Why didn't anybody see the potential in the Aeolipile and what would happen if they did?

Lack of good materials to mass production.

Not as stupid as mediaeval retards who didn't invent fucking buttons until 1300 and for centuries lived in shitty one room houses which were smokey smelly shitholes with no plumbing

Surely you don't need to know about energy to see that if you attach the spinning thing to something you usually have to manually spin, then thats going to make it easier.

You can't see the mechanical energy until you learn about it or create it via experimental sources.

Imagine trying to see a computer when you have never heard about the word computer, seen a computer, don't know its function, don't know about electricity, etc. You simply can't see the computer even though to another person its right infront of you. You do not possess the capacity to understand what a computer is, let alone see it.

Yes, they will see the device spin. They will see the water boils. But what is in between? They will say its god of wind or god of fire does it. They have no concept of mechanical energy nor the understanding of heat as energy nor the proper understanding of what energy entails nor the ability to understand the properties of water.

Nah i don't buy it. If im spending my days spinning a wheel to grind corn and then i go to the temple and they have a thing that automatically spins just from some fire under it then I'll make the connection that i should stick them together. There's no need to understand the physics of energy. They had waterwheels and shit, it's only an extension of that.

The aelopile itself is useless to drive anything but itself. To drive anything useful with steam power, you need pistons (or a turbine, but that is even more complex). To make a functioning piston, you need to understand the properties of steam and the principles of pressure and heat. And that is something I doubt the ancients understood.

It has no torque, it wouldn't drive shit.

Scale it up. The Romans invented all sorts of mechanical wonders, it is odd that they didnt take advantage of steam.

I fucking love this board. Masterful. Bravo, sir.

They couldn't because they didn't understand the mechanical and thermal properties of steam, and because the aelopile is fucking useless.

Did they understand the mechanical and thermal properties of water?

They understood that a stream of water can be used to drive a wheel, which is the most important part. Steam power is a hell of a lot more complex.
Look at early steam engines and compare them to a water mill.
Early steam engines were only possible because of decades to centuries of physics research.

Cashiers at work use computers all the time. Doesn't mean they understand how they work or know how to program.

Nice post there, good job.

As other anons have said, steam power as an invention requires a plethora of other inventions before it. Advanced mining techniques, steel, coal, mechanical seals, precise measurements necessary for machining, as well as tons of research

>it is odd that they didnt take advantage of steam.
It's not odd. They didn't use such technology because they had slaves. Slavery ruins everything.

yeah slavery makes everyone completely retarded and wastefull hurr that's why the romans didn't build massively famous aqueducts because they just had slaves carry water hurr

But the romans did use water mills, pic is is the flour mill complex in Barbegal, dated to the 4th century AD

I think the Romans actually had a shitload of ironworking.

If memory serves, climate data (because smelting metal produces pollution which you can find in ice cores) indicates that metal production in Europe didn't catch up to 100 AD levels until the 1700s.

I could honestly see a world in which the Romans used the watt steam engine for specific applications like pumping out flooded mines and grinding flour.

I remember hearing about that, but it was about lead deposits on ice, which indicated silver mining, since the Roman silver mines in Iberia were rich in lead.

You guys are getting ahead of yourselves with Roman steam power.

There was no market for labor saving devices in general, as the Romans had an unlimited source of manual human labor via slaves and the huge number of unemployed Roman citizens.

The desire for a something more efficient like a horse drawn reaper, doesn't happen in a society where you can just thrown more slaves at the job.

The thing is, flour is just not valuable enough to warrant investment into industrialisation. Flour is generally a plentiful, low-cost commodity, and most importantly, it is perishable. There is no need to mechanise production of goods like flour if you are already able to meet demand, as the demand will always be relatively static, and the product is of low value. Cloth on the other hand is expensive, non-perishable, and has a massive demand (people can only eat so much bread, but given the opportunity will buy far more clothes than they can ever wear).

The Romans also had water driven saw mills (as this user pointed out ), but again, machined wood is a relatively low value commodity with limited applications, so they also could not supply the economic incentive to mechanise even if mechanisation was technologically possible.

Remember that the practical steam engine pre-dates the industrial revolution by almost a century. It may have been an important fuel for the revolution, but it was not the catalyst. When invented, they were used for things like powering mines, and it wasn't until the invention of the mechanical spinner and loom that the industrial revolution begun.

They had the quantity but lacked the quality. In general Roman ironworking was of varying quality, as while they could extract vast quantities from the ground, they didn't have the processing infrastructure needed to create reliable, large scale supply of good metal.

One BIG thing that the Romans lacked in terms of metal working was the ability to cast large and complex pieces of iron, which did not reach Europe until the renaissance and the advent of cast iron cannon. Cast iron being absolutely vital for constructing any large object from solid metal, and in ensuring the uniformity and quality of components.

They also lacked precision machining tools, which, again, are vital for things as complex as large steam engines, and most importantly, piston drive systems.

Continued because FUCK the character limit.

One other thing that I'd like to point out is that there is a HUGE leap between the design of the aeolipile and the design of the central part of the steam engine, without which it is useless, the piston. While one might marvel at a ball propelling itself around by the force of steam pressure, and one might even be able to understand that it is heat and pressure that causes this motion, without knowledge of how to turn this into a working drive shaft, the curiosity of motion is worthless as a practical instrument.

In fact, steam engines in early modern Europe were common as well, predating the industrial revolution by centuries. They were just never useful/efficient as tools of mechanisation until the advent of the piston.

And of course, as the other anons have said, there were a million other small things that the Romans lacked that had been developed in the middle ages, the renaissance and the enlightenment that prevented them from making the leap of discovery. Chief among these is no doubt their lack of scientific and mathematical knowledge, which, while the Greeks especially made giant leaps, was primitive in the extreme compared to the knowledge of physics and mathematics developed by people like Galileo, Newton, and Leibnitz.