Things that could have been invented earlier

[Chuma]

When creating alternative histories, it's pretty handy to come up with some alternate technological advances. So I'm simply wondering: What are some things that could have been invented earlier in history? It can be simple devices, or entire fields of technology or science.

I can think of a couple of things:
- The pot-in-pot refrigerator, invented in the 1990s (altho Wiki claims it was known to the ancient Egyptians)
- The compound bow, invented in the 1960s
- The wheel-shaped water container
- Fertility awareness (either to avoid pregnancy or to increase the chances)
- Medical hygiene
- Steam power, I guess, since the Greeks did play around with it
- Crop rotation
- Babbage's computer
- Hypnosis
- Folding knives

[con quesa]

- The pot-in-pot refrigerator, invented in the 1990s (altho Wiki claims it was known to the ancient Egyptians)

The ancient Persians had a variety of different methods for natural refrigeration (ex. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabestan). I don't think that a portable food-cooling refrigerator would be likely to be invented before the discovery of germ theory, though.

- Babbage's computer

It seems like Babbage's computers could've been with victorian-era technology if he'd had the political and financial backing to get it done. I'm not sure how much before then it could've been made, though.


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. Semaphor telegraphy had the bad luck to be invented not that much before electric telegraphy was, but it'd be cool to see a scenario where telegraphy has been in existence for centuries.

[Anguipes]

- Fertility awareness (either to avoid pregnancy or to increase the chances)

Fertility awareness, especially based on the menstrual cycle, has been around for millenia.

[CaesarVincens]

Electricity. The wherever batteries show some evidence of its knowledge among the ancients.

[Neek]

Here's a few things to consider:
1). Modern technology is developed in think-tanks. While independent breakthroughs can be and are still possible, developing, say, transparent LCDs or smaller processors to build more powerful hand-held devices, is still in the hands of corporate-funded think-tanks. Nuclear technology was not a garage invention.

2). Technology in history demands a massive amount of coincidences, horizontal cross-field adaptations, cultural outlook, understanding of application, and genius.

Case study, the Baghdad Battery. The makers of those made no postulations about electricity, no more than the Egyptians postulated pi into the pyramids. The idea of, say, providing some sort of power would be ridiculous--"Oh yeah, we invented electricity, but we don't have anything to power."

It took over 300 years to get from the understanding of electricity and magnets to developing some sort of useful way. There's a whole story in there, but no one at that point were at all using the "ancient model of batteries" to figure it out.

Another example to bring up is the mechanical clock--water clock, pendulum, and the spring-loaded all rely on the same physical concept of potential energy stored up, then released slowly. To get a pocket watch with a spring, you'd have to wait until metals could be heated evenly (which required someone noting glass-making, and applying that to metallurgy), and the invention of a machine that that threads screws perfectly, amongst other little things. All these little things, though, gave way into the modern world.

3). Attempting to justify that people in the past had access to great technology, but possessed religious or cultural apprehensions, or their development was cut short because of calamity, is sophomore. It really is. Technology did not innovate in the past because the exact people who were handling it were human and were surely of their time.

We look at history with the 20/20 correcting hindsight lenses. When working on your world, you have to determine a probable cause of events. Just because electricity can be stored in clay jars filled with electrolytes does not mean they went about it possessing electromagnetic theories. Nor did they, as a result, invent the light bulb because they needed to put this to work.

The simpler the invention, and the simpler the concept, can conceivably be invented in times long before possible, and become building blocks for larger pieces of technology as the future goes along.

[Torco]

See that's the difference between real history and "Discovery in School".A lot of stuff doesn't get invented once in one place and then radiates outward or whatever. It's way more complicated than that. 4700 years ago people in what's now India were making clay pipes with asphalt as isolation. The minoans had plumbing more than 4000 years ago, then people forgot about pipes. The Chinese and the Persians used plumbing as well. Then the romans got the idea again -probably on their own- and they got some plumbing going on. Then the romans got fucked by goths and lombards and so on, and plumbing evolved into open cesspools and stuff like that. Until recently when industrialization and modern mining allowed for even poor countries to build pipes and get the shit out of their bathrooms.

so it isn't a matter of "X was invented at Y time". Plumbing, and a lot of other things, are more a matter of public policy and less a matter of "invention". The steam engine was discovered, but it wasn't practical to develop it, there wasn't an economic need for expensive machines that generated a lot of force, so no one bothered.

BTW the Q drum is just awesome.

---------------
Anyway, on to the OP, this means that it's pretty complicated to come up with "alternate tech developments". After all, the thing isn't like in CIV3, where you just POOF come up with the wheel or whatever. Hand a wheel to a bunch of nenderthals, or a tribe of huns, and they're going to use it for firewood. Similarly, the Q drum can't be invented until there's some material that's easily available which can be used to build it: clay would break under those stresses, after all. How do you build a Q drum with iron age technology?

and dude... the composite bow was invented by the huns a long time ago.

[Morrígan]

Why the hell is hypnosis on that list???

