What revolutionary technologies did OTL miss?

[Strategos' Risk]

The use of sauerkraut or lemon juice as treatments for scurvy. Scurvy killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800, to say nothing of how many people got it in winter when fresh vegetables were scarce. It could have been solved far earlier than it was OTL - there were multiple people who figured out treatments for it.

That's more of an important improvement that could have been discovered earlier and wasn't until later, rather than a technology that could've been big but never was. But, I still am now interested in the idea of sailors in Antiquity having better nutrition. They would still be constrained by whatever sail and navigation technologies they had access to at the time, but healthier crews would probably be a boon for sea travel.

There could probably be an entire thread about what if X health advancement in medication, nutrition, or sanitation that could have been discovered earlier was indeed discovered earlier. Like, I wonder if penicillin mold could have discovered centuries earlier. And then maybe there are throwaway GURPS Infinite Earths type timelines where human civilization were wiped out early on because of severe bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

 

[Born in the USSA]

That's more of an important improvement that could have been discovered earlier and wasn't until later, rather than a technology that could've been big but never was. But, I still am now interested in the idea of sailors in Antiquity having better nutrition. They would still be constrained by whatever sail and navigation technologies they had access to at the time, but healthier crews would probably be a boon for sea travel.

There could probably be an entire thread about what if X health advancement in medication, nutrition, or sanitation that could have been discovered earlier was indeed discovered earlier. Like, I wonder if penicillin mold could have discovered centuries earlier. And then maybe there are throwaway GURPS Infinite Earths type timelines where human civilization were wiped out early on because of severe bacterial resistance to antibiotics.

It's incredibly weird to me that Hippocrates knew about cerebrospinal fluid but that everyone forgot about it completely until it was rediscovered by Swedenborg of all people 😂 Mendelian inheritance is another weird example of discovered but forgotten medical knowledge.

 

[Legofan4]

It's incredibly weird to me that Hippocrates knew about cerebrospinal fluid but that everyone forgot about it completely until it was rediscovered by Swedenborg of all people 😂 Mendelian inheritance is another weird example of discovered but forgotten medical knowledge.

Which is entirely down to the fact that the information may exist somewhere but if anyone in the past wanted to know about it they would basically already have to know it exists. If someone developed something then they would need backers and patrons to spread the knowledge beyond their immediate surroundings and people they know in person. This is an entirely alien concept to us because we can search through billions of pages and archives for most of the information created to date without leaving our homes.

 

[Emote Control]

What about the germ theory of disease? The first documented microscope was created in 1590, but it wasn't until 1675 that we have documented records of bacteria. Then it took until the 1850s, until Pasteur, for scientists to seriously think that specific species of bacteria might be causing some of the illnesses that had plagued the world for so long -- and again, not until the 1890s were the ancient Greek ideas about disease, inherited from Galen, laid to rest.

What if early scholars had made the connections earlier? They wouldn't have needed to know mechanics or chemistry or even evolution, cataloguing what they saw through their lenses and comparing notes could conceivably have some of them make the intellectual leap, though getting wide acceptance would of course have been much harder.

But the lives of heroes and villains alike would have been saved, changing the course of history dramatically. Even without great minds, improved sanitation would have had drastic economic effects because of fewer plagues, and because armies would have suffered less wastage many wars would likely have ended up with different outcomes.

Sounds like a great POD!

 

[Workable Goblin]

Also, it's not really possible to have a system work over bodies of water, as can be done with an electrical telegraph. No equivalent to underwater cables (not unless you've got some really dedicated workers).

People did work on lighthouses and lightships in quite remote areas or even built on shoals and outcroppings, so I wouldn't rule that out entirely, but more importantly what about narrower channels and straits? It doesn't seem like it would pose any great problem to "telegraph" across the Bosphorus, for instance, and even the English Channel might be possible.

