19th Century inventions that could have happened sooner

1940LaSalle

I'm speaking of innovations for which all the ingredients were there but somehow it took a while to put them all together. Here are two examples:

  • The phonograph. Edison's innovation was strictly mechanical. Machining techniques in the 1840s and 1850s were sufficiently advanced to permit building something very similar to Edison's device a good 25 years earlier. Imagine, if you will, an existing (remastered and digitized) recording of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address...fascinating!
  • The cable car. Andrew Hallidie Smith and William Epplseheimer built the first successful system in San Francisco in 1873 (although former Confederate general P. T. Beauregard demonstrated something along these lines in New Orleans in 1869 and received a patent). Anyhow, all the tools (wire cable with a rope core; cast iron; bronze bearings; etc.) were readily available. Perhaps New York, with an extremely high population density and long straight streets could have been the site of the first installation of cable traction some time in the 1850s, followed soon after by Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia.
What other candidates could you suggest?
 

Arkenfolm

1940LaSalle said:
The phonograph. Edison's innovation was strictly mechanical. Machining techniques in the 1840s and 1850s were sufficiently advanced to permit building something very similar to Edison's device a good 25 years earlier. Imagine, if you will, an existing (remastered and digitized) recording of Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address...fascinating!
Click to expand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonautograph It definitely could've been done had the idea occurred to anyone in the 1860s.
 
UniversalCommons

UniversalCommons

There are quite a few 19th century inventions that are not deeply complicated, the wrench, the postage stamp, the stethoscope, the blueprint, toilet paper. Quite a lot of things can be made of two or three parts. There are a lot of fairly modern inventions that can be implemented without a lot of parts. Storing ice with sawdust made the natural ice trade possible in the 19th century. Seed packets with pictures on them occurred in the 19th Century. A lot of very basic easy to make tools were invented in the 19th century which were based on complex ideas, but simple implementation. Someone who had a lot of basic ideas could change history completely because most of the small inventions would not exist. They could be a serial inventor with hundreds of inventions. Things like zippers, buttons, and lots of ideas could be implemented fairly quickly.
 

Brady Kj

I can't wrap my head around a phonograph existing without electricity. I would be excited to see a demonstration of that.

When were zippers invented? I imagine at the very earliest, they'd need to be built in a time when large numbers of small parts can be made with great precision. I imagine that would require factory technology, so I wonder if it would be a challenge to make them earlier.
 

Arkenfolm

Brady Kj said:
I can't wrap my head around a phonograph existing without electricity. I would be excited to see a demonstration of that.
Click to expand...
It was always theoretically possible to play back phonautograph recordings, even with the technology of the time. Problem is nobody put two and two together until around Edison's time when the phonograph proved the superior method over alternatives. A few very early recordings are out there in public domain, like the phonautograh inventor singing a bit of "Au clair de la lune" in 1860 (the earliest recognizable recording of a voice).
Brady Kj said:
When were zippers invented? I imagine at the very earliest, they'd need to be built in a time when large numbers of small parts can be made with great precision. I imagine that would require factory technology, so I wonder if it would be a challenge to make them earlier.
Click to expand...
The earliest are from the 1890s but the idea didn't take off until the 1910s. It's definitely something that requires the right amount of precise machinery.
 
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