Most comments here seems to be historical complaints.
But I love this!)
Historical Tech Tree
101–110 of 132 posts
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#102Tobacco and alcohol are included, but there is no mention of other botanical or mycological developments outside food production. Those would be an interesting addition.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#103Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science". This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "inven…
Yes it feels very 'male' centric in a way. Like with clothing, the various stitches that you need to make textiles, each individual stitch method is it's own technology. Like, every knot that gets invented, that's a technology. Knots and stitches and warp and weft, they can only come out of a human mind, they are inventions. But trying to find out the dates there, that's nearly impossible if the data were recorded even. And then most of those textile inventions were done by women who are then again historical dark matter even in the best circumstances.
Still, great project and I'd have loved to see it crowdsourced like wikipedia.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#104Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science". This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
Unfortunately, a lot of the reasoning behind omissions is that we have lost the majority of information; what we learned was from luck, inference, and unfortunately (because it produces misleading results), selective durability of some items over others.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#105Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science". This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
Metallurgy is by far the most important human technology. That's why "copper", "bronze" and "iron" are used to classify ages.
Metal has the fortunate process of durability over millenia... we are biased by what we find.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#106This is truly amazing. I love it!
Found a minor nit — the entry for “shoe” is at 3500 BCE and links to the Wikipedia article for “sandal”. But the Wikipedia article for “shoe” [1] indicates that the earliest shoes (apparently not sandals) were worn around 7000-8000 BCE.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't…
having no experience in precision manufacturing and metrology... how does one become more precise than input tools?
The ultimate reference for this is the Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy, which is available as a PDF[1], the print versions aren't cheap.
One example of precision is the Whitworth 3 plate method (invented in the 1830s), with this method, you can make surfaces that approach precision in the micron range, if necessary.
Leonardo Da Vinici's screw cutting lathe sketches show a machine that uses 2 lead screws to generate another, which averages the values of the other two screws, using careful rotations of threads, etc, it should be possible to use this method to work your way up to a uniform precise screw where each new generation is better than the ones before it.
[1] https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#108My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
> I've let the folks at Wikipedia know. What "folks at Wikipedia"? Can't you just edit the date yourself?
I could, but I just put a note on the "Talk" page, and let someone better at editing do it at some future date.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#109Discussed once (and I do mean once): Historical Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1 comment) Edit: oops! The Universal Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607 - June 2025 (65 comments)
Someone else found https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607 (A link to an article about how it's made, with 65 comments)
Oh wow, thanks for letting me know! Added above.
Re: Historical Tech Tree
#110Related: The Universal Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607
Thanks! Added to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44829170 now.