Nick Szabo  🔑

Now let's loop back. Drinking room-temperature alcohol, Europe developed glass craft while hot-tea-drinking China developed porcelain. Europeans look at chemical reactions through glass & discover modern chemistry, but "china" is still the envy of the world.

Beating back the pioneering Iberians, Britain now dominates the world's seas. Following on long Veblen good pattern, English upper classes covet tea and tea-drinking apparatus from the opposite side of the planet, and the middle classes want to emulate them, but can't afford it.

In steps the English entrepreneur, who following on Dutch work figures out how to make cheap but workable knockoffs of Chinese porcelain ("china"). Among the techniques are grinding flint with water or steam power, and by the mid 18th century grinding bone to make bone china.

Crushing & grinding greatly increases the surface area of bone much as the lichen's hyphae does for rock. Next step was applying sulfuric acid to the ground bone or apatite rock, giving us superphosphate, much as lichen applies oxalic acid to dissolve phosphate from cracked rock.

Hay fed the cattle that gave northwestern Europe its high-protein diet & the horses that powered its transport & farm equipment. Hay was the gasoline of stationary pastoral economies & their ultimate protein source. https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/lactase-persistence-and-quasi.html … https://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/06/trotting-ahead-of-malthus.html …

Phosphate-fed hay supercharged the economies of many of the more pastoral regions of northwestern Europe, among them the English Midlands, Scottish Clydeside, Wallonia, and much of Switzerland. Their increased muscle and brain power made them leaders of the industrial revolution.

Practical experimenters had cracked a deep & ancient secret of life, greatly increasing biological scalability over the course of a mere century, creating new muscle & brain power & boosting the productivity of agriculture, freeing up workers for much bigger industrial scales.