Board Thread:Timeline Discussions/@comment-4923787-20130202175501/@comment-4923787-20130420003103

But could Briganza develop instead?

Hmm, I read somewhere that English had some words transferred from Latin since it was used by the Church and state for many years in the Medieval Ages, and than when people began naming things scientifically.

But than why didn't the Qing transition into a functioning constitutional monarchy if they didn't have a hard time modernising? And I thought they were way behind technologically in the 1800s.

Just out of curiousity, is the Industrial Revolution solely reliant on coal or oil, or could it develop entirely differently?

I doubt that it could, but when coal supposedly became scarce in the 1860/70s, there was major contemplation of solar, wind, and hydro power as alternatives, with apparently, Lord Kelvin as a supporter in 1881, and Alexander Graham Bell in 1917, when he proposed using ethanol as a substitute to both because of the shortage. If more important scientific and industrial minds were convinced, like Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, and involved in research and inventions into ways to make alternative fuel sources more efficient? Could this be feasible in a world where perhaps people are more reverant of the environment than they are OTL? Could there be synthetic, hopefully harmless chemical substitutes be found to replicate the process of fermenting yeast?

I doubt all this very much, but it'd be nice to see a world which alternative energies have a head start at the minimum.