Are there any practical uses for the Aeolipile that would not require advanced metallurgy?
Technologies or Scientific discoveries that could have been made long before (or after) they actually were.
- Thread starter Samm
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I don't know about japanese, but for the incas and other native americans, I've seen it attributed to the lack of draought animals
Lots of mountains, I understand.
And there are dog carts, as well as goat and there are pictures of using alpacas to pull them, and people can cart (heh) people around, too, pulling the vehicle.
Actually microscopes did not led to germ theory as they then still believed in abiogenesis. It was Pasteur's experiment which proved that milk in sealed jars does not go sour after being heated which allowed germ theory to prevail.
So with a bit of luck only the ability to make air-tight jars and a receptive audience is needed. Though without microscopes they probably blame it on 'demons which cause food to spoil and get killed by cooking' or something.
On the other hand, if you come up with a theory of 'demons' which essentially mimic the qualities and behaviour of bacteria, then that's good enough. You'd eventually refine a theory of demons which amount to bacteria theory.
I am saying without microscope it is impossible to prove the germ theory not that microscopes invention automatically leads to acceptance of germ theory.
(so I don't think we have anything in contradiction with each other)
It's not just in Abrahamic religions that taboo exists, menstruation taboos of various sorts are common all over the world.
Respect for elders and ancestors for their wisdom is pretty much a cultural universal in humans. The reason being is that it brings stability to a society and prevents people from following youth who do stupid things. For every young person with a good idea that got ignored by overcautious elders, there's going to be ten young people with stupid or foolish ideas that sound good at face value would get them and others around them injured or killed. I don't think you can really prevent that mindset from emerging because any culture which deviates from this will inevitably end up with enough foolish youth that get themselves and others killed.
This isn't quite penicillin (since it isn't isolated and mass produced) but it is indeed something that was known since very old times. Like IIRC some Eastern Europeans would put certain mud on injuries and because this mud contained the spores that create penicillin it was effective.
If you were to see an earlier development of scientific method quite a lot of advances would probably Arrive a lot sooner, particularly if it was attached to the prestige of a literate grouping (like the Greek philosophers, the Chinese bureaucracy or any of the religious organisations in history)
Very basic stethoscopes can be made as soon as a civilization has paper. Simply roll the paper into a cylinder - this is essentially how they were first made OTL
Telescopes can be invented as soon as Glassmaking is capable.
Extremely basic refrigeration can be invented so long as there is a ready source of ice.
Telescopes can be invented as soon as Glassmaking is capable.
Extremely basic refrigeration can be invented so long as there is a ready source of ice.
What about optics in general? Is there a reason we had to wait for Galileo for refracting telescopes and Newton for reflectors? The idea of focusing light using mirrors was known in antiquity—see Archimedes—but imaging optics took much longer.
A Ptolemaic or even Babylonian astronomer armed with Galileo’s telescope could change cosmology a lot. Navigation—calculating longitude with almanacs and watching Jupiter’s moons—would be a direct benefit.
A Ptolemaic or even Babylonian astronomer armed with Galileo’s telescope could change cosmology a lot. Navigation—calculating longitude with almanacs and watching Jupiter’s moons—would be a direct benefit.
I want to add my support to the pushback against the presentism expressed in this thread, especially as expressed against rural populations in earlier eras.
Simply put, less urbanized populations require more generalists, so everyone is, on average, more capable and knowledgeable than their urban counterparts, but their lack of specialization hinders their sophistication.
Simply put, less urbanized populations require more generalists, so everyone is, on average, more capable and knowledgeable than their urban counterparts, but their lack of specialization hinders their sophistication.
I have no idea, but it doesn't seem to very useful on its own, and building it at a much larger scale comes with metallurgy related issues.
I think there were wheels in mesoamerica as well, like used in a watermill, altough not used in transportation. Dogs, goats and alpacas don't have the same strength or endurance as an ox, mule or donkey though. As for humans... to be fair I don't know, could it be diminishing returns compared to just carrying stuff on your body?
