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Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
- bacon_waffle 7y agoMy favourite example of an "idea behind its time" is the torque amplifier, which enabled mechanical analog computers on invention in the early 1900s. It is made of nothing more complicated than a source of rotary power, a couple drums/pulleys, and string/rope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_amplifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_amplifier
- Gibbon1 7y agoMy favorite hard slogs are the zipper and the cotton harvester. The former took something like 30-40 years to develop and then no one wanted it. The latter took 100 years of tinkering.
- Animats 7y agoZippers are hard to make. YKK in Japan is notably better than most of their competitors. Holding a tight tolerance on all those cheap teeth is hard.
- Gibbon1 7y agoYeah and zipper was the result of trying to design an mechanical Hook-and-eye closure. Which look nothing like a zipper. And definitely fits the articles point that somethings couldn't be made until all the supporting pieces were in place. A lot of inventions were initially hand crafted and then automation was applied to reduce cost. Think sewing pins. For zippers automation was necessary from day one. As you said hard to make. Likely cannot be made by hand.
- fernly 7y agoI don't understand why this is called an "amplifier" rather than simply "a clutch". The torque input is always the same; there is no "amplification" of the torque. The tensioned rope or spring simply applies more or less of the torque to the output, by varying the friction on the drum.
- detaro 7y agoThat's true of pretty much any amplifier: a small signal controls how much of a large "source" is available at the output. If I had to guess, it's a) to emphasize the "signal" part and b) to make a distinction for it being used for the proportional control?
- bacon_waffle 7y agoThe output gets more torque, just like a capstan allows a person to amplify tension on a rope. Maybe this will explain better than the wikipedia page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ailf7bz9H0o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ailf7bz9H0o edit: spelling, grammar...
- fernly 7y agoThe reason I wondered, is that in years past I had serviced machines that used a "wrap spring clutch"[1] which I knew used the same principle. These are mentioned in passing in the Wpedia article on clutches[2] where it says they obey the "Capstan equation". That article[3] opens, > The capstan equation or belt friction equation, also known as Eytelwein's formula, relates the hold-force to the load-force if a flexible line is wound around a cylinder (a bollard, a winch or a capstan) So there's the generic idea, which can be viewed as a clutch or a bollard. The bollard is an "amplifier" in the same sense that a transistor is, where a small controlling voltage regulates a larger current flow. However the wrap spring clutch is on/off, not proportional, so is effectively a torque SWITCH. [1] https://www.warnerelectric.com/products/clutch-products/wrap-spring-clutches https://www.warnerelectric.com/products/clutch-products/wrap... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutch [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capstan_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capstan_equation
- bacon_waffle 7y agoI think a better transistor analogy than a FET is a BJT, where both the amplified quantity and control signal are electrical current. The key difference between a clutch and torque amplifier is that, with a clutch, the output shaft power all comes from the input shaft. The torque amplifier's output shaft power mostly comes from the output drum, not the input shaft. The drums are constantly spinning, powered by some external source. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNNkNc7mFJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNNkNc7mFJ4
- SilasX 7y agoMine is wheeled luggage, which is very similar to products that existed in antiquity (wheelbarrow, pushcart, rickshaw). The article mentions it here: >In general, I think we should be more surprised at long gaps for inventions that have obvious, predictable impact on major industries. For this reason, the cotton gin and the flying shuttle are more compelling gaps to me than the wheeled suitcase, role-playing games, or the bicycle, which merely offer convenience or entertainment.
- ncmncm 7y agoWheeled luggage waited for strong plastic.
- krallja 7y agoI have formed a pet theory that wheeled luggage was dependent on the invention of roller blades.
- analog31 7y agoI was going to comment on the same thing. There were no decent small wheels until Rollerblades came along with their molded polypropylene wheels and ball bearings. Skateboard wheels were a similar technology, but not as easy to mount on things. There's an album cover from the late 50s of bassist Paul Chambers rolling has bass down the sidewalk with a wheel on the bottom of his bass.
