......that could have been invented earlier ?
Here are some examples of things I mean:
Choose Your Own Adventure Books:
"A book series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a concept created by Edward Packard and originally published by Constance Cappel's and R. A. Montgomery's Vermont Crossroads Press as the -Adventures of You- series, starting with Packard's Sugarcane Island in 1976"
Ant Farm:
"A formicarium is usually a transparent box made of glass or plastic. Ant farms are usually made thin enough so the tunnels and cavities made by the ants can be seen and their behavior can be studied. They can be filled with soil, loam, sand, vermiculite, other mineral fragments, or sawdustThe formicarium was invented by Charles Janet, a French entomologist and polymath, who had the idea of reducing the three-dimensions of an ants' nest to the virtual two dimensions between two panes of glass. His design was exhibited in the Exposition Universelle (1900) in Paris."
KittyLitter
Before Edward 'Ed' Lowe's invention, people kept their cats outside, using ashes, dirt or sand as cat litter when it was necessary to keep them inside. One day in January 1947, Mrs. Draper, Edward Lowe's neighbor in Cassopolis, Michigan, came to him asking for some sand to use as cat litter. Her sand pile was frozen so she had been using ashes but they tracked all over her house. Instead of sand, Lowe gave her some clay called Fuller's Earth, a set of clay minerals capable of absorbing their weight in water. She found it worked far better than sand or ashes.
Bonus points for anybody who finds a way for these mundane simple things to actually do influence histoy in a non butterfly manner. This means that they directly cause changes instead of merely indirectly causing chaos and ripples in a timeline.