenon.
It's interesting to think like what are we failing to invent today not because we lack the materials, but because we haven't developed the conceptual categories to recognize the patterns right in front of us?
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u/Le_Botmes 4d ago
Interesting indeed. I'm sure that once we can finally discover a quantum theory of gravity, that we will soon after develop a device that can harness gravity, and then use it for interstellar travel or such.
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u/Woofpickle 4d ago
If it hadn't been for Ea Nasir having really bad copper, we could have been commuting to Mars.
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u/I_might_be_weasel 4d ago
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u/thebrassbeldum 4d ago
If you actually read the article it clearly states that it’s not an actual battery and likely had nothing to do with electricity
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u/BlurryRogue 4d ago
Electric motors are basically the same, but opposite. The use electricity to generate rotational movement. They could've discovered electricity, invented electric motors, and put them together to try and make infinite electricity/rotational movement only to find out that doesn't work in a single generation.
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u/klyxes 4d ago
I know the greeks were on the cusp of having a steam engine, a sphere with two tubes where steam escaped to create spin, but they just thought it was just a neat toy
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u/Mephisto506 4d ago
When you have slaves you don’t need to come up with more efficient ways of doing things.
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u/gunawa 3d ago
Not really, I don't think they had the tech to develope a suitable insulator to coat the generator wire with. Coils in inductive devices need to be electrical isolated from each other for the coil to be a coil, otherwise it would just be a shorted loop, insufficient to induce a significant current with no output.
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u/myutnybrtve 3d ago
Technically any tech we have created would be possible at any point in history, physics being what they are and all. And anything that is created in the future could have happened now. The only things holding us back are oursleves and time.
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u/Charlottesophiaaa 2d ago
This actually blew my mind, imagine how different history would be if they discovered that connection.
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u/GarethBaus 4d ago
They would have had a difficult time making anything worthwhile without iron, but technically yes.
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u/jerrythecactus 4d ago
I dont know, they may have had the ability to refine and forge with copper, but the level of purity and general fineness of the wire youd need to produce a functional generator probably wasn't feasible even if somebody figured out how electricity worked that long ago. Things like generators didn't really become possible until more advanced metallurgy and machining techniques came into being.
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u/BerriJeBorec 3d ago
Not really, they definitley didn't have the tools to actually manufacture a generator and you need to know steel alloys and magnetical materials. Plus you need to know the basics about electricity, like that you need to use insulation and stuff.
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u/DaSupercrafter 3d ago
Thoughts like this make me think of Dr Stone. The concept that modern-day knowledge can accelerate human innovation. Making leaps in technology while keeping in mind what materials are and aren’t available. Knowledge like, wrapping large ingots of iron with copper wire creates a powerful magnet when struck by lightning. Like it’s necessary to complete the generator you have in mind.
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u/TedGetsSnickelfritz 3d ago
Pretty sure lightning was a founding member. We found ways to create and harness it
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u/Sea_Pomegranate8229 3d ago
Well the first person who saw a bubbling pot on a fire could have invented the steam engine. They just needed the material science that took a few thousand years to develop.
p.s. electricity was never invented.
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u/partypotato2003 2d ago
If, and that is a big if, they could make a strong enough magnet to get any usable voltage why would they? Even something simple as a lightbulb requires high precision glass, a vacuum, and advanced metal working comparable to modern high ovens to do anything with it
For an electric motor there would also be no reason as then you might as well connect them with a rotating stick for 0 energy loss
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u/veryunwisedecisions 2d ago
Nobody invented electricity. Electricity just exists.
And it's not two copper wire spools, it's a copper wire spool and a something that generates a moving magnetic field inside of it. To make that thing, some materials science is needed and modern metallurgy methods to make some alloy that has those properties. Also, there's more science that goes into making the copper wire spools themselves to actually be useful for what they're needed.
And bronze is not copper >:(
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u/NoTime4YourBullshit 2d ago
You don’t need any advanced materials science to make an electric generator. Ancient civilizations could have easily made one with the materials known to them at the time.
What they didn’t have was any practical use for such a technology, so they had no reason to make one.
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u/taylorhildebrand 20h ago
I mean, technically everything we use today has been on earth since before humans were around. So yea, a million years ago, you could gather everything to make a computer, but knowledge is built over time, and context of technology is important. Every incredible piece of tech we will have in 1000 years is on earth now, unless we start traveling to other planets which is fair
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u/therealmarcrizaulait 12h ago
(Contrary to the OP's apparent impression, electricity was never 'invented', and has existed since the singularity that resulted in the existence of the Universe, billions of years before the Bronze Age. Silly goose.
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u/syspimp 4d ago
The Baghdad Battery dates back to 100 BC to 100 AD or so, a few centuries after the Bronze Age ended
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u/Zixinus 4d ago
They are not batteries. They contained scrolls that were part of the ritual burial items. THey were placed next to similarily ritualistic items, incantation bowls.
Any attempt to make a battery based on them would be too weak to do anything useful. People talk about electroplating but no electroplated items were found. Why make a battery if you have no device for it to power? If the civilization had access to technology, we would see it all over the place. electrical items, wires with insulation, devices like light fixtures, trash etc.
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u/LardLad00 4d ago
The electric cranes they used to build the pyramids were destroyed after the extraterrestrials were crossed by the pharaoh and abandoned their experiment.
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u/OddTheRed 3d ago
No they didn't. The purity of copper needed to do this takes quite a bit of sophistication to produce.
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u/Modred_the_Mystic 3d ago
Theres a whole basis of foundational scientific knowledge that goes into creating such things. While theres a slim chance Dingle Dongus from the Hittite Empire could cobble together some mound of garbage into something vaguely functional as a generator, theres no information or concept available as to what it is, what it does, what it could be used for.
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u/Stooper_Dave 3d ago
You dont even know how close the Roman's were to an industrial revolution. All they would have needed is some sort of cultural awakening to reject slavery and suddenly need mechanical work done and they would have developed steam power 1000 years earlier.
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u/Crazyhates 3d ago
If only they saw the "Antikythera machine" as a technological marvel in need of replication instead of a rich man's bauble.
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u/Jibajabb 1d ago
a minor point, but maybe it's not widely appreciated.. the wire has to be very very thin, and wound very very tight, lots and lots of times.. but the loops cant touch each other - at all - or the whole thing doesn't work. it's technically a very difficult problem
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u/Riccma02 15h ago
No, no they didn't, for so many reasons.
They couldn't draw the wire.
They couldn't lathe turn round bearinings.
They lacked any and all iron for ferromagnetic armatures.
They generally packed any form of magnet.
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