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Historical Tech Tree

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Re: Historical Tech Tree

#61

Post by geor9e »

mikewarot wrote: post #14

My 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

Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably invent screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a "human thing", but what else would serve the rotational wedging purpose in this universe's elements and physics?

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#62

Post by AlotOfReading »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
AlotOfReading wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.

I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of technology is extremely expansive.

You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us today. It reduced malnutrition and the economic/social/political effects of disease. The difference I'm trying to highlight is that it probably wasn't understood as such and intentionally done for that purpose. Nixtamalization was culturally encoded as just what you did. Had they had a better understanding of nutrition, they probably would have made more intentional efforts to include the missing vitamins nixtamalization doesn't provide. We often see signs of those missing nutrients in precolumbian skeletons.

This extends to a surprisingly wide variety of ancient technology. Most metallurgy probably wasn't understood in the technical sense we think of it today until quite late. We see that with early glass, where people simply didn't understand what they were doing. Ingredients from specific areas would have specific effects, but sometimes didn't for reasons no one at the time understood. Craft communities would standardize on very specific, ritualized processes that simply couldn't be changed because they didn't have a good mechanistic understanding of the variables involved. One of the downstream effects of this is that poaching craftspeople is a viable strategy (they had the specific "recipe") and also that resources like sand from specific areas in syria and egypt were effectively non-fungible for centuries. You had to trade with whoever controlled that area even if you had the craftspeople.

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#63

Post by thaumasiotes »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #62
thaumasiotes wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.

I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of technology is extremely expansive. You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us…

Andrew Carnegie wrote that one of the things that gave him an advantage over other steel manufacturers was that he hired a chemist to test ore for iron content.

By implication, this was something that had never been done before.

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#64

Post by bee_rider »

geor9e wrote: post #61
mikewarot wrote: post #14

My 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

Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably invent screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a "human thing", but what else would serve the rotational wedging purpose in this universe's elements and physics?

It would be funny to think of what might actually be a human thing. Like, our arms are quite weird, right? So potentially another intelligent species even on a rocky planet might not invent throwing spears, right? Even our close relatives, the chimpanzees, can’t use them well at all. Even fairly flighty animals seem to barely have the idea that a creature standing, like, tens of feet away from them might be “in range.”

I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the development of melee spears would be, without throwing spears.

The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for almost all of history, any changes to spears would, I guess, make a big difference.

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#67

Post by School-Cotton »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
AlotOfReading wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.

On the other hand, it’s basically impossible to have large organized civilization in Mesoamerica without hominy[1]. So should hominy be upstream of anything Mesoamericans invented?

1: For anyone whose Nahuatl is a bit rusty: the English word for nixtmalized corn is “hominy”.

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#68

Post by School-Cotton »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #62
thaumasiotes wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list. This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.

I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of technology is extremely expansive. You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us…

Craftsmen having secret recipes isn’t quite restricted to the past. According to my drummer friends, nobody knew how to make cymbals as good as Zildjian’s until very, very recently.

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#69

Post by School-Cotton »

Somewhat tangential, but can anyone explain or give any insight into how candles were invented? This has always puzzled me. The idea that if you put a piece of string in some wax, and light it on fire, the string will get hot enough to melt wax, and the molten wax will be sucked into it by capillary action, and burn, before the string itself burns, seems very counterintuitive and hard to come up with before a modern understanding of chemistry and physics. And yet, candles have apparently existed since 700 BC. How?

Re: Historical Tech Tree

#70

Post by drcode »

School-Cotton wrote: post #69

Somewhat tangential, but can anyone explain or give any insight into how candles were invented? This has always puzzled me. The idea that if you put a piece of string in some wax, and light it on fire, the string will get hot enough to melt wax, and the molten wax will be sucked into it by capillary action, and burn, before the string itself burns, seems very counterintuitive and hard to come up with before a modern…

Pure speculation, but I would guess people first mixed wax and lamp oil in different ways to still get the burning effect of oil, with less of the cost of the oil, then added a wick to help light the oil/wax.

Then eventually that product morphed over time to the point where they realized the oil wasn't actually a necessary component

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