There is a reason we name eras after materials - the bronze age, iron age, etc. Currently we're living in the silicon age.
Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock whole new technology paradigms.
You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones, on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them useful...
By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
Yeah, so many people like to point at specific inventions and ask why it wasn't done sooner or such, but 99% of the time it was because of a lack of material science that made production near impossible.
It doesn't matter if someone has a PhD in steam engine engineering, if they went back in time to the Roman empire there still would be no steam engines because there are only a handful of examples of accidentally good enough steel in the entire world, which you don't even have a way to identify yet other than buying 10000x extra and spending years testing every sample to find the good stuff, not to mention you need even more of that high quality steel just to make the tools required to cut good steel into a capable boiler design.
If you can't bang something together with wood, stone, and dirt, it requires advanced material science and entire industries behind it to produce and be worth the effort. Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans, but not if it took 5,000 men working for years and dumping endless amounts of money into it to find just the right ore source and smelting procedures just to produce a single engine that only replaces the labor of 50 guys with buckets.
I think it is a little more nuanced than that. Bret Devereaux wrote about steam engines[1] in Roman Empire, and the conclusion is there was no economic stimuli to kickstart steam engine. For the first half-century (or so) of steam engines they were atmospheric steam engines and they sucked (in a very literal way: they sprayed cold water into a cylinder to condense water vapor to create a (sort of) vacuum that will suck a piston into a cylinder). I don't believe that these steam engines required especially good steel. I think the biggest issue was corrosion due to a contact with water, but there was no need to keep really high pressures.
> Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans
According to Devereaux it wouldn't be useless for the Romans. They didn't pump water from coal mines, and when they pumped water they'd need to move fuel from somewhere else to feed it into a steam engine. It was not an an easy or a cheap task to do, because they had no railroads.
I agree with the sentiment in the sense that technology doesn't scale when you're like that Australian guy making everything from one-use mud and sticks. Some of it does but not a lot of it.
Most materials up to the 1900s were readily available in Roman times, though.
The metal of choice for the first Roman steam engines would be slightly expensive copper and they built highways in cobblestone connecting their whole empire so they wouldn't shy away from some forward-thinking investment given a working demo.
The first application for them wouldn't be pumps, either. It would be trivial to have charcoal factories around the roads to quickly carry priority goods and military with even a rudimentary steam engine.
The cobblestone roads could be adapted to tram use with a few thousand guys equipped with standard width sticks and picks.
A random Roman maybe not but a Roman with connections could do it.
> Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job.
Is related at all to this sentence:
> How come we call mobile phones progress?