remix logo

Hacker Remix

Show HN: The Roman Industrial Revolution that could have been

60 points by miki_tyler 2 days ago | 79 comments

This is a proof-of-concept comic book that asks: What if knowledge from 2025 reached Rome and kicked off an industrial revolution?

The story follows two voices: - Ulysses, a present-day archaeologist who finds a glowing slate in the dig site. - Marcus, an educated household slave in 79 AD who replies on that slate.

Why I’m posting:

I’d love narrative feedback. – Does the story make sense? – Are Ulysses and Marcus believable? – Which directions would you explore next (politics, tech, moral fallout)?

What’s live today - First issue, 25 rough pages. - No paywall; just a PDF.

Next steps

Regular releases toward a 8 or 10 issues collection. I’ll revise based on your critiques and wild speculations.

Grateful for any thoughts on pacing, historical plausibility, or character depth.

Thanks for reading!

ilinx 2 days ago

Comics aren’t typically my genre, but I love this concept. I’m not really qualified to comment on the historical plausibility of anything, but I did have one thought: In many cases there were more complicated reasons why a technology took so long to develop. For example, the difficult thing about wheeled carts wasn’t inventing the wheel, it was the ability to manufacture a straight axle long enough. It might be cool to see some of that explored. For example, the steam engine you teased would be really interesting to me because it necessitates a boiler that can withstand that kind of pressure. Or, I’d also probably enjoy it if it took some liberties and just had fun with the concept. It’s the sort of thing I daydream about all the time. I just think the idea is fun. I don’t know how much it’s been done before, but it’s a cool idea! I really think I would read this.

paleotrope 2 days ago

The steam engine took along time to develop for exactly that reason. You needed something that was big and strong enough for it. https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-steam/

satvikpendem 2 days ago

The Bessemer Process, as well, allowed better steam engines. Like it or not, human advances follow at a fairly linear level where, indeed, former advances inform the latter. It's not necessarily so that we lost a bunch of information during the so-called "Dark Ages," it's more that humans then focused on a different set of objectives that nevertheless had a lot of scientific advances unto themselves.

otherme123 2 days ago

The crankshaft, which is fundamental for a steam engine, was developed in the so-called "Dark Ages".

adgjlsfhk1 2 days ago

I think it's a lot less linear than often imagined. we took a somewhat weird path through physics due to trusting Aristotle blindly for ~1.5k years. it seems totally plausible that if we reran humanity, gravity, basic E&M, ideal gas law etc all get figured out much earlier.

blacksmith_tb 1 day ago

And if you have a wheel without a wide axle... then you can build narrow paths instead of roads! [1] (so much for establishing rail gauges)

1: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/how-to-downsize-a-...

MandieD 7 hours ago

Same with textiles: automating weaving wasn’t the critical jump; automating spinning was.

Before the Saxony (flyer) spinning wheel was developed and spread through Europe in the late Middle Ages, about 9-10 spinners using hand spindles were required to keep one weaver in sufficient yarn (thread), and that includes the most tedious part of weaving, dressing the loom. Such was the need for yarn that most girls and women spun hours a day - possible while waiting for something to cook, watching children, walking around the village (I was able to spin while walking within a few weeks of learning)

Even with spinning wheels, there were still more people spinning than weaving. There were advances in loom technology in the early 1700s that increased the spinner to weaver ratio again. It wasn’t until Arkwright’s Water Frame that a powered device could reliably spin yarns strong enough to be warp; the Spinning Jenny that preceded it produced less-strong yarns.

