Things that could have been invented earlier

[Pthagnar]

There are all sorts of things that I have no idea how they first came up with. Such as the aforementioned gunpowder.
"Hey, let's try mixing sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate! Oh look, it burns rapidly - let's put it in a cylindrical container and use it to propel various objects at people we don't like!"
I sure wouldn't have thought of that.

I think that like most useful bits of alchemy, it was more or less accidentally discovered to have uses other than whatever the alchemists involved were looking for -- this being China, probably an immortality elixir. The methods for making these amounted to a way to try mixing everything with everything else and seeing what happened.

fun chinalchemy fact: one popular method for alchemical longevity was to develop (somehow) the ability to drink mercury through ones penis

[TaylorS]

The movable-type printing press. It's amazing that nobody thought of it before the Koreans did only 1000 years ago.

Oh, and that makes me think of another one, PAPER!

[Torco]

Oh, and that makes me think of another one, PAPER!

What do you want paper for? there's papyrus, leather, palm leaves, and besides, it's not like anyone knows more than two dozen people who can actually read, let alone write!

[Pthagnar]

cheap paper is only worthwhile for cheap books (i.e. post-printing)

[zompist]

I'm skeptical about the effect of the loss of the library of Alexandria. Certainly the loss to literature and philosophy was immense. But it's not like Hellenistic learning was limited to Alexandria, and anything that only existed there was ipso facto a dead end in classical learning.

Much of library was lost in the time of Caesar, thus, half a millennium before the fall of Rome. This doesn't really fit with a story of people falling into ignorance.

Basically, if the information was so all-fired powerful, why didn't it spark an industrial revolution in the Roman Empire? The surer bet is that the information that was lost was pretty much like what wasn't lost. It would deepen our knowledge of the ancient world but it's not esoteric world-changing stuff.

[Zhen Lin]

I think the effect would have been massive. Sure, there'd still have been a dark age... but coming out of it would have been so much easier. In our timeline, Newton and Leibniz both independently struggled to create calculus - wouldn't things have happened quicker if they'd had access to the manuscripts where Archimedes did it already, which in our timeline were only rediscovered as palimpsests much later? Or would it have held us back - if we'd had Greek-style geometrical calculus all along, would we have developed algebra and formal notation as quickly as we did?

The mechanical method of Archimedes is certainly interesting. He very nearly had the concept of the equation, which is one of the cornerstones of algebra. However, I think it might have hindered things. For a long time mathematicians were stuck trying to even understand the work of the ancients, and even now there is still some fascination with the classical methodology. Newton, for instance, invented calculus... but when it came to writing the Principia, he proved everything using, yes, Euclidean geometry. He felt it to be more sure and certain than the newfangled calculus he had invented himself.

But on the other hand, the mechanical method isn't calculus. It's not even halfway there. At best it has the basic notions of integral calculus - but Newton's calculus included differential calculus and even differential equations.

[Radius Solis]

Another thing to think about is technologies that were invented long ago but which did not come to broad usage until much later. Reasons for this are generally the same as already discussed - people simply not seeing the possibility or benefit of an application, or lacking other technology required for useful implementation. One example is the waterscrew; we've had it for 2300 years, and the Greeks and Romans made at least some use of it for irrigation, but then it largely went away again - only to reappear when the Dutch started needing to drain polders, this time powered by windmills. And of course today we have all sorts of things - grain elevators, borers and augurs, screws, all based on the same core invention. In principle we could have had much of that two thousand years ago, if only we'd both had the means to implement them and seen the potential. (In praise to the waterscrew: even now we have nothing better for many of its applications. The Netherlands continues to rely on them, now electrically powered mostly, but if all the world's waterscrews suddenly stopped turning about 2/3 of that country would revert to peat bog in weeks.) All this, from Archimedes having developed an interesting variation on the inclined plane. But it took a couple millennia before it really took off.


Touching on Brandrinn's question: there is probably all kinds of technology we don't have but could, that we don't actually need because we have other solutions. For instance we have elevators already, which work by hanging from cables; so we don't need to invent a screw-based elevator for human transport. But we could have. Provided a sufficient power source were available everywhere we wanted to put one, and provided we'd tolerate the squeals and groans, it could have worked adequately. There are surely hundreds of other such inventions we haven't made because we don't need them, but could have been what we came up with first if things had worked out differently. This, I think, should be a primary avenue of investigation in con-technology.


And on that thought:
In the Akana conworld, I have considered the question of the technology of the iron-age Xshali people, and one thing I'd like to try doing is having them develop more applications of the screw earlier than we did. Given that a lot of necessary circumstances can be hand-waved past, I've worked out that it should be reasonably possible for them to use large waterscrews to lift river water into their elevated cities. Powered how? Waterwheels! The forward motion of the river can turn waterwheels that drive waterscrews that lift a small fraction of the river water up a hundred feet (probably in multiple steps) for general use in the city. Aside from building the thing and occasional maintenance, it would not require any labor - the mechanism would run all on its own. I envision a similar mechanism perhaps powering a cargo elevator or two, for getting heavy goods up and down between the city and the plain. This may seem a little fantastical, but the Romans had their aqueducts after all.

