When comparing to other inventions like “the loom, the spinning wheel, the printing press”, it’s important to consider how much time/effort they save compared to the alternative. The threshing machine has a simple alternative and as a fraction of a farmer’s life, it’s relatively little time (as an overestimate, 1⁄20, so it can at best make farmers 5% more efficient).
Looms are somewhat of a bad comparison since it’s essentially impossible to make cloth without one. Similarly, the printing press is necessary for books to be widely available. Both of them are necessary to allow their activity to even occur, so there will be a strong incentive to create one.
However, the spinning wheel is more comparable to the threshing machine, since it’s not necessarily needed but is a time saver. The big difference between spinning and threshing though is that before the spinning wheel women would spend a huge fraction of their time making textiles and most of that was spent spinning. Keeping a family of six clothed in comfort would take about 22 labor hours each day (split across the women of the household), meaning that women would spend about half of their waking hours making textiles. About 85% of that time was spent in spinning alone. The spinning machine is 10x more effective than hand spinning, so it frees up perhaps 6 hours a day per woman. (source: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-spin-me-right-round/)
Of course, making all farmers 5% more efficient is great, but since everything is decentralized no individual has the incentive. Meanwhile, freeing up that amount of time from spinning is absolutely life changing.
See my reply to @johnswentworth re other benefits of the threshing machine, beyond labor-saving, and evidence that farmers were keenly interested in it.
For looms, rather than comparing loom to no loom, compare the frame looms available in 1700 to the weighted vertical looms or back strap looms from long before. For the printing press, I don’t see how this is different. Books were not impossible to make; scribes made them by hand. Again, it was an efficiency gain.
You might be right that something like the spinning wheel, for example, had a stronger economic incentive than a threshing machine. I just don’t think that’s the main explanation for why it took ~50 years for the technology to diffuse rather than say 20–30.
When comparing to other inventions like “the loom, the spinning wheel, the printing press”, it’s important to consider how much time/effort they save compared to the alternative. The threshing machine has a simple alternative and as a fraction of a farmer’s life, it’s relatively little time (as an overestimate, 1⁄20, so it can at best make farmers 5% more efficient).
Looms are somewhat of a bad comparison since it’s essentially impossible to make cloth without one. Similarly, the printing press is necessary for books to be widely available. Both of them are necessary to allow their activity to even occur, so there will be a strong incentive to create one.
However, the spinning wheel is more comparable to the threshing machine, since it’s not necessarily needed but is a time saver. The big difference between spinning and threshing though is that before the spinning wheel women would spend a huge fraction of their time making textiles and most of that was spent spinning. Keeping a family of six clothed in comfort would take about 22 labor hours each day (split across the women of the household), meaning that women would spend about half of their waking hours making textiles. About 85% of that time was spent in spinning alone. The spinning machine is 10x more effective than hand spinning, so it frees up perhaps 6 hours a day per woman. (source: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-they-make-it-part-iii-spin-me-right-round/)
Of course, making all farmers 5% more efficient is great, but since everything is decentralized no individual has the incentive. Meanwhile, freeing up that amount of time from spinning is absolutely life changing.
See my reply to @johnswentworth re other benefits of the threshing machine, beyond labor-saving, and evidence that farmers were keenly interested in it.
For looms, rather than comparing loom to no loom, compare the frame looms available in 1700 to the weighted vertical looms or back strap looms from long before. For the printing press, I don’t see how this is different. Books were not impossible to make; scribes made them by hand. Again, it was an efficiency gain.
You might be right that something like the spinning wheel, for example, had a stronger economic incentive than a threshing machine. I just don’t think that’s the main explanation for why it took ~50 years for the technology to diffuse rather than say 20–30.