Post-1500 POD with most technological potential

Anaxagoras

Banned
The problem with technologically-based PODs is that having the necessary knowledge and information to invent something is only part of it - there also has to be some conceivable need for it. Heron of Alexandria invented a steam engine around 200 BC, but it never went anywhere because no one could think of what they might do with it.

Even assuming that Leonardo da Vinci's ideas were plausible, what possible use is a primitive screw helicopter to someone in Renaissance Italy?
 

Alkahest

Banned
The problem with technologically-based PODs is that having the necessary knowledge and information to invent something is only part of it - there also has to be some conceivable need for it. Heron of Alexandria invented a steam engine around 200 BC, but it never went anywhere because no one could think of what they might do with it.

Even assuming that Leonardo da Vinci's ideas were plausible, what possible use is a primitive screw helicopter to someone in Renaissance Italy?
This is the reason I think one of the best ways to help science and technology is to increase world population and improve health, education and agricultural methods, not make a specific invention appear earlier. More well-fed, educated people employed in something other than farming is the key to scientific progress.
 
What about having a big Plague or a bunch of plagues which kill of most of the slaves and much of the Roman lower classes. The Romans had developed many devices which were never wide spread as slaves were cheap. Many of the labor saving devices that we use where developed after WW2 when people stopped going into "service"
 
There's another option how to advance China technologically, by keeping it disunited politically and thus having a more competative situation there, where every warring state exploits it's own ressources to the maximum to outcompete the others, forcing them to be more flexible and openminded towards innovations.
 
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