Which lost invention was the biggest loss?

Which lost invention was the biggest loss?

  • Antikythera mechanism

    Votes: 17 16.7%
  • Damascus steel

    Votes: 10 9.8%
  • Flexible glass

    Votes: 12 11.8%
  • Greek fire

    Votes: 12 11.8%
  • Iron pillar of Delhi

    Votes: 7 6.9%
  • Roman concrete

    Votes: 37 36.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 7 6.9%

  • Total voters
    102
The Gallic Reaper from what I understand was fundamental a labor saving device, but as price had a greater waste than manual harvest methods. As population grew in Northern Europe, the price of labor fell and as such it was dropped because the waste was more expensive than the labor cost.
 
and its rust-resistance is an accidental side-effect of its fabrication, never reproduced again

Early ships with Iron Hulls proved to be very long lived, for more than later vessels made from Steel.
It's one of the Reasons why Warrior is still around, along with the Austrian Monitor SMS Leitha. Both were sold to commercial owners as while as Warships their usefulness had been questioned, but not their intact, strong Hulls. that proved to be very corrosion resistant
 
Early ships with Iron Hulls proved to be very long lived, for more than later vessels made from Steel.
It's one of the Reasons why Warrior is still around, along with the Austrian Monitor SMS Leitha. Both were sold to commercial owners as while as Warships their usefulness had been questioned, but not their intact, strong Hulls. that proved to be very corrosion resistant

You can't compare ships built in the mid 19th Century to a monument from 400. Metallurgy and metal treatment had progressed a lot in the meantime.

And the reason those ships are still around is more careful maintenance rather than the innate properties of their hulls.
 
You can't compare ships built in the mid 19th Century to a monument from 400. Metallurgy and metal treatment had progressed a lot in the meantime.

And the reason those ships are still around is more careful maintenance rather than the innate properties of their hulls.
Warrior was all but forgotten, Fuel Hulk C77 after 1927
history-restoration.jpg
till 1978

Wrought Iron of 1860 was little different than First Century AD Wrought Iron, as was paints and preservatives. Boiled Linseed Oil and carbon black from lamps was hardly a new in the 1860s, that was known to the Romans.

Steel ships, they are the ones that degrade quickly in seawater, they need that careful maintenance
 
So with one thing and another, so far the broad theme I am picking up is that we have a hard time coming up with any examples of innovative technology that would in fact have had potential to send society down a different, let alone better track, and was tragically lost and forgotten to the lasting harm of future generations.

Maybe it is all confirmation bias, but it seems that my basic presumption that technology is an interwoven web, that you basically need the whole thing, in distantly related fields, to enable the pace we observe in any one field, and while development of an idea might simply pop up precociously, it will be seeds falling on stony soil unless the general society is prepared to make use of it, seems, well, confirmed. The Gallic Reaper for instance seems great, but then one has the sobering reality that it traded off efficiency in the form of wasting much of the harvest that more traditional and ubiquitous labor intensive methods would not waste--this is great and fine when one has more land than labor available. Which might indeed be characteristic of an expansionist capitalistic society making sweeping inroads on land that is judged relative to their own standards pretty sparsely populated. But of course the specific societies that arose in that kind of circumstance--namely the USA and Canada branching from the English/UK colonies in North America, and Australia and New Zealand, "found empty land" by intruding onto a continent whose native populations were indeed low by European standards--but not nearly as low at first contact as when a couple centuries later Old World diseases had swept through a "New World" whose inhabitants apparently, for reasons that make sense in retrospect, had very little disease resistance, versus a whole swamp full of dozens of major microparasite predator species that had evolved in a witches' brew of dense populations in extensive trading contact, with lots of domesticated animals spread across what are reckoned to be three continents, big ones in two cases, among populations not only densely crowded in cities but in cities with poor sanitation and the majority of the population stressed to vulnerable edges by various forms of exploitation. And we know some of the British North American colonists might have been blissfully ignorant of modern understandings of the germ theory of disease, but pragmatically knew darn well that they could spread diseases deliberately to the Native peoples, and did so quite maliciously in some cases. So actually "innovative colonists find rich empty lands to expand into" is not something nature hands to people in reality on Earth, generally speaking, and where the exceptions exist--well, we did get labor saving innovation and so forth, but in the context of a deeply rooted and expansive global trading market. And not without quite a lot of structural violence in the mix, including instead of relying just on multiplying productivity (with perhaps some wasteful aspects we don't properly weigh into the overall judgement of the progressiveness of it all) forcibly importing forced labor on a massive scale instead and warping the whole society around that "peculiar institution."

Meanwhile a Massalian League, even if it somehow invented the Reaper in parallel and earlier, was not facing expansion into peoples who were as terribly vulnerable as the Americas' peoples. I daresay that in the Classical people the folks in various countries were much more vulnerable than their descendants a thousand years later, offset by the fact that the tri-continental pool of endemic plagues was a lot less developed too, and that generally peoples whose lives were more integrated into the regional Mediterranean sea trade networks were more burdened by the developing disease pool and vice versa also more inured to it, so relative to say the Celtic and Germanic people of Europe to the north or even perhaps West African peoples south of the Sahara, they had some trace of this same dynamic of "more advanced civilization spreads and finds the native people providentially falling into collapse before them." Europeans and Africans would have much better genetic resilience to develop appropriate immune responses to diseases new to them, and their somewhat moderated exposure and involvement in less intensive trade networks would mean they had more cultural preparation for what an outbreak of some virulent new plague new to them would do to their society, so this is a relatively shadowy factor compared to the spectacular horrors awaiting the peoples of the New World--or the Australian aboriginals or New Zealand Maori. All the peoples of the Americas prior to 1492 though appear to have gone through a genetic bottleneck that limited the range of genes available to adapt immune responses, so that was another layer in the intensity of the massive dieback they suffered.

