111–120 of 315 posts
I've often thought we could have had integrated circuits shortly after the invention of photography. 150 years earlier! It would make an interesting steampunk world with steam and hydraulics and CPUs.
Why did you think that? We didn't have transistors until the 1960s.
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Could have used a rocket? They've been around for ages. It seems to me that for flight the construction materials (silk, bamboo, string, glue - what the early WW1-era aircraft were made from) and the propulsion (solid-fuel rocket) have been around for over a thousand years.
Yes, but no... Rocket does have the trust ratio needed. But then there is questions of burn time and control. So you could get up there, with some risk. But not stay there for very long time. Short googling for solid fuel rockets seem that longest burn times are less than 3 minutes... And that is best case scenario with 20th/21st century technology...
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>OTOH in an industrialized society you wouldn't want slaves even if you could have them. Really? Leaving aside the moral issues most associated with slavery specifically, there is a huge demand in modern industrialized society for all sorts of low cost human labor. If middle class-ish people in the West could hire more people for the equivalent of a couple dollars an hour many would absolutely do so.
It's very unlikely that slaves would be able to cover any present-day jobs except very menial service tasks. Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver, which is one of the least qualified jobs today.
>Cleaning houses, mowing lawns, sure. But you wouldn't even get as far as a taxi/truck driver
Again I see how one might expect this to be true but it isn't.
some industries where slavery is widespread:
- Sex work - ocean fishing - mining
I'm sure there are others
Not sure what conclusion the author will come to as an answer to the question in the title (part III is still to come). But if it doesn't include the liberation of inventors (i.e. the protection of intellectual property through patents) and the legal framework for "anyone" to profit from their inventions then I'll be disappointed. As his story indicates so far it was not for the want of ingenuity that the industrial…
I reject the idea that patent and IP law would have made these developments occur sooner. In fact, I blame the slow down in technological development partly on patent and IP law. You think the rapid development seen during the industrial revolution could have happened if people were at litigious as they are now? The ability to create derivative inventions is essential to progress.
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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…
It’s pretty common that “breakthrough inventions” are arrived-at pretty much simultaneously by apparently disparate sources at approximately the same moment in time. Consider the telephone, which is attributed to Alexander Graham Bell in most of the world and to Antonio Meucci in my native Italy. Or radio, which is broadly attributed to Marconi or Tesla. In hindsight it seems like one person triumphed upon others, bu…
> Hero [Hero of Alexandria, 10-70 AD] even suggested a mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow, airtight altar, the heated air within would flow down a tube into a sphere full of water, which in turn would be pushed up another tube into a hanging bucket. The bucket, when sufficiently heavy with water, would then pull on a rope to open some temple doors. Crucially, when the fire was extinguished,…
There is no way an engine like this could outrun a lean and speedy chariot with two to four horses. Also, even a primitive mechanism like this may have encountered fatal problems with dirt, dust and sand. (Mind that steam locomotion was first tried for roads, which was a total failure because of the quality of roads, even in major city centers like London.)
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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…
It's pretty common for things like that to happen. There are many other cases. Calculus from Newton and Leipzig being another example. There is even a wikipedia page delving into the concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery Basic hypothesis is that once enough precondition for an invention are there then the leap can be made.
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Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed. Once rapid design-build-test cycles were practial, the initial Wright design rapidly shifted to a monocoque fuselage with forward wings and empennage, emerging within a decade. In just over 30 years after the Wright's first powered flight, the DC-3, an aircraft still in commercial operation was f…
>Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed. The only thing I would change is that this makes it seem like powered flight was waiting on the engine, when it was waiting on the plane. One thing that struck me at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is how far advanced IC technology was while the Wright brothers were gliding in wooden contraption…
And of course even if you survive the iterative development process, all you’ve got is a (largely) useless glider until the engine comes along and you can commercialize it.