[miki_tyler]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[marcus_holmes]

Yeah, but how do the other patricians react to that?

The Industrial Revolution changed British society, moving power from the feudal aristocracy to the new merchant class. It could only happen in a time where the feudal aristocracy were weakened (this is relatively shortly after the English Civil War). And also when the working class was not so powerful - the Luddites also resented the changes created in British society.

I think you could work with this, though - have the Forum discussing the changes, some backstabbing and politics about who gets licenses to use the new technology, who profits from it, who gets their traditional livelihoods destroyed. And introduce the Roman version of the Luddites - peasants deprived of their ancestral livelihoods by the new technologies.