 

[Timelordtoe]

People did work on lighthouses and lightships in quite remote areas or even built on shoals and outcroppings, so I wouldn't rule that out entirely, but more importantly what about narrower channels and straits? It doesn't seem like it would pose any great problem to "telegraph" across the Bosphorus, for instance, and even the English Channel might be possible.

The Bosporus is absolutely doable, as it's only about 700m at its widest, and both the Swedish and British shutter systems had stations about 5-6 miles apart. I'd completely forgotten that lightships were a thing, though, and I could absolutely see an equivalent brought in for straits and narrows that are too wide for just one station at each end.

I personally imagine a connection across the Irish Sea's Northern Channel to be more likely than one across the English Channel, just for reasons of it being a (sort of) domestic connection. One of the major problems with any system like this is going to be converting between systems. If it does take off, a unified version might take hold, but there are going to be regional variations in the code by necessity. An French language code won't need "ö", and a German language one wouldn't need "ç". I'd expect the early years of the system to be somewhat like early railways where there's no real consensus on what gauge to use, where eventually the systems start to standardise as they're used more.

 

[Arkenfolm]

The use of sauerkraut or lemon juice as treatments for scurvy. Scurvy killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800, to say nothing of how many people got it in winter when fresh vegetables were scarce. It could have been solved far earlier than it was OTL - there were multiple people who figured out treatments for it.

It was well known that "fresh food" cured scurvy since the earliest times, but no one knew exactly why. The real issue was how hard it was to preserve to vitamin C on long voyages before modern canning developed (and early canning is fraught with the far more dangerous issue of botulism).

 

[Teiresias]

People did work on lighthouses and lightships in quite remote areas or even built on shoals and outcroppings, so I wouldn't rule that out entirely, but more importantly what about narrower channels and straits? It doesn't seem like it would pose any great problem to "telegraph" across the Bosphorus, for instance, and even the English Channel might be possible.

Heliographs might prove useful there - they can get ranges of up to 100 miles (I think the record is something like 300 kilometres).

It was well known that "fresh food" cured scurvy since the earliest times, but no one knew exactly why. The real issue was how hard it was to preserve to vitamin C on long voyages before modern canning developed (and early canning is fraught with the far more dangerous issue of botulism).

Yes, and Saeurkraut offers a very simple solution to that, one that's well within the technological resources of earlier time periods. All you need for it is cabbage, water and salt.

 

[aaronupright]

Hero's engine is something I'd prefer to steer away from because it's been talked about a ton already and I'm not sure if Roman society and political economy was ready for it, there didn't seem to be any interest in it?

Roman metallurgy couldn't have handled large practical engines.

 

[RandomFloridian]

The steam engine for early land vehicles.

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Arkenfolm]

The steam engine for early land vehicles.

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

I think horseless carriages/land locomotives were a criminally underexplored path of development. Cugnot is a little early (IIRC early boilers are too finicky) but we could probably have primitive buses and delivery vans in cities by the mid/late 19th century. In the countryside, they'd work well for mining communities (a steam bus at 10 km/h gets workers to the job faster and lets them arrive a little more rested). Steam tractors for farmers are potentially also highly useful, since it will lead to inventors dealing with the issue of muddy roads and with it pressure on politicians to improve roads. Militarily, an innovative general could use it to simply logistics, since while they have disadvantages compared to horses, they're easier to repair, don't need as many people maintaining them (and the skills are much easier to teach than animal medicine), and consume coal rather than food humans might use.

Their uses are limited due to 19th century tech and chemistry (for instance, railroad travel is better in most cases, cavalry still has a vital use, etc.) but even in their niches I think they'd be revolutionary for economics and society.

 

[Merrick]

I'm personally a big fan of the optical telegraph, which did get some limited use, but not nearly as much as it could have. Once you have the ability to make telescopes on a decent scale, it's pretty easy to set up a network. So really any time from about 1610 onwards, it's feasible, and Robert Hooke did propose a system in 1684 (albeit one quite different from the systems that were actually used).