Anyhow, ACOUP has a really great textiles series that shows some of that math. TL;DR - it’s all about the spinning (and the picking and combing)

agumonkey 1 day ago

I also believe that a lot of simple ideas require the right context. A bike could be made out of wood long ago, but without very flat roads you cannot ride very far without getting exhausted.. meanwhile in the 19th, it was a lot nicer and obvious idea.

miki_tyler 2 days ago

Yes, exactly! Even the simplest printing press needs a screw, a nut, and movable types, each one is its own little invention. To make just those three things, they need good metalworking skills, a way to make threads that fit together, and tools to shape the letters. So even one simple machine like the most basic printing press depends on a bunch of other smaller breakthroughs. That’s what makes it so fun to think about, every step opens the door to ten more.

rmah 2 days ago

One of the key components of metal movable type printing presses is an appropriate ink. The concept of using a press to print on paper was well known for 100's of years across the world from China to Europe. Movable type had even been invented earlier, often using wood or ceramics instead of lead. Getting the ink right to work with metal type was not simple and recipes used by various printers were considered trade secrets (though obviously leaked as printing spread widely and rapidly).

Many inventions are like this. They seem simple in hindsight, but at the time, required putting together tools, techniques, materials and insight from multiple sources. There's an old BBC TV show called "Connections" that explores the origins of many modern technology and the often strange paths that led us there. For example, without people loving perfume, internal combustion engines might have taken decades longer to have been developed.

miki_tyler 2 days ago

One of the fun things about writing fiction is that I don’t have to stick to the natural flow of events the way history actually unfolded.

Kind of like how some countries in Africa skipped landlines and went straight to mobile phones, I can let the Romans stumble onto just the right ink recipe a bit early.

ahazred8ta 6 hours ago

In A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge had a post-singularity think tank using FTL comms to talk to a group on a medieval-tech planet, teaching them how to speedrun through developing an industrial-era tech tree. There was an entire academic discipline that studied the fastest ways to uplift a pretechnological society.

'Recruit a bunch of people to study rocks. Use acid and scratch tests to figure out which ones can be smelted for valuable elements. Recruit a bunch of people to study making alloys. Form an R&D team to develop precision lathes. Invent index cards and file catalogs.'

marcus_holmes 2 days ago

Yeah, but the Africans involved didn't invent the phones.

I've always found it fascinating with the history of the Industrial Revolution that it wasn't so much about technology, as about the exact right circumstances arising so that the technology could be used and improved. There had to be industrialists, an industry that needed the invention badly enough and people rich enough to be able to gamble on the unproven inventions. The technology itself (as others have said) rests on the shoulders of multiple layers of giants. The society had to be willing to change, and cope with the new inventions and their social consequences (Britain nearly wasn't, as the Luddites showed, and both China and Japan sealed themselves off from foreign inventions to preserve their societies unchanged).

From what I know of late Roman society, it was stratified and fixed, an oligarchy. Any threat to the patrician class would not have been accepted, and the patrician class had no reason to change. This is different from 18th Century Britain where the rising merchant class were challenging the remnants of the feudal peerage, who didn't have enough power to stop them.

I think your premise is interesting, but only as fiction.

miki_tyler 2 days ago

Agreed, this is a work of fiction, after all. But what if I put a few traders or patricians on the brink of bankruptcy? That would create the right incentives. Then I give them just enough tools to dig themselves out. Things might start to shift from there.

adrianmonk 2 days ago

The concept reminds me of that story from Reddit that was going to get turned into a movie but never did:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome,_Sweet_Rome

I think this is the original Reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/k067x/could_i_de...

miki_tyler 2 days ago

I’m familiar with it. Not sure what ended up happening to the project though.

satvikpendem 2 days ago

Sadly the author mentioned that the script itself is stuck in rights limbo, where they sold off the rights but never saw that it'd amount to a movie, yet.

prennert 2 days ago

You probably found it already when doing your background search, but there is an acoup blog post about why the Industrial Revolution did not happen during the Roman period: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

There might be some inspiration in there to guide the story towards breaking some of the chicken and egg problems. Maybe the Romans find a way (and reason) to exploit the English coal deposits and start encountering the same problems the English did eventually: how to pump water out of shafts.

tene80i 2 days ago

It’s an interesting project for assessing the capabilities of current AI models. I would never read it, because I’m not interested in creative work produced even in part by a computer model, when there is so much out there that is top-to-bottom the expression of a human self. I would rather see your unpolished prose or your amateur sketches than something a computer has generated, or even polished.

