Age of Invention

There's perhaps some misunderstanding about where "perpetual motion" comes from : it was about Aristotle's metaphysics, the best today's translation for at least some of these first devices would probably be "powered by changes in atmospheric pressure" : https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-… (Could skip to "Cornelis Drebbel".) So the term was used more as a synonym for "continuously working", like a water wheel, without presuming any violation of the laws of thermodynamics that had yet to be invented : https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-perpetual-motion (Today we would call that one "a resume-padding buzzword.)

Because I’m trained as a physicist and (non-software) engineer and I know my field’s history? Here’s the first result that comes up on Google. Seems accurate from a quick skim: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-… And yes we should seek to understand new inventions. Which we are doing right now, in the form of interpretability research. We should not be making Luddite calls to halt progress simply because our analytic capabilities haven’t caught up to our progress in engineering.

Your discussion with DrF jogged my memory a bit. There was a discussion on this topic some time ago (I'm fuzzy on when) that went into detail about how there needed to be a specific use case and demand for this. I'm trying to remember the blog, but a search on HN yielded this: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-… I think this is the blog in question, and the most relevant part. If something else comes to me, I'll share it here.

Anton Howes, co-author of this piece, earlier wrote "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam "Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part II" at https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam-… The latter has 304 HN comments from July 2022 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32106467 .

There is, sadly, a vast difference in accuracy between a "state-approved high school textbook" and a "peer-reviewed scholarly publication". A state-approved high-school textbook is subject to myriad business and political agendas that practically, by definition, compromise its truth and accuracy. A peer-reviewed scholarly publication is supposed to have a chain back to actual sources and facts that anchors it in spite of any agenda or narrative it may propound. The issue here is that Bulstrode presented a bunch of claims with no evidence or even contradicting evidence in the actual sources she cites. There are also some engineering issues: sugar mill rollers are oriented differently from steel mill rollers because they serve very different purposes. The comment from here was good: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-cort-case > Historians, myself included, often make leaps of intuition from limited evidence. But speculation ought to be explicitly signalled as such, rather than presented as certainty. Especially when that certainty creates a narrative so compelling that it makes major newspaper headlines. Bulstrode’s narrative requires multiple smoking guns to work, none of which are in the evidence she presents.