- frosted-flakes 7y agoAnd smooth pavement.
- Animats 7y agoThat kind of torque amplifier is of limited value, and it requires fairly good materials. There's a lot of rubbing involved. Power steering uses a completely different approach. Rope has been around for millennia, but good rope is modern. Rope before manila, a 19th century development, rotted easily. (Hemp rope rots from the inside out, incidentally, so it looks fine until it breaks.) Modern rope is usually a nylon core with a polypropeline cover. Good rubber belts are post-WWII. Rubber before neoprene tended to crack, and oil made it much worse. Precisely controlled friction is a modern concept. (I restore antique Teletype machines as a hobby, and the designs from the 1920s and 1930s show these material limitations. The carriage return stop isn't rubber or some flexible material. There's a lever driving a piston in a cylinder to compress air which then comes out through a relief valve. Complex, but buildable with 1920s materials.)
- bacon_waffle 7y agoPart of the cleverness in that arrangement is that it has built-in negative feedback, so changes in friction between the drum and band will manifest as a change in gain or offset. Amplifiers are plenty useful even without well-controlled gain and offset. This whole discussion is mental masturbation, but I suspect if a model of a torque amplifier were sent back a few hundred years in a time machine, there wouldn't be a clear application for it. Industrial uses would evidently be fairly rare, interesting academic applications would've required calculus and control theory.
- hirundo 7y agoWhy is it taking so long to invent the semantic web? It could have a large economic impact, but solutions don't catch on. We have a specific way to say "I am a teapot", but not a generic way to unambiguously make simple statements like that. At least not a way that has gained traction. What's the missing tech? Maybe there isn't one, and we're just an Eli Whitney coder away from making it happen.
- bsder 7y agoLanguage is hard. Written language is very hard. Of all the human inventions, written language is one of the very few that wasn't independently invented in many places, multiple times. However, it is so stupidly and obviously useful that anyone who sees it copies it and disseminates it immediately.
- peterburkimsher 7y agoI thought written language was invented independently as Chinese, Sumerian, and Mayan. [1] Cuneiform influenced Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the Phoenician -> Latin alphabet. I'll include an honourable mention to Arabic & Hebrew here, which are quite different to Latin, but I think are still related to Sumerian somehow. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Bronze_Age_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing#Bronze_Age_...
- ncmncm 7y agoArabic, Hebrew, and Latin all came literally thousands of years later.
- azernik 7y agoThe modern Hebrew (actually Aramaic [1]) alphabet and the Arabic alphabet are both derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which itself was derived (via proto-Sinaitic) from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Egyptian hieroglyphs themselves may or may not be another independent invention; they arose shortly after Sumerian cuneiform, and there was contact between the two societies, but there's no evidence of direct transfer. It's possible that just the concept of writing was transmitted, but no one really knows. [1] The alphabet that archaeologists call the Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a slight variant of the Phoenician one, just as ancient Hebrew is a dialect on the Canaanite dialect continuum. The alphabet used to write Hebrew since about 300-500 BCE is the Aramaic alphabet, spread throughout the Levant by the Persians when they made Aramaic the lingua franca in their possessions west of the Zagros.
- 3pt14159 7y agoMy favourite idea is the internet. The romans could have done it with flags / torches and towers. Don't tell me it wouldn't pay for itself. Sending data over long distances at that type of speed would have paid for itself multiple times over, even if it were one tiny fraction of the bandwidth we have today.
- anewvillager 7y agoThere's something like this in the movie Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg I wonder if this method of communication was EVER used by any civilization.
- detaro 7y agoIt's been described throughout history, so quite certainly.
- anewvillager 7y agoOhhhh, that's true! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communications_(historical) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communica...
- edoceo 7y agoIt's in another cool fantasy movie, with signal towers, I can't find it now despite frantic Google (results terrible). Was very cool, wish I could remember the name.
