By the early 1800s Britain was exporting more than 30000 tonnes of iron per year. This is more than their entire production a century before. The processes of rolling and puddling iron hugely increased the efficiency and quality of iron manufacturing, with consequent drops in cost. In addition, the production of crucible steel in the 1740s also allowed the production of high quality tools, also reducing the cost of manufactured goods. For example, in Charleston, the cost of both imported and raw commodities dropped by around 40% in real terms, which has obvious implications on the costs of manufactured products. This also demonstrates the changes the economics of the early part of the industrial revolution.
So, yes, iron and manufactured products would have been much, much cheaper in the 19th century USA than in past times, even at a time and in places where the industrial revolution had not yet taken hold.
Data on costs is from
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Volume 1 available at
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1975/compendia/hist_stats_colonial-1970.html
Thanks for that, it's very interesting and makes a good case that at least the availability of the necessary instruments (whether they imported the mechanisms or just the raw material) was much improved over earlier times.
So, it seems to have been economically viable in a rather narrow range of situations, existing from the time that the necessary machined parts became affordable to the time when steam power replaced it, other than in a few unusual cases where it continued in use long after it had become obsolete.
In fact, I was about to accept this explanation and assume it was like the bicycle. Conceptually simple enough but even if you very well can make a medieval bicycle out of wood and iron that works, it just isn't possible to make one that is dependable and has a useful lifetime worth the specialized labor required to make it until better quality and higher tech machine parts show up beginning in the 18th century. Combine that with Yakman's insight that you need a lot of open range on the route for horses and call it done.
Just a couple things kept niggling at me.
1.) If it needs britain to launch the industrial revolution to work, why was the United States and Canada the only places that got it? If the UK was exporting all this steel and tools shouldn't the continent have benefited as well? If these sorts of exports were limited by mercantilism then shouldn't India, Australia, South Africa or similar have benefitted as well? Perhaps most puzzling, wouldn't Ireland and Britain itself have had the necessary ingredients?
2.) The tech for bicycles and steam engines certainly are beyond most pre-modern societies to get up and keep going but I keep returning to the fact that paddle wheels and horse mills are *really*
simple and *really*
ancient. You don't need specialized tools to make them, in fact you don't even need iron other than for the nails.
Maybe steamboats developed too quickly in Britain and Europe for Teamboats to take hold if they both rely on the same technological catalysts. Although Commercial steamboat service started in America sooner than Europe, I have no knowledge in how quickly it 'rolled out' in comparison and an interesting wrinkle is the monopoly on Steamboat service granted to Fulton and Livingston. The popularity of teamboats start just when the monopoly is stoking animosity across the country and the decline of teamboats for hauling cargo upriver (though not shorter urban ferries such as in New York or portages) seems to coincide with
its destruction at the hands of the supreme court.
Is that the missing piece of the puzzle? Well, it might explain why only the Americans kept at it when Steam Engines were being developed, but the fact that Teamboats were profitable and kept in service at all meant they were better than
poling keelboats upriver. It's still the fact that a paddle wheel and treadmill isn't that complicated. . . so why didn't anybody do it earlier when Steam Engines weren't an option?
The Alternative without Steam or Teamboats
Well, turns out they did.
I already mentioned the
De Rebus Bellicis but In furthe research I learned that the Chinese actually built and maintained fleets of
treadmill powered paddle wheel ships for hundreds of years in the Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasties for war, and much longer for civilian river traffic. Eighth century texts describe a Tang naval boat with two wheels on its sides propelled by treadmills.
Joseph Needham related "The boats were driven by human pedaling and were able to cruise hundreds of kilometers per day with no wind blowing." The Song dynasty built massive warships with up to 11 wheels on each side with banks of oarsmen entirely replaced by crewmen pedaling in compartments below deck.
Much of the fighting centered on the control of strategic inland waters, rivers and lakes, for which paddleboats, powered by the legs of their crews and not dependent on the wind, were ideal.