I do understand that it allows people to be creative in areas they don’t have skill. I can imagine sensibilities changing over time, even if just between generations, in the way Douglas Adams described. Or maybe, as this sort of thing becomes rampant, people will seek even more the authenticity of human craft, despite / because of all its flaws, the challenge of doing it well, and the awe and human connection that results.

fasbiner 2 days ago

Everything you see on your screen was created in part by a computer model, this seems like a way to be rude and dismissive as some kind of status game.

Because you can't actually tell the difference, reliably, for the rest of your life.

You will never know if that detail was borrowed directly from a human hand without alteration, generated and composed, or added with the flourish of a digital pen or brush, or modified via very specific prompt, or edited with photoshop, or edited by an AI agent using photoshop, or a tiny grease stain, a weird compression artifact that ended up looking cool, etc.

You're a fraud if you say that you can reliably know absent of context, and you grasp for metaphysical assertions because you're a fraud.

tene80i 2 days ago

Eh? I never said I could detect the machine. Only that I would prefer it wasn’t used. I would also prefer not to read a ghostwritten book, even if I would never know it was ghostwritten. The possibility of never knowing something doesn’t mean there’s nothing there to know.

As for the other types of machine help eg photoshop. Yes, it’s an interesting question where to draw the line. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. There are lots of areas of human life where the boundary isn’t neat. That doesn’t mean there is no boundary.

fasbiner 20 hours ago

Yeah well, I don't disagree with you overall, but this is what getting old feels like. The boundary is so messy because it's based on feelings and desires and reduced neuroplasticity rather than a logical principle. There's not even a coherent explanation of how this personal preference could possibly be realized at the level of policy given the state of play. I'm sensitive to this feeling, but it's a luxury belief of people who can afford to ignore the job market.

The collective disapproval of online booking sites by travel agents was far more concentrated and economically existential than AI is to artists, and it made no difference. Travel agents who tried to moralize about soulless technology and inferior experiences while costing 10,000% more money for services that their customers felt were similar enough were not saved by moral disapproval cross-pollinated with self-interested hostility to change.

All the technology that existed when we were young was either a normal part of life or something exciting and new. And then past a certain point, technology becomes suspicious, or unnecessary, or economically threatening, and eventually it gets elevated to a source of danger to the human experience itself. And right or wrong, the next generation has never cared.

ggm 2 days ago

'lest darkness fall' by L Sprague De Camp..1939

miki_tyler 2 days ago

This is very interesting. It seems similar to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which also features a time traveler. I'll try to get a used copy from eBay.

ggm 2 days ago

No intent to say "done before don't do it" btw. There's always more to be said. Fred Hoyle did a 1960s "bootstrap astronomy from sticks on a beach on a desert island" which is fantastic and I recalled watching the suns track in Tom Hanks adventure with Wilson, on the island.

tgbugs 2 days ago

Came here to post this as well and took a moment to reflect that Martin Padway has probably inspired me more than almost any other character in all literature to memorize and know things that might come in handy some day if for the most absurdly impossible reason that I might be pulled through a wormhole to ancient Rome.

Tagbert 2 days ago

“To Turn the Tide” by S.M. Sterling is a story positing a small group of modern people transported to the time of Marcus Aurelius and bringing modern technology ideas to prevent the Germans from degrading the Roman Empire. They don’t really try to explain how the time travel happens. It’s done in the first few pages with out explanation.

https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Tide-S-M-Stirling/dp/1982193530

quuxplusone 2 days ago

This plot device is known as a "time slip": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_slip

Which is also the alternative title of the Sonny Chiba film "G.I. Samurai" (1979), in which a few dozen Japanese Self-Defense Forces soldiers find themselves in the 1560s.

jcranmer 2 days ago

> Grateful for any thoughts on pacing, historical plausibility, or character depth.

