Author, The Roots of Progress (rootsofprogress.org). Part-time tech consultant, Our World in Data. Former software engineering manager and tech startup founder.
jasoncrawford(Jason Crawford)
Karma: 2,757
It was just a cheeky headline, wasn’t meant seriously
Winston Churchill, futurist and EA
I’m not sure that’s really different from the polio story. The world knew that polio vaccines were under development. They knew a big clinical trial was underway starting in 1954. There was a date announced ahead of time when the results of the trial would be announced (April 12, 1955). This seems similar to there being an announcement in the news of the first results of a covid vaccine trial.
Taking a machine around to different farms did actually happen, once portable machines were made (which was not always trivial). See my reply to @ChristianKl
Good question. I think what happened instead is that farmers with threshing machines would rent them out to those without, or people would bring portable machines around to farms—see my reply to @ChristianKl.
Why did it happen that way? Not sure. Maybe transportation costs, which were high. Grain is much more compact and high value-density than unthreshed bundles of wheat. Makes more sense to thresh it on-location before transporting it anywhere.
Oh, also—farmers used the straw! For animal bedding, to mix with manure, etc. It really doesn’t make sense to transport stalks to a central location, and then send the straw back.
Yeah, it was a pithy tweet-length opener. To be precise, it’s unnecessary to have a perfect model of the future / predict it with anything near 100% accuracy, or to have any appreciable degree of accuracy on the long-term future.
Historically, something somewhat different happened: if one farmer owned a threshing machine, other farmers might bring their grain to him and rent time on the machine.
Or, when portable threshing machines were built, someone would travel around to different farms and thresh there for a fee, then move on.
(But a portable machine was nontrivial, especially when the machines were horse-powered, check out this diagram [from this source]—a horse was hooked up to that harness at letter H on the diagram, so you can get a sense of how big that thing was. That model would have been stationary.)
In practice, I don’t think it worked that way. If the machine broke, it was not at all easy to repair; you couldn’t just factor in a maintenance cost. And if the machine damaged or lost grain, it was worse than useless.
Good question about looms/mills, I don’t know. Before the 1800s or so, I think looms were mostly owned by weavers who worked from home. There was no “specialist on site”. But I don’t think they broke much, because there weren’t high forces involved. (In the late 1800s, when large power looms were set up in factories such as those at Lowell, Mass., I imagine they would have had an engineer on staff.) Re mills, I would guess that a broken mill would be repaired by the local millwright. But I doubt they were on-site.
Your model of costs vs. benefits is logical, but in practice there is uncertainty (about machine reliability / breakdowns) and people tend to avoid tail risk by seeking reliable machines. Also, previous standards of quality (that can be achieved by manual labor) tend to set a quality bar that machines have to meet before they are adopted. People don’t like reducing quality, even if the efficiency gain theoretically makes up for it. At least, that’s how it seemed to be in the early days of mechanization.
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.
This doesn’t match with what I’ve read by and about farmers, at least not in the place and time of interest (Britain and US, late 18C on). Farmers were quite interested in improving yields and efficiency. There were many journals devoted to it and many experimental machines and techniques being tried. Capital was a limitation, but many farmers had nonzero capital.
Good thoughts. You’re right that a threshing machine only applies to a portion of agricultural labor, for part of the year. (Then again, weaving is only a portion of the textile manufacturing process, and printing is only a portion of the book-making process.)
My first reaction is that there is lots of evidence of farmers being actively interested in threshing machines. See that block quote from McClelland about how many things George Washington tried. Farmer’s journals have lots of stories about them. They got exhibited at fairs. When the compilation of The Commercial, Agricultural & Manufacturer’s Magazine came out, the preface to the whole volume mentioned the threshing machine, and then it’s the very first article in the first issue. So, there is a lot of interest from farmers.
Another point is that a good threshing machine did the job better than a human, so it not only saved labor, it saved grain. So it was increasing the farmer’s harvest, in addition to decreasing costs. And this was something explicitly anticipated / hoped for, even as early as the 1636 “patent” I referenced.
There could be other motivations, too: one article I read mentioned that a threshing machine could help farmers get their harvest ready for market before the rivers froze for the winter.
And in fact, when a good threshing machine was invented in Scotland in 1786, it was adopted locally. It’s just that adoption was slow to spread—even to England, let alone to the US (or the rest of the world).
So, although I didn’t explicitly consider it, when I add it all up, I don’t think lack of interest from farmers was an issue.
Cost was an issue. Some models were just too expensive, especially those imported from overseas. But there were also cheap models—they just didn’t work reliably. It seems that an increase in reliability, rather than a decrease in cost, was the key to adoption.
Why did we wait so long for the threshing machine?
Precognition
Well, people could barely get computers working with electromechanical parts in the 1930s, and those machines weren’t very practical. Just seems impossible on the face of it that you could get something serious working 100 years earlier.
The Difference Engine, as you correctly point out, was much more feasible, and Babbage probably could have finished building it, if he hadn’t fumbled the project.
Thanks.
Re Hero’s Engine, that’s an interesting reference. Is there any evidence that this was ever built? (Old inventors drew up a lot of plans that were never implemented and may not even have worked.)
Re Babbage: The Difference Engine was not a computer. It was a calculating machine, but it was not programmable or general-purpose. (The Analytic Engine would have been a computer, but Babbage never even finished designing it.)
Not exactly, although neutron flux is a way to measure radiation
Note that lead-208 is at a “double magic number”, with a complete shell of neutrons and also of protons. Beyond that you don’t get the extra stability from completing a shell
Yup, you can block any radiation with enough concrete around it.
Whoops! Correct, I meant the other way around, will fix