Page 585 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

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ActA
weren’t ready to catch the opportunities offered by modern technology and those who
could have used it either didn’t want to or couldn’t.
While the British industry could have built it’s resources starting from scratch,
Germans were forced from the very beginning to create institutions aimed at moving
scarce capitals and canalize them in a productive system that started from an advanced
technical and organizational level.
These were bank equity investments and their ever tighter collaboration with
manufacturing companies had to strongly influence the rhythm and character of German
development.
The “total gain” of this most important branch of bank operations depended on
finding and inventing industrial promotions. Ultimately, banks thus formed forced to
plan and promote development in individual companies and to continually expand the
entire industrial field.
We can therefore conclude that Germany took the correct road for development,
since the long wave of technological transformation favored methods and industries
having high scientific intensity and capital and Germany had the social and cultural
institutional system to help them develop.

CHINA
On the threshold of the 1400s China came this close to industrialization, which
instead characterized later on Western European history. From the 1200s to the 1400s,
more or less, China saw the development of technological innovations in some important
sectors, that Europe would see, in some cases, only centuries later.
Specifically:
1) cultivation of rice brought forth technological progress in water administration;
2 in agriculture:
- the iron plow, used in rice crops took the place of the ard (scratch plow);
- innovative agricultural tools and numerous practical treaties and manuals
concerning agricultural technologies;
3) in the industrial field, the fusion of iron and an initial production of steel, in textile,
the making of a multi-spindle spinning wheel, not dissimilar to Hargreaves jenny.
- note worthy developments in hydraulic engineering (in the 1280s vertical hydraulic
wheels were already in use);
- paper;
4) in time measurements (Su Sung’s “great cosmic machine” a water clock invented in
1086, equipped with an exhaust mechanism, worked with the force of water. It was
most likely the most highly sophisticated water clock ever built, measuring over 12m
in height (over 39’4.5”) it would not only tell the time but also an impressive amount
of astronomical variables such as the position of the moon and planets. Although it
is not correct to see in these water clocks the ancestors of European Mechanical
Clocks, these tools surpassed anything 12th Century Europe could offer by far as far