What do you mean when you use the term 'Classical Era'?
Proximefactum,
Greeks, Romans, etc. How long have wax, needles, drums, and horns been around? How long have humans known they can make noise with something other than their voices? Everything you need for a phonograph aside from the machined screws has been around since the Fertile Crescent.
Are you implicitly thinking of Foucault's idea of the _episteme_ when you write of the importance of identically cut screws?
You mean that gibberish from Foucault's
The Knowledge of Things? Not in the slightest. That's just a bunch of over-thought nonsense, IMHO, just another case of parsing a question well past the point of irrelevance.
When I write about the importance of identically cut screws with constant thread pitch along their lengths I'm writing about the actual parts needed to make a phonograph
physically work and not about some "paradigm shift" or other philosophical rubbish. I'm writing about reality and not about navel gazing.
That is, a breaking-point in the history of ideas/devices/etc?
The breaking point is this instance occurred when someone got his hands dirty and figured out how to repeatedly cut accurate screws. Nothing more.
An early 19th century machine-screwed phonograph could be a POD for a whole sunburst of various inventions.
The late 19th century phonograph was a sunburst too. It sparked all sorts of developments, like the one we're chatting on now.
And, according to the Foucault model, the simultaneous appearance of many similar inventions after a certain 'spark' invention would necessarily demonstrate the proper evolution of history, and not some fluke event.
Foucault and the others got it wrong.
It isn't that everyone was sitting around too stupid to imagine that something like screws could exist and that the idea of screws weren't somehow part of the general discourse of knowledge. It wasn't as if lathes hadn't existed for centuries or that people hadn't been using them. There were physical obstacles at work, primarily the availability of steel. There were no "unthoughts" blocking development and no "epistemological rupture" needed to take place. The problems had been physical in nature, not mental.
The problem with screws was that no one had yet figured out how to repeatedly and accurately make the damn things and not that no one thought of screws yet.
Then, once Maudslay showed the world how it could be done, interchangeable machined parts began being made in increasing numbers. When enough parts were being made on a routine basis for certain uses, enough extra parts were floating around to allow people from all over begin tinkering with those parts and finding all sorts of other and different ways to use them. Again, no mental blocks, just physical ones.
The process of progress is prosaic, pedestrian, and pragmatic. Mysticism need not apply because mysticism isn't real. There's no "spark" event magically leading to other simultaneous developments. Each advance simply means that there's simply more pieces to play with and, the more basic or fundamental an advance the, more it can used with the other pieces. Throw enough "building blocks" out there and
Homo sapiens tinkerer is going to find more useful combinations of those "building blocks". No gesalt changes or paradigm shifts need apply, the only obstructions are purely material and do not exist in our minds.
Bill