[the duke of nuke]

And the Arabs in Muhammad's time had norias, which are a more advanced version. It's just a different mechanism for the same machine...
Always good to hear more about Xshalad It sounds suitably exotic!

[Chuma]

I think your understanding of music is off?

I assume the frequencies are right, for whatever scale it was Pythagoras wanted to achieve. Those frequencies (4 6 8 9 12 16) would produce the right intervals, but I'm saying that those physical methods would not produce those frequencies. If you look at the strings, the velocity of the wave on a string is proportional to the square root of the tension; therefore the frequency is proportional to the square root of the attached mass. So if you want to achieve a certain set of frequencies, you would need to use masses that are proportional to the squares of the frequencies.

[Mashmakhan]

I really don't know why it took so long for someone to invent winged or lighter-than-air flight. The principles for both are fairly easy to grasp...OK maybe not the second one, but as Xonen pointed out, it had been done before. Couldn't gliding atleast have been invented earlier in history? All of those strange flying inventions in the early 19th century make me want to laugh and hit my head on a wall at the same time.

About the refridgerator invention, refridgeration has been around a long time. Basically - but only if you live in a place that has sub-zero temperatures during winter - all you need to do is dig a hole in the snow and leave whatever you want to freeze in there. You bury it to keep flies and scavengers away from the meat, not to actually freeze it. Meat can last a surprisingly long time this way without going bad.

One of my concultures, the Mókura, were using stone-age technology by the time they learned about elevators and sling (?) ballistics.

[Torco]

Lighter than air flight? I imagine the main obstacle would be making airproof such a big bunch of material. But yeah, it is viable for it to have been invented early.

And conservation methods are really old; jam, pickling, using honey and making sausage, amongst many others, are all ways to make food last longer that have been known for ages; the thing with refrigeration is that it doesn't require labor. you just stuff it in the fridge.

[Glenn]

Just reviving this thread for a moment:

In the Akana conworld, I have considered the question of the technology of the iron-age Xshali people, and one thing I'd like to try doing is having them develop more applications of the screw earlier than we did. Given that a lot of necessary circumstances can be hand-waved past, I've worked out that it should be reasonably possible for them to use large waterscrews to lift river water into their elevated cities. Powered how? Waterwheels! The forward motion of the river can turn waterwheels that drive waterscrews that lift a small fraction of the river water up a hundred feet (probably in multiple steps) for general use in the city. Aside from building the thing and occasional maintenance, it would not require any labor - the mechanism would run all on its own. I envision a similar mechanism perhaps powering a cargo elevator or two, for getting heavy goods up and down between the city and the plain. This may seem a little fantastical, but the Romans had their aqueducts after all.

While the discussion above raises several interesting points, I wanted to congratulate Radius for coming up with the idea above; in fact, I'm half-tempted to steal it. Two of my (pre-modern) concultures are intended to have fairly extensive systems for water supply and/or irrigation, and the capital for my focal con-country includes an Imperial Palace perched atop a cliff at the juncture of two rivers; I had been wondering about the best means of supplying water to the residents. (I previously had an idea for a more fantastical con-setting involving a city built into a giant multi-level bridge, connected by an array of lifts and stairs and ladders; a screw system like the one above would have been even more appropriate for that setting.)

At any rate, it reminded me that water supply systems are definitely an area that I could stand to research further; thanks!

p@ (a deep bow with a flourish),
Glenn

[Aldwinkle]

I feel like semaphor telegraphy could've been invented by the Chinese or Romans, anyone with a stable agricultural empire for some period of time and the need for complicated administration and the communication that entails.

I'm not sure about that. While the mechanics involved itself is pretty straightforward, and the encoding wasn't too complex maths (usually it was just two numbers per words, being the page and the line of a decoding manual), the actual transmission involved the use of telescope, to see the signals from quite a distance away (40 to 80 km if you had a fancy one, or around 25 km for cheaper ones). Without that bit, the towers would have to be quite close together, and may negate the benefit of fast communication - a tower was at least one man, usually two, and while most systems were fitted on existing structures, it was still quite an investment. And telescopes are quite fancy pieces of equipment for the roman or chinese empire. You need good glass (Galileo's telescope was pretty shitty because of this) and good glass polishing skills.

[Curan Roshac]

Speaking of something that might have been developed earlier: the paper cartridge. Forget loading powder and wadding by hand...

Or was the cartridge basically impossible to build with black powder because of the need for percussion caps?

Ready-made paper cartridges would have been awesome with an early breechloader such as the Ferguson Rifle. Such cartridges were sort-of known about by the 1830's (Sepoy Rebellion in British India), but chiefly to improve rate-of-fire for muzzleloading weapons (I do not recall them being around any earlier, but I would think that by the late 1700's they'd be in use). Load cartridge, prime pan, cock flint and fire.

[Izambri]

I really don't know why it took so long for someone to invent winged or lighter-than-air flight. The principles for both are fairly easy to grasp...OK maybe not the second one, but as Xonen pointed out, it had been done before. Couldn't gliding atleast have been invented earlier in history? All of those strange flying inventions in the early 19th century make me want to laugh and hit my head on a wall at the same time.

