Technology POD's
- Thread starter AllActionMan
- Start date
personally, i'm trying to work out how a different progression of photographic technology could affect a TL. the POD is that Antoine Lavoisier is not executed during the French Revolution. one of the unintended side effects of this, i learned, is that smokeless powder would be discovered sooner
I tried opening a thread on the subject of what if Henry Cavendish's work had been published before he died but nobody has posted on it.
Obvious ones:
What if no/later/earlier Printing Press?
"gunpowder
"steam engine
"iron-working
"paper
"stirrup
"etc..
Less Obvious:
What if no/earlier/later Indian Numerals?
"Algebra
"Newtonian Physics/Calculus
"glass lenses
"sewer systems
What if no/later/earlier Printing Press?
"gunpowder
"steam engine
"iron-working
"paper
"stirrup
"etc..
Less Obvious:
What if no/earlier/later Indian Numerals?
"Algebra
"Newtonian Physics/Calculus
"glass lenses
"sewer systems
Might I suggest a quick perusal of James Burke's Connections series? (the original one, from the 70s) You can find pretty much all of it on youtube fairly easily.
Steel pen nibs. Seriously. Victorian Britain (and Europe/America a bit later than Britain ) developed a vast appetite for writing stuff . In long hand. With (initially), feathers. The combined sigh of relief when someone brought out steel pen nibs to replace the feathers was probably bowled over coconut palms in the Southern Seas.
And, even better, typewriting machines.
And, even better, typewriting machines.
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Wheelbarrows make the disintegration of the Roman road infrastructure less traumatic. Hey, it worked in China.
First steam engine being blade turbine design instead of piston. Seems more obvious, wind mills and water wheels were all turbines.
Scientific plant breeding. Gregor Mendel's work remained undiscovered for some fifty years. What if it got attention in 1866 instead of 1920s? For that matter, this was a breakthrough entirely possible centuries earlier.
Lithography instead of movable type printing, actually works better for non-alphabet languages like Chinese.
Optical telegraph, should be pretty obvious once you have telescopes.
Canning, food preservation by heating a sealed bottle, you'd think it would've been invented since antiquity.
Kerosene distillation. The Persian scholar Razi wrote about distilling kerosene from crude oil in the 9th century. Yet a thousand years later we're stilling killing whales for lamp oil.
Scientific plant breeding. Gregor Mendel's work remained undiscovered for some fifty years. What if it got attention in 1866 instead of 1920s? For that matter, this was a breakthrough entirely possible centuries earlier.
Lithography instead of movable type printing, actually works better for non-alphabet languages like Chinese.
Optical telegraph, should be pretty obvious once you have telescopes.
Canning, food preservation by heating a sealed bottle, you'd think it would've been invented since antiquity.
Kerosene distillation. The Persian scholar Razi wrote about distilling kerosene from crude oil in the 9th century. Yet a thousand years later we're stilling killing whales for lamp oil.
Its not clear that the Greeks and Romans did not have wheelbarrows. There are literary references to what may have been wheelbarrows.
Both were, by the time steam power was being adopted, used for reciprocal motion just like pistons were.
Because it was cheaper at the time.