Of course, for every traditional practice that proves to be more effective than a "rationally"-planned alternative (personally I don't see how you can consider something "rational" if it hasn't been done after extensive study of current practices to show that it is, in fact, better than those practices), there's another which is outright worse or has null effect (that is, is neither better nor worse than "rational" alternatives). Just the way that "traditional" practices have changed significantly over time (for a minor example, the widespread adoption of plants from the Americas in Eurasia and Africa) shows that.
I also like that the article you link looks at disgust on rectilinear street grids...which have been used for thousands of years in a variety of cultures and which often serve as the basis for the "organic" street plans that they talk up (a very great number of "organic" European cities are based on a Roman street grid that subsequently evolved for a few thousand years). Or that they fail to note that current research shows that grids are better than the faux-"organic" design of the suburbs (which are even less "natural" and "organic" in any meaningful way than the cities they disparage) in encouraging walking and an active urban life. Or that there was a delay of decades between the adoption of street grids in American cities and the development of the modern suburb. Or that they miss that the entire point of large-scale farming isn't to economize on land, but on labor.
It was probably more about malaria and yellow fever than filthy homes. Those are spread by mosquitoes, which breed in standing water, especially swamps, which, surprise surprise, were also considered major sources of miasma.
I was merely giving an example of how an uninformed person could come to the conclusion that miasmas are the cause.
You need purity for that, and workmanship.
That comes later.
Glass isn’t that hard to make, clear glass is and clear glass with no imperfections takes a lot of resources that earlier civilizations did not have/were not looking towards putting said resources to glass, normally a decoration.
And they had extreme basic refrigeration.
Didn’t the mesoamericans send runners up into the snow covered mountains so the nobles could have their flavored iced?
Romans similar?
Ice houses, saving river or lake blocks to keep food from spoiling, have been around a long time.
The wheel is a force multiplier, always better.
Except on steep hills. And narrow places.
And better with actual roads.
Umh, always better on flat plains?
And if you have your smaller animal carrying smaller loads, that’s you not carrying that load.
A medium sized dog with a wheeled cart carrying half his weight or more is just that much more you can convey.
No, not "of course". Generally speaking, a practice only lasts long enough to become traditional if it works, or at least doesn't make things noticeably worse. That's not the case with radically new and untested ideas, which frequently end up disastrously (generally, if no society has ever adopted a particular practice before, that's because it's a bad practice...).
And adopting new plants isn't an example of the sort of thing the book under review was criticising. Generally, new plants were adopted piecemeal, by a process of trial-and-error -- some farmer decides to give this new "potato" thingie a try, the attempt is a success, other farmers copy him, and gradually potatoes end up spreading throughout the country. The sort of thing criticised in the book would be more akin to a government official coming along and saying "Right, you ignorant peasants, we've scientifically determined that potatoes produce the most calories per acre of any crop, so from now on you're only allowed to farm potatoes, and nothing else."
There was in fact a case in France where a decision of the Court of Paris banned potato cultivation in 1748. After the plague of Marseille in 1721 it was thought that the potato was a vector of leprosy.
Yes "of course". Just because something "works" or doesn't make things "noticeably worse" doesn't mean that it works better than a "rationally-planned alternative," or even has any positive effects at all. For example, Chinese traditional medicine prescribes sweet wormwood, which was the basis of an important antimalarial drug...and it also prescribes ginseng, which modern study has shown has a remarkable number of negative long-term side effects. But even in the former case "rationalizing" the traditional medicine by identifying the active ingredient and purifying it into a drug made it work better than if we simply gave sweet wormwood to malaria patients.
(And then there's the mercury-based potions of longevity, but those were always an elite thing, hence arguably not "traditional" in the sense being used)
And the point I was making was that traditional practices are not perfect, which is a trap that people (rightly) criticizing the latter often fall into. The fact that they do change over time shows that they are not in any sense "optimal" and can be improved.
Also, while New World plants did spread throughout Eurasia and Africa, it was often over considerable resistance from local peasants and farmers--you did need the equivalent of that official coming by and saying, "Right, potatoes aren't poisonous and tomatoes aren't either, you're going to grow them too" to get people to try them out and realize that, actually, they worked pretty well. It was just that this "official" was more often a large landowner, a feudal grandee basically, and they didn't try to do it to an entire country at once.