Originally, I thought you were suggesting an endogenous Roman industrial revolution, which, no, that's not historically plausible (see https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... for details as to why). But on a closer reread, I found that you're talking instead about Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court-style introduction of the Industrial Revolution to the past. Which... probably still no?

There's a few factors that make Roman Industrial Revolution unlikely. It's dubious that the Romans had the technology to make a working pressure cylinder necessary for a steam engine--that requires some degree of precision engineering that I don't think they had. But there's other missing technologies: for examples, the Romans lack the spinning wheel (it would be invented ~1000 years later), and even more importantly, their looms likely aren't up to the production capacity that automatic thread production would enable. It's not implausible that this is part of future-tech-transfer, but getting this tech transferred would require a decent amount of specialized knowledge not easily available to either person here.

More importantly, I don't think the Roman economy is really at a stage that can handle an industrial revolution. Most production is still relying essentially on local production. A shortage of wool workers isn't an "oh no, we have too much wool, how ever are we going to turn it into yarn?" problem; rather, it's a "whelp, we've got nobody to deal with all the sheep" problem.

The final note is that your plan for the inevitable old-versus-new conflict is... well, "industrial revolution turns everyone into Revolutionary American liberals" is a summary of that idea, and I don't think that's anywhere near an accurate read of what a Roman reaction to an industrial revolution. I'd go into more detail, but I don't trust my own knowledge of the 1st century Roman Empire sociopolitical structure is accurate enough to model what it would look like in detail.

miki_tyler 2 days ago

I see your point, however, the idea is to introduce engineering knowledge from the outside. Think of the duct tape scene in Apollo 13: a group of engineers gathered around a table, someone dumps a pile of random items, and says, "We have to find a way to make this thing using nothing but that." What's the minimum set of tools and knowledge that, dropped into the Roman world, could solve a specific technological problem.

satvikpendem 2 days ago

Very true on all of those accounts (and I mentioned in another comment about the Bessemer Process). What's interesting on an economic level is that they knew about hyperinflation but were powerless to actually combat it at a high level. Diocletian tried but they simply were unaware of what truly creates hyperinflation and tried price ceilings which of course do not work for scarce goods.

quuxplusone 1 day ago

FWIW:

(1) The art style is 100% "WikiHow meme", when I think you were probably (or should have been) shooting for "ligne claire". It's... distracting, at least. The facial expressions in particular are WikiHow-style.

(2) I can't quite read that "handwritten note" on page 14, nor is it explained to the reader how the protagonist figures out what date it is ("A.D.") for the Roman he thinks he's time-travel-talking to. Nor why he immediately jumps to time travel paradoxes; wouldn't it be obvious at first that this is, at weirdest, some sort of MMAcevedo situation, not a magic time travel communicator? Or is that my HN bias showing?

miki_tyler 1 day ago

Thanks for taking the time to dig in, this is exactly the kind of feedback I'm after.

ilamont 2 days ago

Robert Silverberg wrote something in this vein in the 90s, Roma Eterna. I don’t remember details about industrialization but by the last chapter Roman civilization had reached the rocket age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roma_Eterna

rbanffy 2 days ago

I remember reading, a long time ago, in a science fiction magazine I can’t remember the name, a story about the first contact with aliens and a current-age Roman Empire. The single point of change was that, in that timeline, Jesus got a beating and was released. As a result, Christianity became a minor religion in the empire, which never fell, there was no Middle Ages and the world enjoyed a Pax Romana since then. An interesting read.

mrlonglong 1 day ago

There's a short story similar to that by Peter F. Hamilton.

https://www.stevenhsilver.com/hamilton.html

rbanffy 1 day ago

In the meantime, I remembered: https://www.uchronia.net/label/pohlwaitin.html

don-code 2 days ago

I love the first issue and went to follow the site's RSS feed, but the four posts on the feed seem like spam? They each start with "Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis..."

miki_tyler 2 days ago

Apologies, I use 11ty for most of my personal projects. It’s primarily a static blog generator, but I also use it for plain web pages. I forgot to delete the example blog post pages that came with the template. It didn’t even occur to me that someone might want to use the RSS feed!

