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The little industrial revolution in the Netherlands was how wind energy was used to turn Zaandam, the region above Amsterdam into one of the premier shipbuilding facilities in the Netherlands, able to turn out 1 ship every two days. And it was likewise a combination of technological factors, geographical and historical factors that enabled it.

Geographical

• Amsterdam's position was great for trade, for both Canal/Atlantic trade, trade via inland barges and most importantly, the Baltic sea routes.
• Via the Baltic Amsterdam had access to lumber forests from Scandinavia (as the Netherlands never had much forests)

Technological

• New ship designs like the Fluit which required fewer personal to man, meaning cheaper trade (at the max, half of the ships passing through the Kattegat at Denmark were Dutch)
• New windmill innovation, in the crankshafts for transferring power and new designs for lumber cutting with reciprocating blades

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and to truly create Amsterdam's golden century, lots of historical opportunities, among which:

• the discovery of new sea routes to the indies
• the availability of much manpower in the form of refugees from the 30 year war; the availability and knowledge of new forms of finance from rich Huguonets and Belgium refugees from the 80 year war both drawn in part by Amsterdam's religious freedoms.

Which allowed Amsterdam to turn the reliable Baltic trade into investments in the far east, in turn powering investment into the Netherlands and a golden age of arts. Do keep in mind that many of these sort of things interact with each other, similarly as in the English industrial revolution.

I'm both an Archeologist and a Mechanical engineering by education, so I always loved these kind of technological foundations to large cultural/historical changes.

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That's it? I'd imagine it'd be much more that have been destroyed.

But if 80% are lost forever wouldn't 20%. By the same as 100%?

I appreciate the pushback. I agree that Watts contribution was preconditioned on those earlier inventions and that the growth period preceded Watts engine by a few years.

In my mind, all tech is a continuum, and we choose events to mark beginnings of whatever taxonomy we lay on top to make sense of it. With Watt and Bolton, I see their engine as occupying a similar position to the industrial revolution as solid state transistors replacing vacuum tubes in the computing revolution. I see both as the point where the technologies took off because they were the first two to improve efficiency by orders of magnitude.

Case in point, the steam engines up through the 1940s were all incremental improvements of the Watt Bolton engine. By this, i mean the thermodynamic cycle remained unchanged after them and all future steam engines used the exact same thermodynamic configuration until the steam turbine became widespread in the early 20th century. In terms of thermodynamics, the difference between the watt engine and the ones even a year before was as stark as the first Macintosh personal PC and the ENIAC before it.

Im not disagreeing with you. Im memorializing a different milestone for different criteria

I’m getting this from a lot of sources. It’s just a general trend among ancient Chinese historians.

For example, Records of the Grand Historian is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories and was written in the early 1st century BC by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian. But it covered a 2,500-year period! That’s why modern historians don’t take everything in it as gospel.

Oh, there is. I read recently that only 20% of ancient documents (hundreds of thousands, have been translated and studied. It is also estimated that 80% of ancient documents have been lost forever.

Great ways to put it with a blacksmith making an engineer block.

The part of the thesis i found so compelling was that Britain had a unique combination of resources and economics that presented creative pressure to invent that was not present otherwise. I think the Netherlands is a great counterpoint because even very inefficient windmills were enough to get the land reclamation done, so there was no creative or economic pressure to create precision pumps, for example.

To your point, I do think that the medieval use of wind and water turbines itself constitutes a "little industrial revolution", as these were not present to the same degree in antiquity.

Every time they dig in the middle east they find history.

Thanks for the recommendation

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There is.

It was common for people who were about to be raided or invaded to bury valuables (especially coin) to prevent the invaders getting it.

Article says the total weight is 170g, which would be about $9400 for just the gold value today.

Thanks for this, great addendum. As an aside I love acoup

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