Also, folding knives are fairly old, though how old I'm not sure. I think there was some kind of folding- or possible gravity-knife in mediaeval India.

[Salmoneus]

I don't think hypnosis could have been discovered earlier, because I think it was created, not discovered. Hypnosis seems to be a culture-dependent syndrome. Forms of what we retroactively call 'hypnosis' were discovered many times and in many places, but they differed in many of the particulars of how they 'felt' to the participants, and of what these states could accomplish. The effects produced by Mesmer were entirely different from those produced by Charcot, just as Charcot's phenomena, extensively tested and codified, don't match the phenomena of modern hypnosis. My view is that all of these are merely ordinary altered states of consciousness, with the exact behaviours and experiences of those states being shaped by cultural expectations.

And many vaguely 'hypnotic' states of consciousness have been known about since forever in the various meditative and narcotic practices of world religions (often seemingly 'narcotic' effects are actually culture-dependent).

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Babbage's computers weren't inventions. They were developments. He didn't just invent the computer overnight. Concepts of computing had gradually been developing for centuries before him. And they required an awful lot of abstract thinking, requiring formal mathematical notation, algebraic manipulation, and rudimentary formal logic.

[abeygail]

When I work on contech for TLawasi (Sa'u'o Planet), I only do what was invented during similar periods of technology (Medieval (possibly earlier) Talking drums were in early form of telegraphy that West Africans and New Guineans used, so I have talking marimbas in my medieval conworld) or if something is simpler than an invention made earlier (paper before Iron on 1 continent because more heat is required for iron than paper, as well as the fact that Ancient Egyptians, Polynesians and Classic Maya used Papyrus, Tapa and Amatl, so it seems a shorter stretch to make paper than iron in some ways).
I do think that culture is crucial to the development of societies, but I think it is often used as a cop-out; take the Zhenge He Example: Student in History class asks: "Why didn't the Chinese colonize the new world (let us leave aside the question of whether or not they got there) when they had such great tech?" Professor's Response: "They were conservative and their centralized government was backward". This is the answer that I accepted and that my teachers gave me until I started to realize there is a much more rational explanation: the Chinese simply did have all they needed. Their Empire was Huge and rich; what could they get from anyone else? Of course, their were internal conflicts at the time but in reality they simply had different goals than the Occident a few decades latter.
But more to the point: the issue with "Why did the X not develop Y" question is often very useful in understanding culture and human nature but I think it should be used carefully, as it assumes that the culture being discussed has the same goals as one's own culture: for example, I read a book-Chinese Perspectives in Rhetoric and Communication- (Edited by D.R. Heisey)- wherein a [modern] Chinese scholar stated that the Occident values freedom

More: show

while the Chinese value Peace

More: show

. S/he explained the cultural reasons for this and its effects on the development of China.

[Soap]

Allegedly the pre-electric Persian refrigerators were so good that they could even use them to store ice throughout the summer:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhchal

[benadam]

Semaphor telegraphy had the bad luck to be invented not that much before electric telegraphy was, but it'd be cool to see a scenario where telegraphy has been in existence for centuries.

Terry Pratchett does this in his later Discworld novels (an especially big deal of it is made in "Going Postal"). He kind of uses it as a vehicle to take the piss out of the internet, and is not serious at all, but it's very well imagined and thought-out.

[Přemysl]

and dude... the composite bow was invented by the huns a long time ago.

Not to nitpick but to point out a simple mistake, mentioned above was the compound bow not the composite. One was pullies and the other is laminated. I mess those up in conversation all the time even knowing better.

[zompist]

Often, the more you look into an invention, the more it depends on other things. Steam power is an example-- it wasn't one discovery, it was a centuries-long process of incremental improvement. The ancients had steam toys, but they didn't have good enough iron and steel to make large-scale boilers.

Some things could have come earlier by accident, without theoretical understanding. E.g. the Romans loved their baths; I'm curious if that improved public health, in the absence of germ theory.

[Torco]

and dude... the composite bow was invented by the huns a long time ago.

Not to nitpick but to point out a simple mistake, mentioned above was the compound bow not the composite. One was pullies and the other is laminated. I mess those up in conversation all the time even knowing better.

Oh, okay, thanks for the correction

Anyway, what's the point of the pulley bow anyway? if you're going to mechanize it and make it store loads of energy, better to just make it into a crossbow [invented in China quite a while ago] or a ballista-like thing [like the romans used] right?

@zomp: it must have... being clean makes you have less germs even if you don't know what a germ is, right?

[con quesa]

Semaphor telegraphy had the bad luck to be invented not that much before electric telegraphy was, but it'd be cool to see a scenario where telegraphy has been in existence for centuries.

Terry Pratchett does this in his later Discworld novels (an especially big deal of it is made in "Going Postal"). He kind of uses it as a vehicle to take the piss out of the internet, and is not serious at all, but it's very well imagined and thought-out.

