What Invention or Discovery Happened Oddly Late or Early?

[DaleCoz]

Inventions that could have come later: I'm guessing that sans World War II nuclear weapons and space-capable rockets would have been delayed a good ten to fifteen years.

Oops. I'm in pre-1900 land aren't I? Okay. Pre-1900. How about steam warships? Was the tech good enough for Napoleon to have gotten them? Steam ships, certainly, but I'm not sure if the tech was good enough for warships.

How about steam locomotives? It would be interesting if Napoleon ripped off Watt's steam engine and managed to get someone to improve it enough to start building a system of steam locomotives. He would have incentive to do that given Britain's naval dominance. Move at least some commerce away from the British dominated oceans. I'm not sure that steam engines were reliable/powerful enough early enough for that. Of course since this is alternate history we can presumable handwave any missing pieces of tech into existence 15 to 20 years early.

 

[Admiral Matt]

European/Greco-Roman cultural shifts towards acceptance of monotheism came about much sooner than Greco-Roman religious trends indicated.

Does that really count as a discovery?

The tank could have come about sooner. Da Vinci designed one, the only flaw being that he (purposefully?) designed the wheels to be moving in opposite directions.

You know, come to think of it, several things could have appeared much sooner if more of da Vinci's inventions had been produced.

That happens not to be the case. Da Vinci's tank, and most of Da Vinci's designs, could have been built but not practically used. There were paradigm shifts in materials and engine technology ahead before any version of them would be practical. He could have built the first attempted tank, perhaps, or one of the first failed attempt at manned flight helicopter.

Relativity would likely have been discovered a generation later without Einstein. Ferguson's breechloader was invented a century before they came into common use. Although it wasn't actually a hundred years ahead of its time, it was a long way ahead.

 

[The Kiat]

The hot air balloon.

It's reallly Neolithic technology. The fabric of the balloon itself is the most high-tech part of the machine, requiring either woven fabric and some sort of sealant or paper.

Fire + basket + rope + reasonably air-tight bag = manned flight.

Why did no one put one together before the Industrial Revolution?

I thought the Chinese had floating latterns, or at least latterns attatched to kites, centuries before the hot air balloon appear in Europe.

 

[Claudius]

The stirrup. The Medes, Persians, Greeks, Macedonians and Romans all fielded cavalry units in their armies, but none figured out how to fit a stirrup to their saddles. With that one very simple invention, (ca. 600 AD) The armored knight became possible and the whole structure of post-Roman society changed as a result. What prevented it being discovered and used back in the Bronze Age? Nothing that I can think of.

 

[cclittle]

Automobiels Are a Menace !

There was a lot of opposition to automobiels at first. Suposed cars were axcepted more slowley? Given up as too unpopular to sell ?

 

[Workable Goblin]

Relativity would likely have been discovered a generation later without Einstein.

That's not actually true, unless you're talking about *general* relativity (the version with gravity), which is famous for being a complete bolt out of the blue--really inspired theoretical work. *Special* relativity, OTOH, is famous (well, for physicists) for *almost* being discovered by quite a large number of physicists about the turn of the century--there's a reason it's the Lorenz Transform, not the Einstein Transform, after all. There would almost certainly have been someone else within a few years that would have figured it out.

 

[MRig]

Not sure - if they had figured out the principle and applied it to manned flight, the prestige and usefulness would very likely have dictated the fabric be made available. Ships need an awful lot of expensive canvas, too, and they got equipped.

I rather suspect it was a genuine case of not making the connection. There is no lighter-than-air flight to observe, most prescientific theories don't work with the idea of air as 'something', and even if you have one, filling a big, thin-skinned balloon with hot air to make it fly isn't exactly intuitive.

Good point about the ships. I guess what you need then is...science!

I have heard theories that the Nazca used hot air balloons, though I'm not sure how widely accepted said theory is.

I don't know, but I do know there are a looooooot of theories about what exactly those lines are for and how they made them. Some more reputable than others.

There was a lot of opposition to automobiels at first. Suposed cars were axcepted more slowley? Given up as too unpopular to sell ?

