
Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?” - jasoncrawford
https://rootsofprogress.org/epistemic-standards-for-why-it-took-so-long
======
Zenst
In 1979 when I was at school in a maths class the teacher (for some reason)
was talking about graphine and how it would be a game changer when invented
and I said - why don't you get a bit of pencil lead and put between two bits
of cellotape, rinse repeat until you got a thin layer. I was lambasted and
ridiculed by the teacher.

THAT is another reason why it takes so long to invent X. People who shouldn't,
quickly dismiss and idiot label anything outside the box of thinking. Still
irks me, even today how I was not strong enough to stand my ground (probably
been put in detention for answering back) and how I accepted that I was wrong.

~~~
_fizz_buzz_
> why don't you get a bit of pencil lead and put between two bits of
> cellotape, rinse repeat until you got a thin layer.

I am a bit skeptical of your Account, but it is also not quite as trivial as
that. The key insight wasn’t just the mechanical exfoliation (scotch tape
Methode). This had been used before and wasn’t new by itself. The key insight
was transferring it onto a SiO2 substrate. So, no worries you most likely did
not miss out on your Nobel Prize ;)

~~~
6510
Its not about that, its about dismissing practical trains of thought -
outright. Ironically, the author of the article is such a person.

> To invent something is to invent a practical version of that thing.

It is not. Like with everything from the chain of command to the chain of
events it takes all links in the chain to make it a chain.

You might as well argue that it is marketing that is responsible for the
invention or that the consumer in their decision to purchase the newfangled
contraption decides if the invention is real or not. Or no wait, the
financier, he is the true visionary.

> If your “invention” is impractical, it’s just a demo or prototype

Oh, that is _only this and that._ Someone who trivializes the prototype
doesn't have what it takes to envision it, let alone make it. Hardly a
position fromwhich to judge those who did and do.

~~~
sriku
Furthermore, if I understand the position, the patent office would not agree
to the OP's definition either .. as long as the original maker of the
"prototype" could describe the mechanism well enough. The inventor of the
"practical" version would have to articulate what it took above and beyond the
prototype and even then only be able to patent that part and not including the
invention covered by the proto.

~~~
Ajedi32
To me that sounds more like an argument against our patent system than an
argument in favor of counting impractical prototypes as inventions.

~~~
sriku
The patent system is supposed to be to encourage knowledge sharing in society
by granting monopoly in exchange for full disclosure of invention details.
Imposing an irregular concept like "practicality" on top this is
counterproductive.

Practicality is not straightforward. Was Edison's light bulb practical on its
own terms or did it become practical only after the invention of electric
power generation and distribution? What about economies of scale? .. and so
on.

------
pfdietz
Some inventions are gated by scientific discovery, particularly in materials.

For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron,
causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of
dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could
have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium. But it
wasn't invented until 1948. No one had done the experiment and seen that
effect.

Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium
diboride. It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it
wasn't until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical
temperature of 39 K.

~~~
melling
Hopefully when we’re done with this, perhaps we can extrapolate and invent the
future a little faster.

If we invest a few percent more in R&D every year, for example, would that
compound over decades?

If we did more Citizen Science? Individual and crowdsourced.

More X-Prize investments?

Consumer products like televisions, smartphones, smart watches, etc advance
because consumers are willing to spend large amounts of money.

If robotics, or any technology, could reach a tipping point, it’ll get the
same investment.

~~~
chrismcb
Research into what... I think that is part of the problem. I was recently
reading a click bait article about how some craft person knew something an
archeologist didn't... The Portuguese is no one knows everything. Also look at
a lot of our technological marvels ah were accidents. More resesrch won't
necessarily help, if you are already going down the wrong path

~~~
yetihehe
But going more paths will help discover more good paths.

