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
• Age of Invention: Just Kiln Timeageofinvention.xyz
• Age of Invention: Upstream, Downstreamantonhowes.substack.com
• Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part Iageofinvention.xyz
• Some interesting open problems in technology | Locklin on sciencescottlocklin.wordpress.com
• When innovation hits “snooze”blog.rootsofprogress.org
• How mathematics built the modern world - Works in Progress Magazineworksinprogress.co
• Age of Invention: The Coal Conquestageofinvention.xyz
• The Copernican Revolution from the Insidejacoblagerros.wordpress.com
• The third magicnoahpinion.substack.com
• Eureka! On the clustering of geniuses - by Rohit Krishnanstrangeloopcanon.com