- coopsmgoops 7y agoThe French did it. Check out the wikipedia page on the "semephore telegraph"
- azepoi 7y agoIt was used for military communication between front lines and Paris. It was also famously used for an early securities fraud scheme https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/rewind/the-crooked-timber-of-humanity https://www.1843magazine.com/technology/rewind/the-crooked-t...
- imtringued 7y agoThe bicycle is a pretty poor example of this. The word "car" is derived from the word "carriage". People already had horse or ox drawn "cars" centuries before the bicycle was invented. There simply was no need for an inferior method of transportation.
- tlb 7y agoThe advantage of the bicycle is that it's lightweight enough for a single rider to make it go faster than a horse-drawn carriage. Even on a dirt path, a rider can average 15 mph while horses can only sustain that for short bursts.
- nradov 7y agoIt takes a pretty high level of fitness and a decent quality bicycle to sustain 15 mph on a dirt path. Something like 11 mph would be a more realistic average.
- comicjk 7y agoI think you're comparing bicycles to an idealized version of horses. Real horses get tired quickly, get hurt easily, and are quite expensive. Assuming decent roads, a bicycle would often be more convenient, and almost always cheaper. From Wikipedia: "A stagecoach traveled at an average speed of about 5 miles per hour". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach
- notahacker 7y ago> Assuming decent roads, a bicycle would often be more convenient, and almost always cheaper. I think you're assuming an idealised version of roads. In all seriousness, good roads were usually cobblestones and bad roads rutted tracks until bicycle pioneers started lobbying for roads to be paved smoothly enough to make their then-expensive hobby more practical for transportation than horses and horse drawn vehicles. Asphalt and Portland cement roads were new technologies in the nineteenth century too.
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- tunesmith 7y agoI wonder if there have been any truly physically-gating dependencies? Meaning, physical and natural phenomenon where certain advances were impossible before they happened? For instance, certain technology that absolutely could not have existed before, say, a certain comet flew past because before then there was no evidence to believe X. Is there any reason to believe that we couldn't have been at this technological level 1,000 or 10,000 years ago?
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoThings getting cool enough after the big bang seems to be the obvious one. But on a more serious note, maybe modern encryption? The physical gate being the literal ability to get rocks to count fast enough to finish decrypting something before the heath death of the universe
- zenhack 7y agoI'd actually put modern crypto in the opposite bucket: there's virtually no physical constraints at all. You could do RSA by hand if you had to, and if nobody else has computers, you can pick a key size small enough for doing it manually to be practical.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoOh I agree. I guess I was approaching this from the angle of the use of long keys where it would be literally impossible to decrypt unless computers exist. We could also get into the sub argument of math being a property of the universe. Does encryption exist if we don't discover it? Trying to imagine a universe where our concept of math is impossible to the universe just not working that way
- knzhou 7y agoThis isn't technology, but the supernova of 1987 [0] confirmed our understanding of supernova physics, and gave us useful bounds on the mass of the neutrino. Even today, it gives stringent constraints on new hypothetical particles, which would have changed how the supernova played out. Unfortunately, we might have to wait decades to centuries for the next one. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A
- pfdietz 7y agoSome inventions are gated by scientific discovery, particularly in materials. For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron, causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium. But it wasn't invented until 1948. No one had done the experiment and seen that effect. Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride. It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn't until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.
- melling 7y agoHopefully when we’re done with this, perhaps we can extrapolate and invent the future a little faster. If we invest a few percent more in R&D every year, for example, would that compound over decades? If we did more Citizen Science? Individual and crowdsourced. More X-Prize investments? Consumer products like televisions, smartphones, smart watches, etc advance because consumers are willing to spend large amounts of money. If robotics, or any technology, could reach a tipping point, it’ll get the same investment.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoComputer Forensics is an area that can totally get some love. The hardware and software is designed to be used by large agencies, pricing out the consumer space (for data recovery) and the small business (for data recovery)
- vsnf 7y agoThere are some decent open source forensics projects out there, such as The Sleuth Kit / Autopsy. I'm not sure how well they compare to the more pricey alternatives like EnCase, but they seem popular enough among law enforcement. https://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/ https://www.sleuthkit.org/autopsy/
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- nickdothutton 7y agoPlease take the time to enjoy this. I’ll leave it to others who know the work of James Burke to explain https://youtu.be/7G8YHWbi-9U https://youtu.be/7G8YHWbi-9U
- spitfire 7y agoOh damn you to hell! I cannot see a james Burke show/presentationwithout being sucked in and watching the whole thing. It’s just not possible. Even if I’m just walking by I get sucked in. Why can’t today’s presenters/media types be as good as him?
