1.1a. Consider the Ledger
To run Hero's device for a week required 3,000 pounds of firewood, enough to heat a bathhouse for a month. But Rome's forests had long since receded beyond the Apennines, and transporting timber by oxcart added 22% to its cost per mile. By the time the wood reached Alexandria's docks, its price exceeded the device's own bronze value. Meanwhile, the lanista at the slave markets could provide a chain-gang of Sicilian captives for less than the cost of keeping the engine fed for three days. The mathematics were cruel in their simplicity: human muscle, fueled by handfuls of barley and the occasional flogging, remained the only energy source cheap enough to scale.
The same story repeated in 18th-century England, though with a different kind of suffering. Thomas Newcomen's massive steam engine, a creaking iron behemoth taller than two men, succeeded where Hero's invention failed not because it was more sophisticated, but because it emerged at Britain's energy breaking point. While the Romans had drowned in slave labor, the British were running out of trees.
But even Newcomen's engines had their limits. In the narrow seams of Cornwall's tin mines, where galleries dipped to just 30 inches high, the engines couldn't fit. There, the work fell to "hurriers," children as young as six, harnessed like pit ponies to sledges of ore. Their bent spines and stunted growth became the hidden subsidy for Britain's early industrial might. The engines thrived only where they could exploit waste: the "slack" coal that was too dusty to sell, the mines so flooded they'd otherwise be abandoned. A single engine might drain a flooded shaft while consuming £1,000 worth of coal annually (at that time,) a cost only justified because losing the mine meant losing the empire's energy future.
These parallel tales reveal the brutal laws governing technological emergence:
1. The Slave vs. Steam Paradox: Rome's ordo servorum didn't just manage slaves, it maintained an energy infrastructure as complex as any power grid. The whip-wielding overseers, the chain gangs marching to quarry sites at dawn, the breeding farms in Epirus, all formed a system optimized to deliver human joules at unbeatable prices. Britain's early engines survived only by exploiting energy waste products no one wanted, just as today's AI models rely on Kenyan data laborers paid $1.50/hour to scrub toxic content.
2. The 3% Efficiency Threshold: Newcomen's engines couldn't spread until wood prices tripled, because only then did their miserable 0.5% efficiency become economically viable. The real invention wasn't the engine, but the desperation that made it necessary.
3. The Inertia of Incumbent Systems: Rome's slave markets and Britain's cottage industries weren't just economic arrangements; they were massive investments in a particular energy order. The lanistae and mine owners had as much to lose from automation as any modern oil cartel. When technologies threaten entrenched energy regimes, their adoption follows not technical brilliance, but societal pain.
Today's AI researchers stand where Hero and Newcomen stood, building marvels in a world not yet desperate enough to need them. Our "aeolipiles" include quantum computers requiring liquid helium baths colder than space. Our "Newcomen engines" are massive language models burning through $100 million in compute costs per training run. And our version of slave labor hides in the data labeling farms of Nairobi, where workers sift through graphic violence for pennies, their mental trauma externalized to keep the AI's energy budget viable.
The lesson echoes across the centuries: technologies don't fail because they don't work, but because the energy transition required to sustain them hasn't yet become painful enough. When the Roman aqueducts failed, they turned to lead pipes. When Britain's forests vanished, they embraced coal. Our turn is coming; the only question is whether we'll heed history's warning before our own desperate transition begins.
1.1b. First Electric Car Revolution
The streets of early 20th century America hummed with a sound modern ears would find unfamiliar: the nearly silent whir of electric vehicles gliding along cobblestone roads. By 1912, electric cars accounted for over one-third of all vehicles in major U.S. cities, with fleets of battery-powered taxis operating in New York and Chicago. The Detroit Electric, priced at a premium $2,650 (nearly $80,000 in the mid-2020's), carried Henry Ford's wife Clara on her daily errands, while Thomas Edison championed battery technology as the future of transportation. Yet within fifteen years, this promising industry would vanish almost completely, crushed not by inferior engineering but by the unforgiving physics of energy density, a lesson we're poised to relearn in the 2020s with lithium-ion batteries.