tomrod 2 days ago

Rome Sweet Rome comes to mind. Looking forward to the concept.

satvikpendem 2 days ago

I like this series from ToldInStone about how an Industrial Revolution was not remotely possible from the Roman perspective [0] but I like what you've done with the comic.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uqPlOAH85o

miki_tyler 2 days ago

Absolutely, I get that. But the whole idea behind the story is to introduce outside knowledge into the Roman world. If someone managed to bring steam power to ancient Rome, it would trigger a complex chain of events, a kind of technological revolution. It probably wouldn't resemble our own Industrial Revolution. For example, I don't see railroads becoming a priority. Rome's geography is centered around the Mediterranean, and most trade happens by sea. So steamboats it is.

Animats 2 days ago

I want to see how he makes a non-toy steam engine using Roman technology.

gus_massa 2 days ago

Slightly related, but Antikythera mechanism was build ~150BC and has a lot of advanced construction steps. If you have a few hour to go down the rabbit hole I recommend the Clickspring reconstruction serie https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0...

Perhaps someone can ask the guy to build a "roman" steam engine.

miki_tyler 2 days ago

It’s not so much about using only Roman technology to build a steam engine directly. The more interesting question is: what’s the smallest set of tools the Romans could have made that would let them build a basic working steam engine?

notavalleyman 2 days ago

How much of the part 1 pdf was made by a person versus chatgpt if you don't mind me asking?

The MC's hair colour and stubble change between the first three frames and everything has that yellow sheen.

miki_tyler 2 days ago

I explain the whole process in “The Making Of” section, but happy to share more here if you have specific questions!

pimlottc 7 hours ago

Given how much AI was used in this, it really should be noted prominently on the main page, not just the making of page which most people won’t see.

notavalleyman 2 days ago

My personal detector feedback is that this is slop, the images have the yellow fake sheen, none of the characters were drawn in an interesting way, and the text font is unreadable. The idea of submitting AI generated slop with 0% human input, and then burying it under 'making of' and not even admitting it here when asked, is a bad sign for me

Edit, to be less rude of me, clearly what you've worked hard on here is a chatgpt prompt which generates a fun comic. Why don't you submit that for discussion/comparison instead of a sample of model outputs without providing the prompt

miki_tyler 2 days ago

Not my intention. I actually broke the process down by task and role in the themakingof/ section. If I had drawn the sketches myself, just the line work would’ve taken about 50% more time, before even getting to color.

As for the writing, the story, structure, dialogue, I’d say 90–95% of it is human-made. If there’s anything you’re curious about that’s not covered on the site, I’m happy to share more details.

satvikpendem 2 days ago

Good for you, I want to see more things created by those who have an imagination but don't necessarily have the technical skill or time to bring it to life; there is no need to have it be monopolized by those who do, everyone deserves to have their ideas seen, at least in some form.

whateveracct 2 days ago

This reads to me like "I don't have the skill, so I don't understand what quality even means." Which is the main issue with using AI.

Comic art is as abstract, expressive, and integral to the final product as "story, structure, and dialogue." Using the art to express motion, setting, emotion, etc is so key. It's why most comic artists are masters of figure drawing.

carpo 2 days ago

This is great. Can see you put a lot of work into it. I like it.

satvikpendem 2 days ago

Who cares? It's clearly not "0% human input" as the author stated, and as long as the output conveys the ideas presented, it's fine, in my opinion.

cellis 2 days ago

Pretty good. Reminds me of the Sword of Jupiter (Imperium series).

2 days ago

90s_dev 2 days ago

I always wondered if Archimedes could have realized more applications of his lever and invented the gear and kicked off the industrial revolution early.

jcranmer 2 days ago

> kicked off the industrial revolution early.

Short answer: no. Longer answer: read https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... (which covers it better than I could, from an actual historian).