We touched on this in the culture without WWII thread. We figured that cars take off in the US the way they do largely because of the war--the war production stuff getting converted into automobile production and GIs coming home ready to buy the newly minted edition of the American Dream. Without WWII, expect a US that looks more like Europe on the transportation front. And, since 'Murrica exports itself to the world...

 

[Admiral Matt]

That's not actually true, unless you're talking about *general* relativity (the version with gravity), which is famous for being a complete bolt out of the blue--really inspired theoretical work. *Special* relativity, OTOH, is famous (well, for physicists) for *almost* being discovered by quite a large number of physicists about the turn of the century--there's a reason it's the Lorenz Transform, not the Einstein Transform, after all. There would almost certainly have been someone else within a few years that would have figured it out.

Yeah, I meant General Relativity. I mean, even I understand Special Relativity!

 

[Bottlestein]

That's not actually true, unless you're talking about *general* relativity (the version with gravity), which is famous for being a complete bolt out of the blue--really inspired theoretical work. *Special* relativity, OTOH, is famous (well, for physicists) for *almost* being discovered by quite a large number of physicists about the turn of the century--there's a reason it's the Lorenz Transform, not the Einstein Transform, after all. There would almost certainly have been someone else within a few years that would have figured it out.

I've heard this too. I was curious though, the math was quite advanced at that time - Levi-Civita did a lot of stuff by 1900's, Riemann and Lie were earlier. I assume Wilhelm Killing was also before 1910. Is it just the form of the Einstein field equations that's the "bolt from the blue"?

 

[Workable Goblin]

I've heard this too. I was curious though, the math was quite advanced at that time - Levi-Civita did a lot of stuff by 1900's, Riemann and Lie were earlier. I assume Wilhelm Killing was also before 1910. Is it just the form of the Einstein field equations that's the "bolt from the blue"?

It was the whole idea of mass curving space--no one, to my knowledge, had thought of that before, and it was a radically different way of looking at gravity than Newton's approach (or even the Lagrangian version of Newton's approach). A big conceptual breakthrough!

 

[corditeman]

Steam coaches, steam powered flight, Stanley steam cars...

The first attempts at steam lorries (France) and steam coaches (England) were halted by commercial vindictiveness. If they had not been, MacAdam's and Telford's roads could have seen a massive growth in freight and passenger transport.

The Stanley Steam Car could have outperformed the T Ford, given a flash tube boiler and a system of mass production. If it had, pollution would have been far less serious.

Hiram Maxim attempted a steam powered aircraft back in 1894 :-

Maxim invested £20,000 in building a huge, hundred-foot-wingspan, multi-winged machine, in England. It was powered by two lightweight 180-horsepower steam engines that he'd designed for it. Maxim began flight tests in 1894. On the third try the plane was powered up to forty miles per hour, left its track, flew two hundred feet, and crashed. After that, Maxim lost interest in flying. He went on to other inventions.

But, what if he hadn't... ?

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Someone mentioned the telescope. But eyeglasses, microscopes, any number of lens applications.

part of your problem is glass quality. Getting clear, consistent glass is relatively recent. The Venetians had it first, the rest of Europe doesn't really get it until ~1600. A mild green tint to eyeglasses would be OK (and they were invented rather earlier than e.g. telescopes, IIRC), but to get multiple lenses working together in a telescope wants GOOD glass.

To get more than a simple telescope requires a good understanding of ray paths, etc.

So, no, I don't think optics can get advanced MUCH.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

I've always found it odd that the bicycle wasn't invented until the 19th century , considering it's pretty simple in principle. As one example, adding the chain drive to bicycle design in the 1885 finally made it a safe, easy method of transit. But chain drives have been in use since at least 300 BC. Of course, tires probably couldn't come about until the invention of rubber, but tireless bikes would not have been very rough rides on unpaved surfaces. So I see little reason, for example, someone couldn't have invented the bicycle in late antiquity.

Bikes are actually surprisingly high tech. Not in modern terms, of course. To get sufficiently hard and repeatable bearings and races, for instance, which you really need for the bicycle to be efficient enough to be worth bothering about, requires metallurgy that just didn't exist e.g. in 1800.

There's no point in having a bicycle if it isn't more energetically efficient than transport by foot...

