As Petzold said in Code, all the pieces for computers existed in the 1870s, but it wouldn't be until the second world war that any serious effort at leveraging

As Petzold said in Code, all the pieces for computers existed in the 1870s, but it wouldn't be until the second world war that any serious effort at leveraging computational power was attempted. All you had to do was take three unrelated disciplines & combine them into labor saving technology, right? Evidence that humans, while excellent problem solvers suffer terribly at the creative aspect. In far too many disciplines only by already 'knowing' something can we solve for it. The real miracle is that we're here at this level at all.