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On economic and technological growth Brad Delong has a new book out, Slouching Towards Utopia, and he kind of hits the idea of very, very slow technological progress before 1870 over and over again. I want to say 1% growth every 50 years on average? Doubling slow enough to be easily outpaced by population growth anyway.
The Church preserved learning. It didn’t stifle it. For most of the history of the Church it was the only set of institutions one could do intellectual work in at all.
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This is such a naive comment… look at what religious cultures used to do prior to the Rome converting or the Aztecs in the Americas — they’d literally sacrifice humans. That was the norm prior to the dark ages.
During the dark ages, they developed a wealth of technology. The challenge more had to do with the plague, famines, raids from the nords / Muslims, etc
Anyway, I recommend reading some books on the topic of you’re interested. Particularly because it’s around 1/4 - 1/3 of western history (at least the history we have decently documented).
What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded paper (or your material here) airplane invented, and by whom? Then, why not make it bigger?
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If I was on a more sophisticated forum I would assume this is satire. Alas, just classic HN tech bro nonsense.
In essence, it's about not seeing the role of an economic window of opportunity for opening up a then rapidly advancing segment of the "tech tree". E.g., the idea of the locomotive only became viable with the Napoleonic wars and the (at times) exponential increase in prices of horses and/or fodder (esp. between 1808 and 1824 in the UK, these spikes are also, when we see any major projects started). With maintenance costs of horse driven machinery rising, even marginal technology like early locomotives became viable, eventually leading to a mature technology, which is economical sound even in normal times. (We me see similar with rising natural gas prices in Europe, nowadays.) So, why hadn't this been pursued earlier? Well, it must have been because of the stubbornness of the ancestors. Usually, this is accomplished by ignoring that there had been always a difference between a commonly acknowledged working model and a higher spiritual truth, which seldom clashed, only when it came to claims that endangered the hierarchy. (E.g., the idea of everyone actually believing in a flat earth originates essentially in a 19th century play about Columbus. However, the T-shaped world map was never a working model, it conveyed a spiritual truth only. Columbus' problem was really him proposing that the world was smaller than generally assumed, thus there would be no room for another continent – for which there had been some evidence – and a direct way to India. Which is, as we know, not how it works.)
Something I’m curious about are what technologies sat around a very very long time with no real blocker for discovery. That it was as simple as “nobody thought to do it that way…”
The Greek philosoper Hero of Alexandria actually invented something close to a steam engine in the 1st century BE [1]. Whenever I think about "obvious" inventions which happened quite late in our civilization, I remember "The road not taken", a fantastic short story that plays with this idea. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...
> But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a machine that does the exact opposite, exploiting the apparent sucking power that occurs when hot steam is rapidly condensed with a spray of cold water. It’s the relative weight of the atmosphere, compared to the sudden vacuum from condensing steam, that does all the work.
This article connects that sort of engine to (among others) Hero of Alexandria’s temple doors, rather than the aeolipile, though suggests that it might have been known to "at least a few aeolipile-users" as a way to fill the aeolipile with water.
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Nobody knew how penecilin worked when it was first discovered (we now know it inhibits the growth of the bacterial cell wall) but that did not stop people using it, to good effect. Similar for many other discoveries/inventions.
More generally: technology (engineering) delivers results . Understanding why it does so is not required, and often comes quite late. If you want explanation , that's a role of science, though it's often preceded by a very long period of systematic observation. One striking example is geology, which has existed since at least the 17th century, but which didn't formally adopt its central organising and explanatory pri…
What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded paper (or your material here) airplane invented, and by whom? Then, why not make it bigger?
What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded paper (or your material here) airplane invented, and by whom? Then, why not make it bigger?
What amazes me about heavier than air flight is that it was invented all over the planet at virtually the same time by all kinds of unrelated people who had no connection or communication with or little knowledge of one another. Sure here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of nowhere. But in reality, heavier than air flight was invented s…