Going Postal is actually one of my favorite Discworld novels precisely because he is obviously taking the piss out of the internet with the Clacks. I mean, Smoking GNU? That's just blatant I unfortunately haven't read as much Discworld as I should so I don't know how Pratchett's developed the Clacks in the other novels.

Still, precisely because Pratchett isn't remotely trying to be serious, I'm not sure Discworld is necessarily a great model for trying to figure out how a premodern agricultural state - something, like I said, akin to the Roman or Han Dynasty Chinese empires - might create a semaphor telegraph system. This is actually something I'm interested in for my own conworld, so I'm trying to think of reasons why it took until Napoleonic France, i.e. not that many decades before the development of electric telegraphy, to get such a system up and running.

[Åge Kruger]

This is actually something I'm interested in for my own conworld, so I'm trying to think of reasons why it took until Napoleonic France, i.e. not that many decades before the development of electric telegraphy, to get such a system up and running.

There has been semaphore systems before the invention of flagged semaphore. The best-known are probably smoke signals and beacons. Beacons were lit in a semaphore line, allowing messages to travel over long distances. Since beacons are binary (i.e., lit or unlit), the beacons could only send a single message, usually one of impending invasion. Smoke signals, on the other hand, can convey a variety of pre-determined messages by changing the colour of the smoke, or through other means.

Something more akin to flagged semaphore was invented by Polybius (of the Polybius Square fame). He suggested using two torches for sending encoded letters by sight. It didn't catch on. Probably because of a combination of the lack of requirement (they had plenty of trained runners), and the lack of an populace educated well enough to be able to read and write. There may also have been a lack of messages to convey (I'm just speculating, but perhaps wars weren't as large scale, or didn't require the control of two armies in two locations at the same time, or some other factor)

[Qwynegold]

- The compound bow, invented in the 1960s

Oh huh, first I was like "Wut??", but then I realized it's not the same thing as a composite bow. EDIT: Oh, it has already been covered.

About refrigerators. I heard that in the old times in Finland, people would dig a deep hole in the ground and put ice in the bottom, and it would keep cool over the whole summer. Though I don't know how effective it was, and it would obviously not work in hotter climates.

[Chuma]

Maybe some of my ideas aren't great examples. I just tried to write down whatever came to mind.

As has been pointed out, there are a lot of things that are invented more than once. That's kind of the same thing - things that could have been invented earlier, and actually were. Eh, I mean... they could still be useful as alternative-history ideas, since history could have been different if the inventions had not been forgotten.

Anyway, what's the point of the pulley bow anyway?

I think the crossbow takes ages to load, for one thing. 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.

Apparently some people have used "compound bow" to describe what is otherwise known as "composite bow", before the pulley kind was invented, so the confusion is understandable.

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.

[fiziwig]

I can't think of any reason why the Roman soldiers couldn't have used para-wing hang gliders. It's not that much different from a simple kite, an it would have scared the ever loving crap out of the barbarians!

[Salmoneus]

What system could produce more and better archers than the system of Western Europe? 1492 was only 77 years after Agincourt.

[It's possible that standing armies being introduced into Europe earlier could have maintained bowmen corps into the nineteenth century - Wellington lamented their absence in the Napoleonic wars. But they would by then only have been an elite corps, and probably not worth the money]

[Travis B.]

What system could produce more and better archers than the system of Western Europe? 1492 was only 77 years after Agincourt.

Mind you that, at Agincourt, it is strongly suspected that the real thing that did in the French was not the English and Welsh's arrows (a lot of the longbowmen were actually Welsh rather than English) but rather that the field had essentially turned into mud which the heavily armored French got stuck in on foot (and which many of them drowned in) after the longbowmen, who did not have the heavy armor that the French had, had killed their horses and they had dismounted and that the longbowmen, being commoners, did not bother to try to capture and ransom the French men-at-arms but simply slaughtered them in the mud with daggers, hammers, and the like.

(Note that the French by this time were largely using steel armor, which the iron-tipped arrows had a very hard time penetrating - steel at the time was, of course, extremely expensive, to the point that you would not generally use it for making arrowheads.)

(Also note that it is also strongly suspected that there were too many French on the field that day, for the overall shape of the field where it occurred, which was rather thin, and the French actually obstructed their own movement on the field as a result, especially when they started getting stuck in the mud.)

[brandrinn]

What about all that stuff that hasn't been invented yet, but could totally be here by now?

[Torco]

What about all that stuff that hasn't been invented yet, but could totally be here by now?

... Like ?

[brandrinn]

What about all that stuff that hasn't been invented yet, but could totally be here by now?

... Like ?

How should I know?

[dhok]

What system could produce more and better archers than the system of Western Europe? 1492 was only 77 years after Agincourt.

[It's possible that standing armies being introduced into Europe earlier could have maintained bowmen corps into the nineteenth century - Wellington lamented their absence in the Napoleonic wars. But they would by then only have been an elite corps, and probably not worth the money]

You know, I have read that although Kevlar is pretty good at keeping bullets away, it's no match for a well-shot arrow. But I don't know if anybody's capitalized on this yet...