Why did it take until the 19th century for horse-drawn trams to be invented?

Why did it take until the 19th century for horse-drawn trams to be invented?

You needed steelworking to be able to make parts that precise

And the bessemer process to make steel very cheap.

horses didn't exist until the 19th century

Darwin invented horses

the horse was invented by John S. Horse you retard

This. They were out of bicycles after a really hard winter.

densely populated urban areas weren't as much of a thing so there was no use

I just had a quick peek at some cities as they were around the Napoleonic war and most of them are less than three miles from one end to the other. Considering that thats from suburb to suburb one would only need to walk a mile or so to get to the city center.

Rich folks would use taxi coaches or even ride horses themselves.

Mass transport was more something for when the cities grew.

Honestly OP I'm more pissed about nobody getting serious with the windmill powered ships.

And I'm 90% certain radio could be made with Baghdad Battery level tech.

>windmill powered ships.
They're called sails

Not what I'm talking about.

I mean windmill on top, paddlewheel at the rear.

Or sound recordings, even some kind of photograph from some primitive pinhole camera

So like a poor version of sails?

I am not really seeing the point of such a construction.

You daft idiot.

Windmill propellers turn on a gear system which moves a millstone around to process wheat. Hence the fucking name.

user is wonderng why a similar system wasnt employed on boats to turn, say, a paddle wheel or a propeller.

It lets you travel upwind without tacking.

For an equivalent height you'll have less canvas, significantly less canvas.
Modern research on extant mills reveals the wooden gears reduce efficiecy to below 40%.

All in all you're gonna have wooden superstructures that generate about a fifth if not less of the power a sail would give you. Considering 3 knots was considered a good speed over long distances with proper sails you're likely gonna end up with a speed below a knot with the system you're suggesting. Factor in drift, contrary wind and currents and I doubt such a thing would even have windward capabilities.

People were nothing if not imaginative back in those days and if this could have worked we might have seen it.

What they did do was use manpower to propel paddles because you can put the 'human engine' straight on the axle without losing a ton of energy in the shitty gears.

/thread

Here here.

if people weren't so dumb in the Christian Dark Ages they could have colonized Sardinia.

so how 1 horse could move that ahead?
that wasnt too heavy for the horse?

Rails. Read up on tractive effort.

On a level surface, a single horse pulling a load on rails would be the equivalent of ~twenty horses pulling the same load on a road.

unironically this. he invented horses to study evolution by crossing donkeys and mules

amazin, thanks lad for helping this brainlet

Don't be fucking stupid, it would take decades to reach Sardinia by boat, it wasn't even populated until the advent of the airplane

of course their were horses before XIX, but ground was only invented in 1800, so they had nothing to walk on before.

Tram thread? Tram thread.

can you explain how that works in brainlet terms. I looked on wikipedia and there was too much about the mechanics of it than explaining why rails are superior to roads for hauling shit

Holy shit someone turn this into a mount and blade clone

>can you explain how that works in brainlet terms
It's all friction / rolling resistance.

Think of Newton's first law. Objects in motion stay in motion unless acted upon by a force. We're used to thinking of getting some number of miles per gallon as if it cost energy to cross distance, but it doesn't! The thing that costs you energy is *acceleration*.

But even as you travel at a constant speed in your car, you have to keep accelerating to counteract the fact the friction of your tires on the road (and, at higher speeds, air drag) is constantly slowing you down. So the energy you spend and the power you need are the amount you need to match that friction. (e.g. a spaceship doesn't have that problem and only needs to spend energy to accelerate at the start of the journey and to decelerate at the end).

A metal train wheel on a metal rail has a far lower coefficient of friction than a car tire on a road (over twenty times lower) which means the amount of energy it needs to spend to accelerate (up until air drag becomes the dominant factor) and sustain its speed is ~twenty times lower per unit weight, and the power needed to sustain such acceleration is also ~twenty times lower.

Although a problem is that with such low friction you don't have much grip either so any hill becomes a mountain of a problem. Trains perform best on level surfaces and can only go up very gentle slopes, often requiring longer, circuitous routes, tunnels, bridges, etc.

>carries 60000 men & 600 cannon