The problem with optical telegraphs is that you need someone in the receiving tower with his eye glued to the telescope, waiting for incoming messages. If you try to build a network of any size with continuously-manned towers every 10-20 miles, the wage bill spirals up to the point where it was never commercially viable. The key advantage of the electrical telegraph was the ability to use repeaters to relay messages without human intervention.

Random note - The original Morse telegraph system was designed to work with an automatic recorder which converted the incoming pulses to marks on paper which could then be deciphered at leisure without needing someone on continuous duty to record/interpret the message in realtime. Operators quickly learned to decipher the message from the buzz of the machine, without needing to look at the paper!

I think horseless carriages/land locomotives were a criminally underexplored path of development.

The key technology there is the pneumatic tyre - without it, any heavy vehicle is going to shake itself and the road to bits if you try to run it at any speed. Vulcanized rubber is mid-19th century technology but I seem to recall that the big low-pressure tractor-tyres were only practical from the mid-20th century. If you can get those earlier, you get a horseless carriage that can handle 19th-century roads.

 

[Sol Zagato]

Compound bows. Doable at lower tech.

 

[Kerney]

Psychedelic Drugs were used for ages to treat PTSD, Depression, Anxiety, and Addiction around the world. But most likely in Europe and well documented many other cases, they lost mostly due to association with indigenous religion. It is easy to picture a world where these drugs were not sidelined but became part of the pharmacopeia of psychology/psychiatry on the 'ground floor'.

 

[UniversalCommons]

Heron's technology did not demonstrate a steam engine. It was a device that demonstrated the principle of the wind. It was much closer to rocketry. Archytas developed a steam bird prior to Heron. It would be interesting to see the first demonstration of air power. People shooting off simple steam rockets and learning about the principles of air. Aristotle describes letting down a cauldron into the ocean in the 4th century bc. Also the use of bellows to store air. Ctesebius is considered the father of pneumatics. From the study of air, you could come up with all kinds of things. Hot air rises for the first blimps. The first man kites. An aerial revolution.

 

[Deleted member 90563]

If you put food in a sealed rigid container and expose it to a vacuum, all the moisture would evaporate out.

 

[manitobot]

I really like these threads, there is a treasure trove of them on the wiki on things that could have been.

Echoing some potential (or useless ideas): earlier usage of mills running on wind or water, the Gallic reaper, macadam roads, concrete, bicycles, not to mention all the hydraulic and mechanical advances Heron, Archimedes, and da Vinci could have popularized. The list is endless.

One question I have, in what situations is the Stirling engine more efficient or better fit for the steam engine?

 

[Ijon Tichy]

I was going to write phage therapy, which could have been the great competitor to antibiotics - but it turns out we do have it. The Soviet experiments went further than I thought:

Phage therapy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Simreeve]

If the British army had adopted the Puckle Gun, early in the 18th century...

 

[Arkenfolm]

I was going to write phage therapy, which could have been the great competitor to antibiotics - but it turns out we do have it. The Soviet experiments went further than I thought:

Phage therapy - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I don't think it would so much be a competitor to antibiotics, but a supplement, especially for antibiotic resistance.

The key technology there is the pneumatic tyre - without it, any heavy vehicle is going to shake itself and the road to bits if you try to run it at any speed. Vulcanized rubber is mid-19th century technology but I seem to recall that the big low-pressure tractor-tyres were only practical from the mid-20th century. If you can get those earlier, you get a horseless carriage that can handle 19th-century roads.

Would it really be too heavier than a fully-laden wagon? On roads in cities and towns, it should be possible to run a steam wagon at slightly faster average speeds than a horse-drawn wagon using the tires of the day. But apparently pneumatic tires are a mid-19th century invention thanks to the work of inventor Robert William Thompson who used them for both steam vehicles and horse-drawn carriages. I suspect if steam vehicles are a major concern, this sort of tire would be in higher demand meaning there'd be continued refinement and reduction of cost over the next few decades.