90s_dev 2 days ago

I meant technologically not economically.

jcranmer 2 days ago

Technologically, probably not. The first invention of the Industrial Revolution isn't a steam engine, it's the flying shuttle, and the Romans are using far more primitive looms than 18th century Europe is, and I'm not sure their looms could have taken advantage of the flying shuttle.

MandieD 7 hours ago

First, they’d need spinning wheels. Even with the primitive looms the Romans were using, far more labor went into producing the yarn (processing flax, cleaning wool, spinning with hand spindles)

90s_dev 2 days ago

Maybe the Romans invented both of those but just didn't tell you.

krapp 2 days ago

The Antikythera mechanism was likely within Archimedes' lifetime or not long after his death, so he certainly knew what gears were.

miki_tyler 2 days ago

He might have a "cameo". At some point I will need the Romans to make screws and nuts!

kristopolous 2 days ago

I've always wondered if China was actually closer

miki_tyler 2 days ago

Absolutely. One of the reasons I chose ancient Rome over other settings is simply because, while I’m no expert, it’s the one I know the most about.

Findeton 2 days ago

One of the problems with Rome was that by using slaves, the rich didn’t value work. People are more productive if they are compensated according to their productivity. Also the rich didn’t systematically reinvest their capital in the most productive way as capitalists do nowadays, instead they bought titles/positions, land or married their children.

jcranmer 2 days ago

That's not true! We see the invention and diffusion of labor-saving devices throughout the entire history of the Roman Empire!

miki_tyler 2 days ago

That’s something I really want to explore. If Rome had an industrial revolution, where progress didn’t rely on slaves anymore, it could lead to big political conflicts. You’d have the old guard trying to hold on to power, and a new group pushing for change, a la American Revolution.

ElevenLathe 1 day ago

Roman Whigs!

Findeton 2 days ago

Nah they were too centralised. Actually I think the Greeks were closer by having city-states and inventing the aeolipile.

chucksmash 2 days ago

The "Who invented the steam engine?"[0] section of "The Book of General Ignorance" refers to a "brilliant essay" by Arnold Toynbee that imagines a global Greek empire enabled by a rail network derived from combining the aeolopile and the Diolkos. I'd love to read that essay but they don't cite it and I have yet to come across it myself.

[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=1Mjd2GCRPmAC&newbks=1&newb...

GolfPopper 2 days ago

The essay you're looking for is "IF ALEXANDER THE GREAT HAD LIVED ON" in Part IV of Some Problems of Greek History, Arnold Toynbee 1969.

chucksmash 2 days ago

Thanks for the pointer. Looking forward to tracking down a copy.

kristopolous 2 days ago

Honestly I thought industrialization was more about the relationship between labor, commodity and manufacturing than any particular technology.

It's a mode of production more than anything.

For China you had river power which also served as a major trading round.

One of the big blockers was that trading and banking was seen by many cultures as only moral if exercised without profit. Intentionally profiting was often seen as a form of theft so you needed the moral reclassifications of these social relationships before industrialization was incentivized.

So without moral judgment approving accumulation, your assembly line is just a logistical curiosity and not a revolutionary device.

2 days ago

huangjingyun 2 days ago

做不出来的，没有牛顿，没有瓦特，没有达芬奇，就没有所谓的工业革命

miki_tyler 2 days ago

故事讲的是未来的人将达芬奇的设计图送给罗马人

gus_massa 2 days ago

Autotraslations:

>> It can't be done. Without Newton, Watt, and Da Vinci, there would be no so-called Industrial Revolution.

> The story is about a man from the future sending Leonardo da Vinci's designs to the Romans.

osculum 2 days ago

[flagged]

Findeton 2 days ago

Shameless plug as AUC calendar is mentioned: https://aburbecondita.com

Years since the founding of the City (Rome), Ab Urbe Condita. Although during Imperial times they used years since the current emperor started his mandate, ehich could be confusing as sometimes there would be three emperors in a year.

Btw I loved the comic and I will anxiously wait for the next edition.