Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part I

Things I thought I knew, and on which I agreed with a lot of other historians, turned out to be ever more questionable. Perhaps even wrong. And so I had to delve ever deeper to get to the truth, and to reformulate what I knew.

You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. This edition went out to over 8,300 subscribers. If you’ve just been forwarded this, you can sign up here: As regular readers might have noticed, it’s been a long time since my last newsletter — far, far longer than usual. Although I haven’t been posting, however, I have been hard at work researching. I had to translate a lot of primary sources from sixteenth-century French, Italian, Dutch, German, and even Latin, so that was already going to cause a delay. But…

related reading

• The Newcomen steam engineblog.rootsofprogress.org
• What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came?rootsofprogress.org
• Full text of "Are Inventions Inevitable? A Note on Social Evolution"archive.org
• When innovation hits “snooze”blog.rootsofprogress.org
• The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheeltheatlantic.com
• How the New York City Steam System Works - Untapped New Yorkuntappedcities.com
• Age of Invention: Just Kiln Timeageofinvention.xyz
• Rented Virtuesubstack.com
• CABINET / The Beautiful Possibilitycabinetmagazine.org
• The_Future_We_Were_Promised_by_J._Storrs_Hall.pdfassets.ctfassets.net
• How Common is Multiple Invention? - by Brian Potterconstruction-physics.com
• Theory lags practicelemire.me