Scientific revolution played surprisingly little role in the early days of industrial revolution, which was mostly a result of north British engineers tinkering on and improving their production processes. Scientific advancements only became important during the second industrial revolution, starting from late 19th century, and especially in 20th.

And the scientific revolution first required the protestant reformation. The catholic church's stranghold on europe first had to be broken before the freedom that ushured in the scientific revolution could come about.

And the protestant revolution probably could not have happened with Gutenberg's printing press.

Gutenberg's Printing Press > Martin Luther and the Protestant Revolution > The Scientific Revolution > The Industrial Revolution > Teletubbies.

Not at all. The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century.

And the Gutenberg press was far less important than the invention of cheap paper.

> The disruption and reintroduction of superstition caused by the protestant revolution (eg the burning of "witches") held back science by probably a century.

Witchhunts were bad, but this is really not correct.

For the specific case of the steam engine, Torricelli had made some of the most important basic discoveries in Italy[0], but these came to nothing in Catholic Europe because his discoveries disproved an unimportant minor point of Catholic dogma, so it was unsafe to continue work with them. (The existence of a vacuum was for some insane reason held to be heretical, so no actual research into devices that worked using vacuum, such as atmospheric steam engines, could be done.)

There was plenty of insane fundamentalism in Protestant Europe, but crucially, it was fragmented. The part that doomed science under Catholicism was not that Catholics were less learned or more supersticious than Protestants (because they really weren't), it was that in Catholicism there was a single person who ultimately decided what it was okay to think, and this person was just as dumb and fallible as the rest of us. In contrast, in Northern, Protestant Europe the baseline of education and knowledge was much lower, but every King or Princeling managed the rules of thought and discourse for their own domain, so there was always some place somewhere that was willing to accommodate new ideas.

[0]: Starting with one of the most important viewpoint shifts in science history: "We live submerged under an ocean of air."

The catholic Counter-Reformation was equally enthusiastic about burning witches, particularly in Southern Germany.

By equally, do you mean at least one order of magnitude less?

And even your counter is a response to the reformation. I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side. I'm observing from outside.

I mean that several of the largest witch trials in human history were Catholic, particularly in southern Germany. Witch trials were a regional phenomena, not a catholic or protestant one. There were many witch trials in protestant Scotland, but few in the protestant Netherlands. There were many witch trials in catholic Germany, but few in Spain. Attributing the witch trials to the protestant revolution itself is bad history.

> I'm not a Catholic, you can't goad me into taking a side. I'm observing from outside.

I'm not christian either.

So if the Protestant revolution never happened and the Catholic Church still had political control over much of the world, you still think the scientific revolution would have happened? I have my doubts.

Also the Islamic Renaissance played a significant role in the evolution of the scientific method which gave European scholars a foundation to build on. Newton's quote about standing on the shoulders of giants is apt here. :)

> Newton's quote about standing on the shoulders of giants is apt here. :)

Even if he was making a jab at Robert Hooke when he said it.

Doesn't make sense, Roman engineers discovered steam power but it was cheaper and easier to use slaves. It's more of a problem of demand. Why would I need a loud clunky steam engine when I can hire a dozen slaves who will not only row my boat but clean, and perform whole bunch of auxillary tasks?

Roman "steam power" worked nothing like a condensing engine and was nowhere near adequate to power a ship.

Ironically, rowing vessels was one of the tasks Romans preferred to use freemen where possible. And even the best galleys with the most motivated, coordinated and healthy rowers were vastly inferior in speed and endurance to steamships (or indeed sail powered tea-clippers). But you needed a lot of intermediate inventions to get from a lightweight device that rotated by blowing out hot air to a steamship that could cross oceans. Or from a trireme to a tea clipper that would travel faster relying on just the wind, for that matter

I wonder what the Romans could have done with designs for "modern" sailing ships? Though I also wonder how relatively useful they would be as warships absent cannons.

Here's a question back at you: how well do modern sailing ships handle the Mediterranean in winter?

As far as I know, the winds haven't significantly changed: mostly from the northwest for most of the year, with a period in the spring and summer where they swing to the from the northeast. Also, ferocious storms in the winter.

Going clockwise along the Med's coast from France to Italy, Greece, the Levant, and to Egypt is "downhill"; going the other direction will take roughly twice as long. Sailing along the north coast of Africa is kind of dangerous because a storm or navigation mistake plus the prevailing winds can put you aground hard and unexpectedly.

Modern sailing ships are much better at sailing closer to the wind, are much less limited by supplies (it's hard to get more than a few days endurance from a rowed galley) and are more seaworthy, because they could extend the sailing season and take more direct routes.

How much better is that? I don't know, but I suspect a fair bit. Galleys still have advantages in some circumstances.

Now, if you throw in some even remotely modern navigation equipment, that would be stupidly advantageous.

Source: John Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War.

> Though I also wonder how relatively useful they would be as warships absent cannons.

Without cannons, maneuvering becomes a lot more important because you rely on either ramming the enemy, or pulling up alongside them and boarding them (or both.) These tactics favor rowed galleys, which can sprint quick for short distances and don't depend on the wind.

Even after the invention and proliferation of cannon, navies and pirates in the Med continued to use rowed galleys, direct descendants of ancient triremes, through the middle ages into the 18th century.

if the Romans were the only empire with relatively modern sailing vessels, I'm not sure lack of cannon would have hampered them.

And the inhabitants of most of the areas they'd be able to reach beyond the Mediterranean and Red Sea weren't going to sail out to meet them.

I guess a Roman conquest of the Americas would be pretty boring for archaeologists and architecture students. No Macchu Picchu or Teotihuacan, not even a Chan Chan, but the crumbling 2000 year old columns of Washington DC instead ;)

Of course, if you already have the technology to build boats, it's not going to take you long to copy the other guy's design.

Later sail warships mostly didn't use triangular sails either. I assume this is related to volume in some manner. Clipper ships were very fast but they had relatively little capacity so were used for high value goods.

> Later sail warships mostly didn't use triangular sails either.

Presumably the whole "fabric is ferociously expensive" problem.

Robotics has the same problem today: Human labor is cheaper and more flexible. In the future we might see this as having been as stupid and inhumane as we today see slavery in the Roman times.

> Roman engineers discovered steam power but it was cheaper and easier to use slaves.

I think the key reason why is not because the Roman Greeks did some type of cost benefit analysis, it's the fact that the idea of applying automation of labor using the Aeolipile(which was regarded as a novelty rather than a tool) never even occurred to them. The concept of industrial production did not really exist yet, even when there was some forms of it in existence, the very idea of applying it to everything is not something anyone even thought about.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that steam engines were the first crossing between science and industry, and that the industrial development and use of steam engines preceded their take-up as a subject of interest by scientists (or the approximations of the time).

What? For sure a lot of engineering happened as a result of scientists and practioners discussing possible advancements. I have completely different understanding of history. Was not Archimedes a scientist that was presented with a task that required a lot of scientific reasoning.