Gratuitous thread hijacking...

Quote:
The Ancient Engineers

I highly recommend reading this book. It's amazing how far back some of the technology goes. There was a developer from around 2,000 years back that converted houses to central heat for profit.

A friend of mine had the theory that the Romans were perilously close to having the industrial revolution. For example, they had virtually all of the ingredients necessary to have water-powered machinery: they could move water around through aquaducts, they had wheels and other assorted parts, and they had basic metallurgy (mostly for military applications, I suppose). The question is whether they had (a) the financial and legal framework, much less political stability, for such businesses to come to fruition, and (b) whether there was any need for mechanized labor when they had perfectly functional slave labor, instead.

At a talk given here by James Burke several years ago, I ask his opinion of this theory in the crush surrounding him after his talk was over. He felt the Romans were nowhere near the industrial revolution for some of the reasons above. Thoughts?