 

[HARRY]

There is a fair bit of evidence that the manufacturing of lens occured in several ancient cultures. Polishing clear rock crystal so that it focused light to start a fire, to enable an artist to do small scale work or correct a vision fault. However in was not until the creating of clear moulded glass that that lens could be more the a novelty or the domain of the social elite much like early clocks.

One of the must basic parts of the bicycle is the hubble but very important ball bearing without which it would require a lot more energy to move and would greatly decrease its span of use. The making a small metal sphere that is hard wearing but not brittle is not easy.

All forms of maths would have developed a bit quick in Europe if the Roman Numerals had evolved into symbols that were more individual and less able to be confused with letters.

 

[Shawn Endresen]

I've often pondered the germ theory of disease. Microscopes were invented 200 years beforehand, but no credible person chose to compare diseased tissue or fluids with healthy tissue or fluids under a microscope and draw the obvious conclusion? How did that happen?

 

[Gerry10]

The one thing I always wandered was, why the Romans never invented the mechanical printing press.
They had everything neccessary to do so.

 

[Linkwerk]

stirrups? somebody please tell me there is a reason they took so long to crop up. in hindsight it just seems, like, well, horse riding 102 type stuff; totally self-evident.

 

[tallwingedgoat]

The anesthetic application of ether was discovered by the mid-1500s but it's use in surgery didn't happen for three hundred years. By then it was quickly replaced by the safer to use chloroform. So for three hundred years people had to endure painful operations when they had the technology of ether.

There were also several Chinese technologies like the moldboard plow which was far more efficient and yet quite obvious, that took Europe over a thousand years to catch on. The invention of coke, again obvious considering people have been turning wood into charcoal since the stone age, wasn't invented in Europe until the 1600s. Iron puddling and the Bessemer steel making process weren't discovered until the Industrial Revolution but were already in use in China almost a Millenia earlier.

The Romans and Mayans used cement, which is simply cooked limestone. Yet no one else came up with it. Roman cement technology was inexplicably lost and it had to be rediscovered much later. Imagine if Europe continued building concrete structures through out the Dark Age and Middle Ages.

 

[DrakonFin]

The first attempts at steam lorries (France) and steam coaches (England) were halted by commercial vindictiveness. If they had not been, MacAdam's and Telford's roads could have seen a massive growth in freight and passenger transport.

Have you read Beasley's Suppression of the Automobile? I think he and writers in the same tradition tend to overestimate the possibilities of the steam coaches of 1830s vintage. The technology was simply not mature enough. There were constant problems with the steam engine (which had to be both light and powerful), the axles kept breaking, suspension was either nonexistent or inadequate, steering, brakes, etc. On the rails, all these problems were much smaller, first of all the engine could be heavier (and thus overbuilt) and secondly one could avoid the jarring and bumps and need for quick changes in power that were pure hell for such machines like Gurney's, Maceroni's or even Hancock's on the common roads.

As long as there is a powerful railway lobby that can marshal a lot of capital for its effort, steam coaches really can't before, say, 1860-70 compete with railways in reliability or economy, even assuming an uninterrupted development since the best machines of 1835. Throwing money at the railways will give results sooner, because they are comparatively low tech. It would take huge effort to match the comparative advantage of even the horse-drawn vehicles in anywhere but the most crowded intercity routes. If one could somehow manage to avoid creation of powerful pro-railway business interests with a stake in manufacturing and mining... But then you might have to avert the industrial revolution altogether, which leads to a paradox.

What we are really fighting is path dependence. Circa 1828-33 the railway engineers (and their supporters) still considered the steam coach a threat to their effort. Thus they were ready to fight against it in public and in Parliament. After the success of the L&MR become evident, railways swallowed most of the capital that could have been used for the development of road vehicles. After this the premier steam coach builders crashed and burned by 1840, and there was really little belief for the technical and commercial feasibility of the steam carriage among those who mattered.

What we need would be an alt-Stephenson who could see early on that the steam coach is not an adversary but a possibility for feeder routes: such a railway magnate might conceivably contract a successful steam carriage operator to complement his routes in the metropolitan area and other bigger cities. Hancock would be the obvious candidate for this.

 

[tallwingedgoat]

Almost forgot double paned glass windows. Invented by the Romans, reinvented in the 1980s. I sh*t you not.