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Generally, a technology has to have a commercial market that scales in order to be pursued, much less to be widely and cheaply available. It's often the case t
by GlenTheMachine 3y ago
Generally, a technology has to have a commercial market that scales in order to be pursued, much less to be widely and cheaply available.
It's often the case that a number of technologies have to converge to make a compelling product, and then all of them become commercially available at basically the same time. Firearms, for instance, required both the ability to cast strong, straight metal barrels and the ability to produce gunpowder. Prior to around 1600, these technologies existed but nobody was really pursuing them very hard because either one, by itself, isn’t that useful. Put them together and suddenly the world changes.
- Qwertious 3y agoTo extend your example: Rifling pre-dates muskets, despite most muskets being smoothbore. This is because muzzle-loaders are slower to load if they're rifled (the point of the rifling is to grip the bullet and force it to spin, but that grip applies just as hard when you're ramming the bullet into its firing position), so you were paying more for a substantially lower rate-of-fire and the rifling was harder to clean, more prone to failure etc. Once breachloaders became common, rifling also became common.
- pjc50 3y agoThis is very important. We see a lot of "new battery" or "new green tech" papers here. Very few of them make it to market, because the thousands of details that make up the non-lab manufacturing process are very important. There's a big gap between "works in lab" and a product everyone can buy.