- severine 7y agoThanks for the link, didn't know the guy. Although the last question/answer is painful to hear, those filters aren't working...
- Alex3917 7y agoIt's crazy to think that the modern bicycle was invented the same year as the modern car, both in 1885. Although apparently the ball bearing was a limiting factor for the creation of each.
- sitkack 7y agoThe vast majority of advancements come directly from materials science. New materials are so strongly correlated to advancements, that I think there should be national labs that run government scale experiments to search for new substances.
- redis_mlc 7y ago> The vast majority of advancements come directly from materials science. This is one of the most thought-provoking comments I've ever seen on HN! Can you expand on that for a couple of paragraphs?
- NikolaeVarius 7y agoI don't think these are the "best" examples as they are probably not completely accurate, but there is probably a reason why the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Steel Ages exist as a concept. Also I think it makes sense since materials science is more applied chemistry/physics/engineering, so naturally materials science is huge because it represents 3 fields of knowledge interacting.
- bllguo 7y agoim not sure "steel age" is a common term, but I agree with the idea. the (second) industrial revolution was spurred by availability of steel anyway, you can take it further. the information age we are in is arguably characterized by silicon
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- pfdietz 7y agoAn example I've mentioned before on HN is the rotary pressure exchanger. It has one moving part, is 98% efficient, and the base patent was issued in 1988. Perhaps there was a lack of large application before reverse osmosis became a big thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_exchanger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_exchanger
- nl 7y agoThis is pretty interesting. > Early designs for desalination plants... have an energy consumption of over 9 kWh per cubic meter. > Many early SWRO plants built in the 1970s and early 1980s had an energy consumption of over 6.0 kWh per cubic meter of potable water. But it doesn't go on to list the comparable performance of the newer post-1988 patent designs (except to say 98% efficient). Do you have any idea what in terms of kWh/m^3 that converts to?
- kragen 7y agohttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-desalination-era-is-here/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-... says Sorek produces drinking water at US$0.58/kℓ by reverse osmosis at 7.1 MPa. 7.1 MPa is by definition 7.1 MJ/m³, so 98% efficient at the mechanical level would be 7.2 MJ/m³. (As someone else pointed out, though, 98% is the efficiency of the pressure exchanger, not the whole electro/mechanical/hydraulic system.) 6 kWh is 22 MJ, and 9 kWh is 32 MJ. US$0.58 is the cost of about 52 MJ, but that includes things like the cost of building the plant and defouling it.
- mdorazio 7y agoFrom some published numbers, current average for a modern plant seems to be about 3.5 kWh / m^3
- pfdietz 7y agoThe pressure exchanger is 98% efficient, but that doesn't mean the entire RO unit is that efficient. The pressure exchanger recovers the ~60% of energy that comes out in the brine stream; the other 40% is necessarily lost in fighting osmotic pressure across the membrane.
- teej 7y agoIf you liked this article I would recommend “How To Invent Everything” by Ryan North. The book is effectively a time travelers guide to reinventing technology.
- The_Fox 7y agoThis book actually does try to answer questions like "what's necessary to invent the bicycle?" According to the book, bikes depend on 2 major branches: Bikes -> Spinning wheels -> Natural fibers -> Farming and Bikes -> Steel -> Kilns/Smelters/Forges (this has quite a lot of decendents) -> Mining -> Farming Very interesting book.
