Lack of technological progress in late Roman Empire

[Eleatic Guest]

but it is broadly true that a large source of manual labour in slaves did have something of a retardant effect on the widespread use of mechanical power, for example.

Have you looked up the article conon394 offered in this thread as pdf
?
I can say that it quite radically reversed my opinion about the Roman attitude to mechanical power. Horizontal water wheel, vertical undershot wheel, vertical uppershot wheel, underwater turbines, archaeological evidence for water-powered trip hammers, large scale use of water power in mining - the only thing the author left out was the possible existence of Roman tidal mills. Not so bad after all. See:

"Machines, Power and the Ancient Economy" Andrew Wilson
The Journal of Roman Studies, Vol. 92 (2002), pp. 1-32

We know that several monks were working on how to get a mechanical clock to run using a weight-driven escapement. We have one letter from one monastery to another where the idea is being discussed and the writer says he hopes someone would find a way to get such a mechanism to work. Not long afterwards the first such clocks began popping up all over Europe, so obviously someone found the solution.

Could you give a source for that correspondence? I am really interested in the history of clocks.[/quote]