Anton Howes
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
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What they believe
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Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.
Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.
ageofinvention.xyzSaid 13 Oct 2025This on korrents
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Changed their mind England switched from wood to coal because deforestation had made firewood scarce.
Now As I set out last time, the usual story — that this was caused by deforestation, making firewood so scarce that people resorted to burning an inferior but cheaper fuel — simply does not stack up.
Said 12 Feb 2025This on korrents
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Their words
Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.
26 August 2025
2 July 2025
- Bluesky
- NewsletterAge of Invention: All Fired Up
10 June 2025
14 May 2025
1 May 2025
23 April 2025
22 April 2025
- Bluesky
- NewsletterAge of Invention: Just Kiln Time
15 April 2025
25 March 2025
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On changing their mind
As I set out last time, the usual story — that this was caused by deforestation, making firewood so scarce that people resorted to burning an inferior but cheaper fuel — simply does not stack up.
From one piece Age of Invention: How Coal Really Won 2 beliefs · ageofinvention.xyz
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Their words
England’s deforestation — along with the draining of its peat-filled fens and marshes, and the clearing of its gorse-growing heaths — was instead itself caused by the arrival of cheap coal.
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Their words
Far from being the laboratory that brought coal into the home, then, London was actually a laggard — all the more so given it had been buying coal from Newcastle for centuries.
4 October 2024
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Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 10 beliefs, 1 changed mind — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.
Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.
Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobel Said 13 Oct 2025
London did not lead England into coal: coal spread outwards from the Newcastle coalfield, and London was one of the last places to take it up.
Far from being the laboratory that brought coal into the home, then, London was actually a laggard — all the more so given it had been buying coal from Newcastle for centuries.
Age of Invention: How Coal Really Won Said 12 Feb 2025
England's deforestation was a consequence of cheap coal rather than its cause.
England’s deforestation — along with the draining of its peat-filled fens and marshes, and the clearing of its gorse-growing heaths — was instead itself caused by the arrival of cheap coal.
Age of Invention: How Coal Really Won Said 12 Feb 2025
Show 7 more
The Dutch Golden Age did not end for want of energy: peat and grain were cheaper than ever while its industries were collapsing.
The Dutch Republic’s Golden Age did not fail because it lacked energy sources.
Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coal Said 25 Oct 2023
Lime is a blind spot in economic history: cheap coal made it widely available as a soil treatment and raised farm output, and the standard growth estimates barely mention it.
Yet lime is a huge blind spot for economic historians, despite it increasing the productivity of what was still by far the largest portion of the economy: agriculture.
Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coal Said 25 Oct 2023
"Lots of anonymous people worked it out by trial and error" is never the real story of an invention: on closer investigation, identifiable people always turn out to be responsible.
“lots of anonymous people just invented through trial and error and adaptation” just doesn’t cut it for me — I’ve never found such stories to be true upon closer investigation.
Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coal Said 25 Oct 2023
History has a reproducibility problem worse than science’s replication crisis, because hardly anyone ever goes back to the sources to check what a historian claimed they say.
But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.
Age of Invention: Does History have a Replication Crisis? Said 29 Aug 2023
Historical myths are close to unkillable: once in print they keep being repeated for decades or centuries after being disproved.
Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.
Age of Invention: Does History have a Replication Crisis? Said 29 Aug 2023
The field of history runs on a trust it has not earned: almost nobody ever checks a citation, so an error can propagate unchallenged indefinitely.
But it’s hard to trust when you are exposed to one of the most frightening of revelations: that hardly anyone ever bothers to check.
Age of Invention: Does History have a Replication Crisis? Said 29 Aug 2023
Historians should be required to publish photographs or transcriptions of the archival sources they cite, the way scientists are expected to publish their data.
Just as in the sciences it is considered good practice to make one’s data available, in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online.
Age of Invention: Does History have a Replication Crisis? Said 29 Aug 2023
What is a korrent?
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 4 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Loved Economic Forces
Loved What's New Under the Sun
When it comes to Matt Clancy's work, I'm something of a hipster. I loved his work "before it was cool". This is essential reading for anyone interested in how innovation works.