- pippy 7y agoAll inventions have prerequisites that people don't think about. The steam engine is the first invention people think about if they were time travel, scribble something on a bit of paper and become rich. You'll need several boring things that need to happen for you to make a working steam engine. You'll need the materials. A lot of strong, cheap steel. Preheated blast furnaces weren't invented until the early 1800's. Thomas Savery had the idea for the steam engine almost a hundred years before the Watt, but Savery's engines kept blowing up because the lack of strong steel. You'll also need to overcome trade barriers too. You'll also need cheap coal (ironically requiring steam engines to become cost effective) and high quality iron ore (ideally from Sweden). Through out most of history, empires hated trading as it could create vulnerabilities. There's also the market prerequisites, no one wants your expensive steam engine if a donkey pulling a wheel is cheaper and more reliable.
- NikolaeVarius 7y agohttp://www.thetoasterproject.org/ http://www.thetoasterproject.org/
- obastani 7y agoI think the market prerequisites are a key point overlooked by the article. There has to be some application where a low-performing version of the invention is already useful for it to be worth it to develop better-performing ones. For example, in the case of Watt's steam engine, versions were already used for the application of pumping water out of mines [1]. This application made it economically worthwhile for Watt to work on his improved steam engine. Of course, once the improved version was available, it found many new applications beyond the original one. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watt_steam_engine
- hammock 7y agoThe usefulness of a skunkworks-type operation is that you can fund R&D that has no market need, thus unnaturally accelerating the progress of technological innovation.
- zahreeley 7y agoWhy weren’t you born 200 years ago?
- hyko 7y agoColossus predates ENIAC https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
- jasoneckert 7y agoI misinterpreted "X" as meaning "X windows" Good article, but I still wish it was about X windows...definitely a buzzkill.
- Razengan 7y agoSometimes thinking of an idea is the hardest step after all. How many of us have just sat there how many times, with all the tools we could need at our disposal, but not sure of what to do with them?
- Zenst 7y agoIn 1979 when I was at school in a maths class the teacher (for some reason) was talking about graphine and how it would be a game changer when invented and I said - why don't you get a bit of pencil lead and put between two bits of cellotape, rinse repeat until you got a thin layer. I was lambasted and ridiculed by the teacher. THAT is another reason why it takes so long to invent X. People who shouldn't, quickly dismiss and idiot label anything outside the box of thinking. Still irks me, even today how I was not strong enough to stand my ground (probably been put in detention for answering back) and how I accepted that I was wrong.
- hu3 7y agoHappened to me as well. It hurts that I couldn't stand my ground while my ideas was being ridiculed by a college teacher in front of my colleagues. I know exactly how you feel. That day I learned the important lesson of not trusting "authorities" blindly.
- 6510 7y agoYes, that is where you start questioning everything. If you never run into that situation and follow instructions to the letter the system will reward you to such extend that you cant imagine anything wrong with it. You will forever think you can have a negative number of baskets with a negative number of apples in each and by those means create as many apples as you like without involving trees in the process. Like Jesus.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoJesus worked on a bit higher level of mathematics. He literally Banach–Tarskied the bread.
- Zenst 7y agoI had to look that one up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banach%E2%80%93Tarski_paradox Which made for a nice chuckle and once I'd explained it to myself.
