Technologies or Scientific discoveries that could have been made long before (or after) they actually were.

Nothing held reflectors back that much, any society that discovered bronze could make speculum metal for mirrors, but the math to know the correct shape and distances would take a good amount of effort. For refracting telescopes it's the same thing, the earliest known lenses (purely decorative) date to 2200 BC in Egypt and there are lenses from Crete dated to 500 BC that were most likely used as magnification lenses given their quality. (Also this has more information on ancient lenses.) But while they were probably good enough for telescope lenses there is no evidence that they ever built telescopes.
How far back could the math be pushed? Wikipedia lists Alhazen as one of the originators of the idea that mirrors could do the same job as lenses, and also points to some earlier work by Hero of Alexandria and some other Greeks. What impacts would Alhazen's reflecting telescope (circa 1000 AD--just in time to observe the 1054 AD supernova) have? Or one by Hero?

And, on a similar mathematical level, Wiki says that the Egyptians used a zero, and had developed something similar to Cartesian coordinates in that they understood negative (below datum) numbers. Could Egyptian numerals have been adopted more broadly in the ancient Mediterranean, and with them greater strides in numerical math?
 
I read an SF story set in post-apocalyptic California where people in the mountains used hang gliders for scouting in warfare.

It would take a fairly lucky set of events but I wonder if functional hang gliders could be developed using pretty primitive tech and if there would be a use for them.

It could start as something used for entertainment or as an awesome display in ceremony or to frighten and impress enemies, and then develop from there
The Chinese had kites to lift men aloft.
Maybe they run with that?
Could be very useful.
 
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.
Actually, despite resistance, new world plants did manage to spread with relatively breathtaking speed in Europe and Africa. And while official endorsement or demands were often significant, it's far from the whole story.

I think that what's going on, is that we have to understand the roots (pun intended) of conservative adoption strategies.

The reality of life is that while a new plant may be fine and dandy, if you don't know that plant - the best ways to cultivate it, to weed it, the best time to harvest, or even when to harvest, how to store it, how to prepare and cook it, you could end up starving to death pretty damned quick. There's no 'one size fits all' - every agricultural plant requires a certain learning curve in how to best manage it for optimum results. Simply randomly adopting and hoping for the best.... well that works out over time, but over the short term.... it's disaster.

And this is the issue for traditional societies and novelty. Basically, in traditional societies, a lot of the stuff has been worked out. You've evolved a farming/life model that won't kill you, and which will give you a sustainable yield and social surplus. A random innovation? Ninety per cent of the time, that's likely to be bad or make things worse. 10% of innovations may be positive. Well, that means 9 times out of 10, you're worse off. So innovation tends to be adopted slowly and carefully, and only as it's proved out.
 
There is the Nimrud Lens from the Assyrian palace at Nimrud. There are a number of different assertions around this leans, that it might have been used as a burning lens, possibly as a magnifier or as part of a telescope.

There are a number of different functions that could develop from a lens. You can have a burning lens to start fire, a lens for magnification, a lens for a telescope to look at the sky. If the glass was clear enough, you could use a single lens with a bow.

You could take it further with what Archimedes did with concentrated light using bronze shields to light a torch.
 
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The Chinese had kites to lift men aloft.
Maybe they run with that?
Could be very useful.
Yeah but the (safe) landing is the hard part, I think basic hygiene would be top of list don't crap, piss in your own water supply wash your hands ect.
 
There are a number of technologies that did not continue from their initial sources. For example, it is believed that in ancient Egypt sand was used to cut and shape stone. Fine sand for example would be put under a copper blade to cut granite. Sand could abrade stone and smooth it as well.

There is also the idea of using canals to move heavy blocks of stones to the pyramids. You could cut a canal from the Nile and bring it close to the pyramid and have the blocks floated down the canal. This is a recent idea on how the Egyptians were able to move massive blocks of stone.

Also, there are sites with iron working going back to close to 2000 b.c, in Central Africa and Cameroon, earlier than the Hittites.
 
I think paper could pretty much have been developed in the early Neolithic era.
Modern white paper needs chemical and heat treatments, but if you finely grind the wood-pulp with, say, a grinding stone, you can make something that looks like old newspaper paper but with poor stability. "Paper" until about the mid 1800s or so was actually mostly made out of old rags that were used as the source material for fibers. I don't think early paper is as durable as clay tablets or papyrus, so it may be a sad development for humanity because most of the eraly writing would end up being lost forever.

Neolithic paper? Yes. But it won't have much in common with what we call "paper", it would be more useful as a building material than for writing.
 
The Chinese had kites to lift men aloft.
Maybe they run with that?
Could be very useful.
www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/the-era-of-the-kite-and-rocket.419924

Danbenson worked out a timeline a few years ago in order to write a story. Era of kite and rocket. To sum up it is just possible to make a man lifting glider without aluminium carbon fibre or nylon but the result is fragile and heavy. The physics means you simply can not achieve a useful glide ratio unless your wings are so big they will fall apart in the slightest wind. I suggested he ignore the facts and write it anyway!
 
