Is it possible to have a Society to evolve into a industrial age society without discovering gunpowder

Yet another alternative is to have a weapon more effective than primitive guns. Remember the first guns were muzzle loaded balls with a packet of gunpowder, the barrels were not rifled to create spin so the guns were wildly inaccurate. The parts were not interchangeable, either, a broken gun meant making a new part by hand. Plus they could literally blind and deafen the shooter!

So the 'alternative history' could be to advance industrialization well before the discovery of gunpowder.

IRL, the Viking's had access to crucible steel 1200 years ago; we see it in some of their swords (Ulfbhert, see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html, also http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2878512/The-mystery-magical-superstrong-Viking-sword-Researchers-close-supermonks-believed-forged-weapons.html). This is steel as good and hard as modern steel, and available hundreds of years before the first written formula for gunpowder.

So, alternate history wise; suppose instead of just making swords with it, it was forged into machinery, and the magicians that made the crucible steel figured out how to make some of Archimedes weapons, too: repeating crossbows, lathes with diamond tips making fine machinery, spring steel that let archers fire accurately for hundreds of yards: Far further and more deadly than the best early blunderbusses. Suppose they fired needles, filled with lethal poison, and could actually be hand held like pistols, but with a hundred rounds instead of 6 of those big bulky bullets.

Our firearms have slowly evolved to be accurate and lethal at a distance, but that is for the same reason we have the QWERTY keyboard: It came first, was widely adopted, and became the awkward norm. If industrialization starts 300 years before we discovered gunpowder circa 1100 AD, because for some cultural quirk everybody knows how to make good steel, and some Archimedes or Da Vinci type figure of the time could make kinetic weapons powered by spring steel that made early gun shooters look like idiots playing with dynamite for no good reason; the bullets did not travel as far or as accurately as their steel darts: Say a marksman with a steel dart could hit the bullseye three times in 8 seconds at 50 yards, while a blunderbuss takes two minutes to load one shot and would be lucky to hit the target at all!

Modern steel, the discovery of fine cutting and grinding with diamonds, the invention of standardized parts. Metallurgy of our many kinds of steel would be obvious; the super hard alloys for scalpel sharp edges can happen.

On top of all that, industrial production of modern steel would help with the exploitation of other kinds of explosive fuels: Natural gas, gasoline and internal combustion engines, nitroglycerin. Even electrical discoveries are plausibly fuelled by fine metallurgical advances and refinement of metals and experiments with alloys.

Instead of gunpowder, magnetic rail guns.

The writing trick is just that something else got there first by a few centuries. It was evolved and refined by hundreds of little inventions and improvements, it was widely accepted in the culture, and the headstart was just too much for gunpowder to overcome: People were accustomed to "charging" their guns with machinery and/or horses winding thousands of pounds of energy into reliable heavy steel springs: Their guns were whisper silent, deadly, accurate, safe, carried dozens of projectiles and left no plume of smoke identifying the location of the shooter! Which made the first black-powder guns look like, to them, cavemen throwing rocks! It isn't that black powder and other such explosives were never discovered, just that the black powder gun was stillborn, a loud, smelly, inaccurate novelty, handmade by a few crackpots, that nobody ever saw fit to improve upon.

posted almost 7 years ago

Amadeus‭

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