- alkibiades 7y agowhy did the suitcase with wheels take until 1970s
- thadk 7y agoThe ENIAC credit seems to be further complicated by the tube based code-breakers that came out 3-4 years before on a top-secret basis, only in the last few decades documented publicly: https://daytoncodebreakers.org/brief/one_sheet/ https://daytoncodebreakers.org/brief/one_sheet/ and https://daytoncodebreakers.org/more/sitemap/ https://daytoncodebreakers.org/more/sitemap/
- mncharity 7y agoI was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday. Long sigh. "Why did it take so long to..."? Regrettably not. "How very long will it eventually take to...", write an intro Astronomy textbook, that doesn't bungle the color of the Sun? I still don't know of a single one. With true-color in a leading image, and in illustrations. With no misconceptions about yellow stars, or scattering to yellow, or blackbody color, or color perception. With explicit mention of stellar classification color's non-perceptual white-point of blue Vega. With correctness from clarity, not from ambiguity and omissions. Such a text could have been written any time in the last few decades. People have been suggesting it. So how many more decades will we wait? It's a mistake to confuse systemic communication, coordination, and incentive dysfunction, with "people don't care" (as the interventions needed are different)... but they do superficially look so similar. Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content. I'm currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. "Atoms are little balls"; interactive accurate simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on youtube. So to achieve a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing", would require a lot of mucking about, asking after images, educating about copyright... sigh. At least accurate electron simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran. And yet, for how long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content? One more year? 5? 10? 25? More? As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet". Most of it caused by "who's going to pay for it? I can't afford to do it on my own". And, sadly, the need to make money at every step of the way is what causes a lot of these problems. You wouldn't have to educate anyone about copyrights when dealing with pictures of atoms if there weren't a couple layers of rent-seekers in between you and the photographer. > a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing" One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do yet is a kind of "continuity of zoom" image from everyday scale to nanoscale. Imagine a video (or better yet, a frame with a slider you can drag back and forth yourself) depicting an object - say, a metal sheet, or a fly's wing, or something - that starts in 1:1 scale, and then the zoom level gradually increases, going through overlapped perspectives of camera, optical microscope, ... [whatever they use in the middle] ... up to a scanning microscope, so you can watch as the image is being zoomed all the way to the atomic level. With no jump cuts in between. Would do wonders for people's sense of scale and understanding of what the world is made of.
- ggggtez 7y ago>Wheeled Luggage I think that one is pretty obvious. You need to be a traveler going somewhere you need to bring luggage to... but it has to be somewhere you can't just have someone help you or use a dolly (e.g. taxi or hotel) but also needs to have smooth surface for the wheels (roads/sidewalks/flooring...), and it has to be a traveler who can't just afford to hire a servant/car/cart/horse to transport those goods. Prior to train stations, is there any reasonable place a traveler could want to go that would even cause the necessary demand for wheeled luggage?
- Mvandenbergh 7y agoProbably not but wheeled luggage was invented almost two centuries after the railway!
- bluGill 7y agoThe railroad provided wheels. Every station had a large cart. Unload your trunk from the carriage to cart, then push the cart up to the train, then load onto the train where it was stacked. Nobody had to personally handle their luggage much, and they also typically carried a larger volume of stuff. As such built in wheels wouldn't have been desired for rail road travel as there already was wheels available when you needed them.
- z3t4 7y agoThe article was on to something, that something only becomes viable when its stronger or faster then a human. Because human labor has always been cheap. I'm sure engines and other things existed before, but they where only available for kings, or smart people with free time (money). What have been the single most important factor for our recent technology explosion is that human labor has become more expensive because of opportunity cost. People will not join the army if they can get better paid doing something else. So it's also solves wars and crisis. But it can only be achieved politically. If you where a king, there wouldn't really be any incentive to make other peoples life better, as you then would have to pay more for services, and the people might overthrow you if they think they can fare well on their own.
- mariushn 7y agoWhat software do you think could help speed up discoveries/inventions? Ideally, something which doesn't require immense computing (like materials simulator).
- 6510 7y agoIll pester you with a riddle I came up with the other day. I'm calling it the apples and oranges problem. If we could answer it it would increase progress a thousand fold: The question is: How do you compare unrelated features? To put silly: What is more important, a led on your coffee machine or gears on your bicycle and by what margin? How much is CPU speed worth vs memory vs screen resolution vs battery life? We could make a chart for each for what it costs, we could make a chart for the technical advantage or disadvantage, we could make a chart for consumer demand. I'm probably forgetting 10 things here.... Now imagine each of those to be dynamic(!) If the CPU does zero cycles per second it will render the entire computer useless. If it is 0.8 Ghz and the goal is [say] web browsing it is almost as worthless as the 0 Ghz. In a few years 1.5 wont be enough either. The infinitely large memory costs an infinitely large amount of money. If we could resolve this puzzle we could make giant leaps forwards. Until we do grandma will have to pick her phone on gut feeling and the market will just have to anticipate that.