There is also the idea of using canals to move heavy blocks of stones to the pyramids. You could cut a canal from the Nile and bring it close to the pyramid and have the blocks floated down the canal. This is a recent idea on how the Egyptians were able to move massive blocks of stone.
When the Nile floods the waters get to Giza.
Construction of canals for those are not necessary.
A very short trip to the pyramids.
10% of the Great Pyramid is on site stone shaped to look like they are blocks of stone brought on site.
Add the time it took to build the Giza Pyramids, the distance to the quarries where the stones came from, the number of stones in the pyramids and construction can be done with less than 10 boats transporting.
This does not quite explain the other 100+ pyramids that are in Egypt, but it gives us a good idea.
 
How far back could the math be pushed? Wikipedia lists Alhazen as one of the originators of the idea that mirrors could do the same job as lenses, and also points to some earlier work by Hero of Alexandria and some other Greeks. What impacts would Alhazen's reflecting telescope (circa 1000 AD--just in time to observe the 1054 AD supernova) have? Or one by Hero?

And, on a similar mathematical level, Wiki says that the Egyptians used a zero, and had developed something similar to Cartesian coordinates in that they understood negative (below datum) numbers. Could Egyptian numerals have been adopted more broadly in the ancient Mediterranean, and with them greater strides in numerical math?
In theory it could have happened whenever- basic math is not limited by technology, it can be discovered anytime so long as its prerequisite math is discovered.
 
In theory it could have happened whenever- basic math is not limited by teIchnology, it can be discovered anytime so long as its prerequisite math is discovered.
I don't see why we need the mathematics to build telescopes. Surely trial and error would be just as effective?
 
One thing I'm surprised no one has mentioned is the pound lock. Flash locks are ancient, and pound locks are really just two flash locks in a series, but it took until Song China for someone to put it together.
 
What about a clipper ship, or any late era sailing ship a couple centuries earlier? Never mind the design evolution process. If some shipbuilder had an epiphany/divine inspiration, is there anything stopping him from building one?
The evolution process in building techniques, of which carvel building is an important step, is probably the reason it didn't happen sooner. I don't think that nobody in history prior to the 16th century never tought about building a ship with a taller draft.
 
The evolution process in building techniques, of which carvel building is an important step, is probably the reason it didn't happen sooner. I don't think that nobody in history prior to the 16th century never tought about building a ship with a taller draft.
Wouldn't that be right up the alley of this thread? I look at the thread concept this way:

If I'm an expert on 19th/20th century sailing ship building, and I'm time warped back several centuries, is there anything preventing me from building such a ship? Can I leapfrog generations of designs simply by inspiration? Or am I limited by hardware (metal fasteners, caulking, wood type accessibility, etc), or tools necessary to fabricate a part?

Versus, I'm an expert on building rockets. Doesn't matter how much I know about each and every component of the rocket, I have to create an entire modern industrial age society before I can build one.

I think just about any innovation can be moved prior in time. The time frame may vary from months to centuries depending on current technologies.
 
A steam rocket is a possibility. Archytas rocket is basically a ball of metal on a tripod with water inside with a tube sticking out. A hollow clay bird is placed over the tube which fills with steam... Simple things are a rough possibility. So are cushoons or 19th century Indian rocket brigades. Nothing modern. A lot of it is stripping the technology to the basics first. Then building them up over time.
 
I have heard it pointed out that Mendel's genetic discoveries could have been made by anyone since probably the dawn of the agricultural age who had basic literacy Mathematical skills and access to a lot of peas. Of course statistics and an intelectual elite that thinks counting peas is worthy of its time are themselves maybe non-obvious but nonetheless I have often found it suprising how late a propper understanding of hereditary principles came. Some advances seem to come as soon as the conditions for them are right. Others seem to linger. What are some examples of technologies thatmight have been made far later oer earlier than they actually were?
What about far later? I was thinking that the Integrated Circuit chip, depending on the circumstances, could actually have been invented later than it did in OTL.
 
i had the idea that the proliferation of the Antikythera mechanism could lead to the earlier invention and proliferation of clocks, ultimately meaning that wristwatches are a thing by the 17th century, though i'm not sure how accurate that assessment is
The problem with mechanical clocks in antiquity was, that they were permanently shooting themselves in the foot by the way they subdivided the day. Just like today the day consisted of two times 12 hours, but unlike today, measured from sunrise till sunset and from sunset till sunrise instand of from midnight till noon and from noon till midnight, which resulted in hours of unequal length depending on the date and your latitude. Constructing a mechanical clock able to measure those unequally long hours would be an extremely complicated challenge even with uptime horological expertise and was completely impossible to achieve in antiquity, not that it wasn't attempted. There were highly complex water clocks in the Hellenistic and Imperial Roman eras, which used differently sized bowls for each month of the year, i.e. the daytime hour bowl for June was also used as the nighttime hour bowl for December and vice versa. But the resulting clocks were overly complicated and of limited practical use. It took the deliberate decision to shift the beginning of the day from sunset/sunrise to midnight and thus measuring 12 equally long hours from midnight till noon and from noon till midnight, that made mechanical clocks technically possible to construct and practically useful, thus viable.
 
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In real life, the submarine was invented in the 1600s (in England), the inflatable dirigible in the same century (between Italy and Portugal), and the steam car in the 1700s (by a missionary in China). Their usefulness was not really appreciated at the time. My WIP is set in a world where it was.
 
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