Some were capable of carrying 700 to 800 hundred men apiece and were propelled by the energy of more than twenty men on treadmills or turning capstans. By the end of the wars, both sides had reportedly fielded thousands of such vessels, but with the end of hostilities, paddleboats in China soon went out of favor.
Chinese
"Thousand League Boat" from Qing Era Illustration
Funnily enough, even though paddle boats fell out of use in China after the mongol conquest they were 'rediscovered'
and put into use against the British during the opium wars. These vessels were composed of four wheels (two fore, two aft) each with six blades and each wheel was turned by two men who stood shoulder to shoulder and pushed/drove the wheel.
A quote from British forces after the battle of Wusong river illustrating that you don't need iron or precision machine tools to build these contraptions:
British Naval report said:
Some way further up the [Wusong] river, fourteen war-junks were in sight, and also five large newly-built wheel-boats, each moved by four wooden paddlewheels. . . . These wheel-junks were fitted with two paddlewheels on either side, strongly constructed of wood. The shaft, which was also of wood, had a number of strong wooden cogs upon it, and was turned by means of a capstan, fitted also with cogs, and worked round by men. The machinery was all below, between decks, so that the men were under cover. They were all quite newly-built, and carried some two, some three, newly-cast brass guns, besides a number of large ginjals [heavy muskets].
The british captured some and assumed it was an attempted copy of their steamships. (Which it was in a way, as the Chinese hadn't yet worked out that it was the steam moving the wheel and not some interaction with the fire or smoke from the smokestacks, but it was based on much older indigenous ideas that classically educated Chinese would be familiar with.
In fact, muscle powered paddle wheels were apparently used in Southern China into the 20th century.
The Chinese weren't the only ones, however. According to the
The Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea,
"In Europe the idea of constructing a paddle-wheel boat appears in several old manuscripts which date back to the 15th century, and such a mode of transport probably dates back much further. However, the first recorded use of them was in 1543 when, manned by a crew of 40 working on capstans or treadmills, some were employed as tugs in Barcelona and Malaga harbours, and treadmill paddle boats were still in regular use on the River Loire at the start of the 19th century."
Tracking that information down leads to
Blasco De Garay, who developed and tested a number of different
paddlewheel tug designs for Carlos I. These were slower than oared boats so were abandoned.
So here we are.
1.) A muscle powered drive definitely works on a river or calm water ship. The Chinese built them a millennia ago and kept operating them for centuries.
2.) A Horse engine drive definitely works on river or calm water. The Americans wouldn't have kept building them if they were less efficient than poling against the current or blazing towpaths along every river. They were even better at moving things across a bay than oars.
Why didn't the Chinese ever switch out their man powered drives for animal drives?
Why didn't anybody else develop effective paddlewheel boats before the steam age?
In addition to all the limitations already proposed by the fine paradoxers in this thread, I suspect in the case of the Chinese warships since the wheelmen didn't need specialized training in rowing they were a feature. They would be just as useful as naval infantry or sailors when they weren't needed to row, removing them to make room for a specialized animal team might be counter productive even if that might have made the ship move faster or longer.
I also think that maybe a lot of places that could have really benefitted from teamboats already had towpaths or other infrastructure. China had an extensive and ancient system of managed canals, but I suspect the same sort of thing applied in Europe and India. America would be a place that had a pressing need for ascending rivers and no ancient infrastructure to assist. Still doesn't explain why they didn't find a use as tugs or for bay and river crossings in the rest of the world, (There we might be satisfied with Senor De Garay's failures in speed except for the fact the Chinese seemed to have worked that out and made very fast ships) but I think there might also be a little bit of Pyoro's 'nobody thought of it'.
There's obviously obstacles and issues but I'm still not convinced it doesn't work, properly designed. The Chinese seem to be pretty much there.
This was a very interesting ad-hoc research project and I can't say I'm done with it yet. There's very little of the chinese stuff on the web in english.
I'll have to look up Mr. Needham's book.