In a context where in fact cultural and social expansion means not so much that new invading peoples simply move in and occupy land that someone else had first cultivated on their terms but then conveniently vanished, but rather the new people are somewhere on the spectrum between weaving their way into the local social order (very likely on advantageous terms as a group, in part from access to technology and political backing from strong if distant developed societies, but also simply because as intruders, they generally get to choose whether they poke their noses in or not, and will flock to and linger in places where they find opportunity and leave alone places where the opportunities are not so great) and tying new peoples into the networks they come from, versus coming in in force and subjugating the locals and setting themselves up as elite ruling peoples wholesale. In either case, they establish themselves, in varying levels of numbers and force, atop an already established indigenous labor system, with established agricultural and other technological practices, and by and large the work of primary resource cultivation and extraction will be done by the locals on whatever social terms, more or less exploited by their old elites and the newcomers alike.

So, broadly speaking, something like the Gallic Reaper has a niche only briefly until a population that hosts its inventors grows to a resources crunch, so on one hand plenty of labor is at hand for more labor intensive methods--and on the other demand is high, and waste in a particular phase of cultivation such as harvest is costly and an opportunity to favor whatever shifts in practice address this problem. It could be more sophisticated high tech approaches, feeding into as well as drawing from a generalized practice of high tech tinkering, but it seems pretty likely generally speaking innovation will take the form of shifting labor practices relying on human skill, and given the broad dominator paradigm of post-agricultural societies, probably not with too much concern for the well being and comfort of these lowly workers. Who will be ingenious in their own ways about making the best of their situation to be sure, but a large part of that is trying to sequester some of their productive potential from their exploitive "betters." They will negotiate higher living standards for themselves in the face of elite demands if they can do that, or hide their production to an extent if that is feasible, and if driven to the wall will take the form of resisting being effectively driven through various forms of passive labor resistance if that is all that is left to them.

Thus such methods as the Gallic Reaper have a place when broad global conditions create a global demand in the context of a generally exponentially advancing technical state of the art, which puts other demands than working the land on the general peasant population, drawing them into other fields of labor, while the general pool of technical proficiency means that there are lots of tinkering types with access to sophisticated market supplied inputs to choose from.

"It steam engines when it is steam engine time." This is a lot less mystical seeming when we realize that each innovation requires both a general substrate of skill, knowledge, and input material resources such as being able to purchase highly processed things like iron products rather than one Leonardo DaVinci type visionary genius having to fabricate everything from scratch, and also an effective market to output the product to, and the alternate labor-intensive ways of getting the job done are somewhat discouraged by other demands for labor which appear as opportunities to more or less free workers or for that matter, overlords looking to make profits in an expanding new sector. It helps to have the scale of market demand for a particular product, be it wheat or coal, appear to have prospects to expand without limit.

So, innovation keeps simmering along all through human history, and sometimes some precocious genius or lucky person reasons their way or stumbles into some approach that will impress later generations with its foresight. But it is not steam engine time for that approach just yet, there is little demand for it and it is largely abandoned and forgotten. It seems a big mistake then to identify these flashes in the pan and sit around wringing our hands wondering how powerful these people might have become if only they had not lost this. Actually the real substrate of social transformation is a deep and wide network of systems.

This is not to say I think we must assume there is only one path innovation can go on, or that there were not lost opportunities in the past. But I think even a different technological course of development would broadly require similar magnitudes of opportunity creating ground work; population centers reaching a certain density and number, overall levels of resource consumption and production being broadly similar, the range of trade and effective transport of goods to distant destinations on a similar scale, etc. The details of how agriculture might become more productive, or which material technologies take the lead first and thus perhaps condition the course of future development both via a specific technological skill set being emphasized and via the general social pattern this course causes to evolve, might conceivably be quite different from the OTL course. But I do think it is very tricky for us to visualize a consistent and workable different course, whereas the pattern we know from OTL history does in fact work. It might have failed to deliver some outcomes people in some ATL take for granted goes hand in hand with basic development that we remain backward on, and vice versa some unknown ATL might marvel at stuff we were doing two hundred years ago they are much less proficient at.

My guess is though there is not range, not by the time we get to say 1900 OTL broad levels, for two centuries of variance. More like a single generation if that; I could buy a carefully developed ATL where say aspects of turbojet engines circa 1950 are close in some respects to what we did in 1970, while aspects of say microelectronics are mostly still stuck in say 1925 by our benchmarks, but I would also expect that the more "backward" a field is by our benchmarks, the more rapidly that field will start surging forward, because technology and science is an interwoven net. And vice versa being apparently a decade or three ahead of us in some field means either we were unusually and thus to some extent unreasonably retarded in developing that, or that the ATL people stumbled into some very fortunate opportunity that came about mostly by chance, and will not sustain the pace of surging on past that while we tend to catch up and lower the gap, and maybe surpass them in that field.

So my guess is, technology comes in a woven network, and if you have one kind of item that is reminiscent of what was common in say 1600 OTL, you won't find other fields retarded or advanced by more than a century or so if that. The network tightens up as general capabilities broaden too, because everything feeds into everything else, so that modern peoples will be fluctuated say just decades if that, while around say the first century CE there might be scope for half a thousand years, and the world is patchy, a bunch of different "worlds" only loosely integrated.

But the notion that "if only the empire of Alexander had movable type!" and still more fatuous, the notion "if only the ancients understood economics the way we do!" is barking up the wrong tree I think. Ideas are a dime a dozen, imaginative people cook them up all the time; it is putting the pedal to the metal and working out how to do them in the material world that takes work and gives them solidity, and this is limited both by the resources available to implement them and by the rewards if any the people who invest in such ventures can find sustaining them--or not.
 
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