270 DESTINY DISRUPTED
year 1800 CE, beginning with the steam engine. Often, we speak of great
inventions as if they make their own case merely by existing, but in fact,
people don't start building and using a device simply because it's clever.
The technological breakthrough represented by an invention is only one
ingredient in its success. The social context is what really determines
whether it will "take."
The steam engine provides a case in point. What could be more useful?
What could be more obviously world-changing? Yet the steam engine was
invented in the Muslim world over three centuries before it popped up in
the West, and in the Muslim world it didn't change much of anything. The
steam engine invented there was used to power a spit so that a whole sheep
might be roasted efficiently at a rich man's banquet. (A description of this
device appears in a 1551 book by the Turkish engineer Taqi al-Oin.) After
the spit, however, no other application for the device occurred to anyone,
so it was forgotten.
Another case in point: the ancient Chinese had all the technology they
needed by the tenth century to mechanize production and mass produce
goods, but they didn't use it that way. They used geared machinery to
make toys. They used a water-driven turbine to power a big clock. If they
had used these technologies to build labor-saving machinery of the type
that spawned factories in nineteenth-century Europe, the Industrial Revo-
lution would almost certainly have started in China.
So why didn't it? Why did these inventions fail to "take" until they
were invented in the West? The answer has less to do with the inventions
themselves than it does with the social context into which the inventions
were born.
When the Chinese invented geared machinery, theirs was an efficient,
highly centralized state in which an imperial bureacracy managed the
entire society. The main function of this bureacracy aside from record-
keeping and defense was to organize public works. The genius of Chinese
political culture was its ability to soak up surplus labor with massive con-
struction projects useful to the public good. The first emperor, for exam-
ple, put about a million people to work building the Great Wall. A later
emperor employed even more workers to dig the Grand Canal, which con-
nected the country's two major river systems. Yes, China had the technol-
ogy to build labor-saving machinery, but who was going to build it? Only