- nradov 7y agoThere is a whole niche industry of case-based reasoning (CBR) tools which do exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case-based_reasoning (CBR does have applications beyond just invention.)
- LeonB 7y agoPerhaps economics/accounting ideas would be able to be invented sooner, as they have less reliance on physical materials/supply chains etc. Here's my 3 favorite candidates: - insurance based on statistics - double entry book-keeping - credit cards How early could they have been invented? (How early were they invented in primitive forms?)
- MperorM 7y agoThat's a really interesting observation. My knowledge on the history of finance is woefully inadequate, but stocks seem to be another concept that was popularized very late.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoIn case you were curious why it took till 3500 BC to invent the wheel: https://www.livescience.com/18808-invention-wheel.html https://www.livescience.com/18808-invention-wheel.html
- notahacker 7y agoThe 'why didn't the Incas, who were brilliant engineers eminently capable of mastering the axle, invent the wheel' is a fun question too. But one easily answered by looking at how little of their territory is flat enough for a wheel to be useful.
- dmurray 7y agoPlenty of people use cars, buses and railways in Peru today. The wheel is definitely useful in that territory, it just wasn't advantageous enough to over existing tech, so it needed to wait until complementary technologies had been invented in other cultures.
- notahacker 7y agoMade a lot more sense to start cutting and maintaining gently graded roads through the Andes for civilisations who started millennia earlier with the premise that horses/oxen were available and good at pulling stuff and once you got through the mountains everything would be nice and flat. Iron helped a lot too, of course. The wheel still isn't particularly useful in reaching a number of Inca sites even given dynamite and the internal combustion engine. It wasn't that Incas were averse to the concept of roads so much as they didn't see why roads shouldn't have stairs. Llamas are good at climbing steps and terrible at pulling carts...
- jmmcd 7y agoI think the point about an "obvious" demand for a product is important, but what is obvious changes over time. After the industrial revolution it was obvious that certain improvements could make a lot of money in industry, but that was not obvious eg to the inventors of the Roman steam engine.
- random_upvoter 7y agoMy favorite example is the Edison phonograph. I see no reason why someone like Newton could not have invented this. We could have have recordings of Mozart and Beethoven playing the piano.
- emilecantin 7y agoIt's also amazing to me how quantitative, evolutionary advances to some technologies that might seem futile or superficial enable some qualitative technology leaps. For example, miniaturization of computers seemed pretty futile to me in the 90s. Indeed, why would I care if that big box becomes slightly smaller? That miniaturization is basically what enabled the whole smartphone industry. The large-scale availability of small and powerful chips in turn enabled the drone / quadcopter to become feasible (a quadcopter is too unstable to fly on its own, and there's no real way to stabilize it mechanically like we do on RC helicopters; it has to be stabilized electronically). I think the best inventions come from recognizing the kind of qualitative leaps you can do from evolutionary advances to existing technologies.
- Robotbeat 7y agoOr rechargable batteries. Even lithium ion batteries weren't better than state of the art NiMH batteries when they first came out in the 1990s. Evolutionary improvement let us develop quadcopters, e-bikes, e-scooters, electric cars, smartphones, e-cigarettes, tablets, and countless other devices that simply weren't that practical 3 decades ago. And this process continues.
- mmhsieh 7y agothe author sets out on a very difficult exercise, made more so if he does not include the other inventive civilizations. documenting china's inventions, for instance, required more than a lifetime of work by Needham; volumes continued to come out even decades after his death around 1990; some dozens of densely worded volumes comprise his masterwork and it is still thought to be far from complete. some of what the British patent office was approving in the 1800s were already in their modern form in china at the time of Christ. such examples are many, and I expect similarly so for India, the Arabs, the Persians, the Mayans, the Incas, etc.