Loved Construction Physics
A must-read for me, on subjects ranging from the history of modern wind turbines to why the Empire State Building was built so quickly.
Show 1 more
Loved The Works in Progress Newsletter
Hands-down my favourite online magazine. It's released quarterly, and every article is of a shockingly high quality. I use the newsletter to make sure I never miss an issue.
Where they publish
Newsletter Age of Invention His newsletter on the history of innovation. Has a feed.
Recent
- Age of Invention: Salt Syndicate, Part I 28 Sept 2026 The story of one of the most important inventions of the sixteenth century that nobody has ever heard of, and the multi-national syndicate that promoted it
- Age of Invention: Why Scotland Succeeded 24 Mar 2026 It was capital, not education
- Age of Invention: Tudor Trade War 12 Jan 2026 The true effects of Henry VII's "industrial policy"
Show 17 more
- Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobel 13 Oct 2025 A triumph for history and the importance of ideas
- Age of Invention: The Century-Long Depression 26 Aug 2025 There’s an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century, that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or prison for servants.
- Age of Invention: All Fired Up 2 Jul 2025 The mystifying, centuries-long failure of the coal briquette
- Age of Invention: Just Kiln Time 22 Apr 2025 The Quest for Pale Ale, Part I
- Age of Invention: How Coal Really Won 12 Feb 2025 The Coal Conquest, Part II
- Age of Invention: The Coal Conquest 4 Oct 2024 There was no shortage of trees
- Age of Invention: The Dutch Salten Age 27 Jun 2024 Part III of the Salt Series
- Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part II 1 May 2024 The Lands that Salt Forgot
- Age of Invention: The Second Soul, Part I 8 Mar 2024 Here’s a riddle. There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many…
- Age of Invention: Unsung Materials 19 Jan 2024 One of my big goals for this year, as part of finally finishing my book on the causes of the Industrial Revolution, has been to get a handle on a bunch of industries of the period — ones that experienced dramatic change…
- Age of Invention: More the Merrier 22 Dec 2023 Today I’m making good on a promise.
- Age of Invention: The Interactive History of the Steam Engine 7 Dec 2023 I’m excited to announce something I’ve been quietly working on for a few months now behind the scenes: the first instalment of the interactive, animated, explorable history of the steam engine.
- Age of Invention: How to be a Public Historian 28 Nov 2023 Writing for a public audience is a double-edged sword.
- Age of Invention: Outdoing the Ancients 10 Nov 2023 When was the technology of the Ancient World superseded? The views from 1599 and 1715.
- Age of Invention: Lessons from the Rise of Coal 25 Oct 2023 The surprising rise of muscle power, the salty source of Scottish Lowlands wealth, the Dutch Republic's energy abundance, and why doesn't anybody ever talk about lime?
- Age of Invention: How to Steal Technology 10 Oct 2023 The extraordinary life of John Holker: industrialist, rebel, prisoner, fugitive, soldier, undercover agent, spy-catcher, industrial spymaster, innovation inspector, and nobleman.
- Age of Invention: Open History 22 Sept 2023 I was quite overwhelmed by the response to my last piece, on whether history has a reproducibility crisis — all the more overwhelmed because I posted it just before moving house. But I’ve been sent so many interesting t…
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @antonhowes Their X account.