The electric vehicle's first golden age emerged from perfect historical circumstances. American cities of the Gilded Age were compact, with most trips under 20 miles: well within the 80-mile range of a Detroit Electric's lead-acid batteries. Unlike gasoline cars that required dangerous hand-cranking to start and emitted noxious fumes, electrics offered instant ignition and clean operation. Wealthy women particularly favored them because they eliminated the strenuous chore of cranking engines and didn't soil expensive dresses with oil or street mud. The vehicles were mechanically simple, with fewer than two dozen moving parts compared to hundreds in internal combustion engines. Even Henry Ford, while developing his Model T, purchased two Detroit Electrics for his wife and closely studied their design.
The collapse came not from technological failure, but from an energy substrate hitting its physical limits. Lead-acid batteries, the best energy storage technology available, contained a fatal flaw: their energy density maxed out at 30–40 watt-hours per kilogram, while gasoline packed 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. This 300-fold disadvantage meant that while a 10-gallon gasoline tank (weighing 60 pounds) could propel a car 200 miles, achieving similar range with lead-acid batteries required 1,200 pounds of battery weight: more than the rest of the vehicle combined. As Americans began traveling longer distances on improving road networks, this weight penalty became insurmountable. The electric car's primary application: urban commuting, proved its death sentence when the U.S. government began funding interstate highways in the 1920s.
The parallels to our modern lithium-ion revolution are unsettling. Today's EVs face the same fundamental constraint: energy density. While lithium-ion batteries with 250–300 Wh/kg, represent a six-fold improvement over lead-acid, they still achieve barely 2% of gasoline's energy density when accounting for drivetrain efficiency. This explains why a Tesla Model S battery weighs over 1,200 pounds yet delivers less range than a compact gasoline car's 80-pound fuel tank. The problem compounds when considering that today's average vehicle is 50% heavier than 1920s cars, with consumers demanding 300+ mile ranges that push battery weights toward the absurd, the forthcoming Silverado EV's battery alone equals the entire weight of a 1980s sedan.
The first electric collapse offers three warnings for our current transition:
First, infrastructure follows energy dominance, not the reverse. In the 1910s, electricity was actually more widely available than gasoline: most homes had electrical service while gas stations remained scarce. Yet the market chose liquid fuels because their energy density enabled superior functionality. Today, we're making the same miscalculation by assuming charging infrastructure can overcome lithium's density limitations rather than acknowledging that energy-dense fuels shape mobility patterns by their very nature.
Second, energy transitions are often non-linear. The 1920s didn't see a gradual shift from electric to gasoline, the change was catastrophic for EV makers. When Cadillac introduced the electric starter in 1912 (eliminating gasoline cars' cranking disadvantage), electric vehicle sales collapsed within 24 months. Similarly, any breakthrough in synthetic fuels or hydrogen storage could render today's massive EV investments obsolete almost overnight.
Third, and most critically, we're repeating the same recursion error. Early electric cars couldn't be used to reproduce themselves effectively: their batteries depended on lead mines and chemical plants powered by coal. Modern EVs face an identical recursion crisis: lithium mining requires massive diesel-powered equipment, battery factories consume grid electricity largely generated by fossil fuels, and the vehicles themselves rely on global supply chains fueled by oil. Just as 1920s EVs couldn't escape their lead-acid limitations, today's EVs remain chained to the fossil economy they're meant to replace.
The Detroit Electric's final irony? The company survived until 1939, but only by abandoning car production to make industrial batteries, including those used in gasoline cars' electrical systems. Its fate whispers an uncomfortable truth: sometimes the "obsolete" technology doesn't disappear, but becomes subsumed by the "superior" one it was meant to replace. As we stand on the brink of another energy transition, the bones of America's first electric cars remind us that in the contest between human ingenuity and physical limits, physics always wins. The question isn't whether lithium-ion batteries will follow lead-acid into obsolescence, but whether we'll recognize the pattern before committing trillions to another energy dead end.