Well, we have Daedalus' wings. It's a myth, I know, but here we have an idea for a human-flying machine. I mean, the idea is as old as humankind, and I'm sure that in ancient times there were propitious moments to reach something valuable, even serious attempts at fligth, but they didn't go too far and we forgot them or that people thought it was a waste of time. It's in the XIX when technology and science (specially modern aerodynamics) allows to build a flying machine, although some basic principles were known by the times of Aristotle or da Vinci.

[Aidan]

I really don't know why it took so long for someone to invent winged or lighter-than-air flight. The principles for both are fairly easy to grasp...OK maybe not the second one,

Winged flight is actually a pretty difficult concept. Up until pretty recently (on the history scale) all investigation of winged flight focused on the power stroke, with no understanding of airfoil. And the bigger the flyer, the less important the power stroke is. At human body scales, airfoil is absolutely crucial, and pretty non-intuitive.

----

An interesting little thing that could have been invented earlier: the pencil. More or less, the pencil was invented when the only known large deposit of pure graphite was discovered. That could have been anytime at all.

The pencil technology that does not depend on pure graphite deposit (which was developed when England restricted export of pure graphite) depends solely on crushing up (graphite containing) rocks and mixing them with clay, also a readily developable technology far before 1795.

----

I tried to decide bicycles could be invented far earlier, but ultimately gave up on that. I concluded that you need either rubber(-ish) tires, or smooth paved roads for them to be very practical.

[schwhatever]

I've never actually used a compound bow, but I assume that they can be considered an improvement of the regular bow, and therefore something that would have been a very useful invention in the absence of gunpowder.

Even in the presence of gunpowder, it's arguably a disincentive for the development of a better gunpowder-based weapon since the compound bow is light years ahead of centuries-worth of adaptations. One of my history teachers last year had the theory that continual contact with Central Asian groups (like the Mongols) that relied on compound bow-using horse-back archers stunted development of firearms among Indians, Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Russians. Central and Western Europe slowly progressed into slightly more functional weapons than the flintlock because they had the slight advantage of isolation from the best bows around.

The thing which made me think of this subject was an alternative-history-conworld idea I had, where the Europeans discover America only to get their asses kicked by the superior military technology of the Americans. For that purpose, I needed something that was potentially superior to the firearms of the 1500s. As I've understood it, longbows were actually a more powerful weapon than guns up until perhaps as late as the 1800s - their disadvantage was that they required much more practice. A superior economy and a different political system could have allowed large numbers of trained archers, and with the help of hopefully even better bows, they could conceivably have won.

A superior economy and different political system that somehow survived a massive percentage of the population dying of smallpox? Europeans didn't win by the sword alone, there was also wheat, plague, and horses on their sides in the initial battles (and for quite some time afterward as well). The most successful Native American groups weren't the ones that adopted European political systems, but those that either were on land virtually no one wanted (the Andes, the Arctic) or very successfully incorporated European technologies (the Navajo became sheep-herders, various groups readily adopted the horse or guns, etc).

[Aidan]

One of my history teachers last year had the theory that continual contact with Central Asian groups (like the Mongols) that relied on compound bow-using horse-back archers stunted development of firearms among Indians, Chinese, Middle Easterners, and Russians. Central and Western Europe slowly progressed into slightly more functional weapons than the flintlock because they had the slight advantage of isolation from the best bows around.

Again, the Central Asian groups used composite bows, not compound bows. Composite bows were occasionally referred to as compound bows before the invention of the compound bow, but afterwards, we should try to keep our terms straight so we know what each other are talking about.

Composite Bows are at least 3500 years old, and are made of multiple materials laminated together, such as wood and horn.

Compound Bows are 45 years old, and use pulleys (or similar mechanics).

But it's a good point about something to think about the differential development of firearms.

A superior economy and different political system that somehow survived a massive percentage of the population dying of smallpox? Europeans didn't win by the sword alone, there was also wheat, plague, and horses on their sides in the initial battles

Depends on what the point of departure is in Chuma's alternate history. A superior economy and different political system imply the presence of several factors which could have developed their own home-bred epidemics like smallpox.

If that is the case, there's some advantage to the home team. The first European ships would have brought some diseases to the Americas and been exposed to the local diseases. Each group is decimated. The European ship crews likely don't have enough survivors to make it back to Europe. So the Americas are receiving a safer first exposure to European diseases than vice versa.

It could go other ways, too. But that's a pretty reasonable scenario, imo.

[schwhatever]

Dammit, I read the earlier discussion on that even, and was thankful that some one else had mixed them up (because I always did in the same class with the teacher who presented that theory). Oh well.

Yeah, there's a lot that could be said about any alt-history of the Columbian exchange, I just wanted to point out that a good section of the conflict was less about Spanish Imperialists attacking villagers than one empire (the Spanish) attacking two others (the Aztec and the Inca) and succeeding at destablizing both, in part because of communicable diseases that the Spanish introduced (which screwed up the entire accession system of the Inca Empire helping the Spanish quite a lot).