Recent
- HMRC ostensibly getting into the game of “improving business productivity” (LOL) 3 Nov 2026
- I’m a single issue voter now. Promise to abolish MTD and whatever’s next in the pipeline and you get my vote. Can’t believe it was allowed to be implemented at all really. 1 Nov 2026
- Think I may have just found a never-before-seen account of the Battle of Pinkie, containing some interesting extra details 29 Oct 2026
Show 10 more
- Being self-employed, this and Making Tax Digital make me want to emigrate. Ever more bureaucratic inconvenience for such a paltry, negligible gain to the public purse! 28 Oct 2026
- Japanese train stations are really something else. The malls are just mind-bogglingly vast, and often the best places in the city to buy or eat, well, anything. Hard to convey just how impressive they are. 24 Oct 2026
- I distinctly remember lots of people saying this wouldn’t happen, because it wasn’t the intention. That’s not how laws work! 20 Oct 2026
- Britain barely builds anything because it inexplicably costs a million times more than it ought, while in the Netherlands one town will apparently build 7 bridges to look like the ones on Euro notes just for a joke! 8 Oct 2026
- Get yourself a lovely warm mug of the caffeine of your choice, and settle down to a long read of Tudor and Habsburg intrigue 4 Oct 2026
- After more than two years of research in archives across Europe: The malicious plots and international intrigues surrounding the most strategically important invention you’ve never heard of 28 Sept 2026 ageofinvention.xyz
- Hey @britishlibrary the search function for the manuscripts catalogue is not working. 27 Sept 2026
- Deep in sixteenth-century history these past few years, and lately reading about the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it’s astonishing that a matter of such horror then, of life and death and the preservation of souls, will today for the vast majority of people barely elicit a shrug. 15 Sept 2026
- So nice to occasionally come across beautiful imagery to interrupt the thousands of pages of sixteenth-century manuscripts I read through every day. The arms of a prominent investor in inventions and voyages of exploration, Sir Lionell Duckett: 12 Sept 2026
- Is this perhaps the earliest mention of cognac in English, from 1568? Spelled “conyake”. But not sure what “sebese wines” are... 11 Sept 2026
Link verified 23 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Bluesky @antonhowes.bsky.social Their Bluesky account.
Recent
- NEW article by me, on a multi-national invention-promoting syndicate of the 1560s. Involving a great deal of high-political intrigue along the way! 28 Sept 2026 ageofinvention.xyz
- Who are the best people in Scotland who work on Scottish policy? I don't mean politics, but policy. Taxation, healthcare, education, social care, housing, welfare, crime. So often it appears to be dictated by politics-brained special advisers and a charity lobbyists... 19 Jan 2026
- NEW article by me, on Henry VII’s trade wars, and their long-term impact on labour restrictions 13 Jan 2026 ageofinvention.xyz
Show 9 more
- My latest post! On England's centuries of maximum wages (yes, you read that right), and how they led to a Lost Century of stagnant growth and a dwindling population, while the rest of Europe forged ahead. 26 Aug 2025 ageofinvention.xyz
- My latest post! In researching the history of coal, I stumbled across a puzzle that has baffled people for over four hundred years: why the coal briquette never became widely adopted in England. Now, finally, there is an answer! 2 Jul 2025 ageofinvention.xyz
- Does anyone know how to get in touch with the historian and antiquary Malcolm Thick? I've tried via various institutions he's associated with, but no reply from them. 10 Jun 2025
- The sale is still on! 14 May 2025
- Woah, would you look at that! My book, ARTS & MINDS: How the Royal Society of Arts changed a Nation, is currently half price from the publishers - for just a few days only! 1 May 2025 press.princeton.edu
- Making pale ale cheaply and at scale was a major prize: a healthier, tastier, and more standardised drink, with major savings in terms of straw that could be better used for feeding cattle. But it was far easier said than done. See my latest post: 23 Apr 2025 ageofinvention.xyz
- My latest post! On the long and winding quest to develop pale ale. Involving nefarious noblemen, a failed plot to raise illegal taxes, and the Dutch alchemist who invented the thermostat. 22 Apr 2025 ageofinvention.xyz
- Had a lot of fun doing this. And just days after recording discovered some evidence I’d missed, confirming that Cornelis Drebbel’s perpetual motion worked the way I suspected, using expanding mercury to rewind its springs! 15 Apr 2025
- @bho.bsky.social Hello, when will I be able to purchase a subscription again? I keep getting blocked by the paywall, and then told I am unable to pay to get past it. Could you please either release your paywalled stuff or fix subscriptions? Now that the archived site is down, this is impossible. 25 Mar 2025
Link verified 23 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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