------
pfdietz
An example I've mentioned before on HN is the rotary pressure exchanger. It
has one moving part, is 98% efficient, and the base patent was issued in 1988.
Perhaps there was a lack of large application before reverse osmosis became a
big thing?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_exchanger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_exchanger)

~~~
nl
This is pretty interesting.

> Early designs for desalination plants... have an energy consumption of over
> 9 kWh per cubic meter.

> Many early SWRO plants built in the 1970s and early 1980s had an energy
> consumption of over 6.0 kWh per cubic meter of potable water.

But it doesn't go on to list the comparable performance of the newer post-1988
patent designs (except to say 98% efficient). Do you have any idea what in
terms of kWh/m^3 that converts to?

~~~
kragen
[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-
the-...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-
desalination-era-is-here/) says Sorek produces drinking water at US$0.58/kℓ by
reverse osmosis at 7.1 MPa. 7.1 MPa is by definition 7.1 MJ/m³, so 98%
efficient at the mechanical level would be 7.2 MJ/m³. (As someone else pointed
out, though, 98% is the efficiency of the pressure exchanger, not the whole
electro/mechanical/hydraulic system.) 6 kWh is 22 MJ, and 9 kWh is 32 MJ.
US$0.58 is the cost of about 52 MJ, but that includes things like the cost of
building the plant and defouling it.

------
pippy
All inventions have prerequisites that people don't think about. The steam
engine is the first invention people think about if they were time travel,
scribble something on a bit of paper and become rich. You'll need several
boring things that need to happen for you to make a working steam engine.

You'll need the materials. A lot of strong, cheap steel. Preheated blast
furnaces weren't invented until the early 1800's. Thomas Savery had the idea
for the steam engine almost a hundred years before the Watt, but Savery's
engines kept blowing up because the lack of strong steel.

You'll also need to overcome trade barriers too. You'll also need cheap coal
(ironically requiring steam engines to become cost effective) and high quality
iron ore (ideally from Sweden). Through out most of history, empires hated
trading as it could create vulnerabilities.

There's also the market prerequisites, no one wants your expensive steam
engine if a donkey pulling a wheel is cheaper and more reliable.

~~~
virtuous_signal
Thinking about this and going down the wikipedia rabbit hole of inventions
scares me. I've heard the Dark Ages happened in part because society
collectively forgot how to re-create the advanced technology from ancients, so
once things inevitably broke, people just became that less efficient. Another
area which strikes me as complex as metalworking is textiles. What if we
forgot how to use the machines for harvesting cotton, spinning it into threads
and then weaving it into clothes? I wouldn't be able to help at all in such a
catastrophe, despite holding advanced degrees. I'm afraid I wouldn't even know
how to fashion a spindle, or operate one. Hopefully the internet has enough
information that this doesn't happen again?

~~~
roywiggins
Well, the scholars at the time thought so anyway. They were very keen on
classical knowledge.

More realistically, the "dark ages" were a time of political dislocation and
fragmentation of trading networks, so Europe just got a lot poorer. Rome had
knit together a vast trading network, but without Roman armies you couldn't
trade long distances anymore.

You forget how to build Roman roads when you don't have a government around to
build roads, and even if you did, you don't have the money or manpower anyway.

Medieval Europe invented a heavy plow, which the Romans never came up with, so
it was not all disintegration.

[https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--
fisheries...](https://sciencenordic.com/agriculture-agriculture--fisheries-
anthropology/how-the-heavy-plough-changed-the-world/1381548)

~~~
paganel
Watermills were also on an evolutionary path (so to speak) in the early Middle
Ages. From the dedicated wiki page [1]:

> Largely unaffected from the turbulent political events following the demise
> of the Western Roman Empire, the importance of watermilling continued to
> grow under the new Germanic lords. (...) By Carolingian times, references to
> watermills in the Frankish Realm had become "innumerable".

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_medieval_watermills#Historical_overview)

------
emilecantin
It's also amazing to me how quantitative, evolutionary advances to some
technologies that might seem futile or superficial enable some qualitative
technology leaps.

For example, miniaturization of computers seemed pretty futile to me in the
90s. Indeed, why would I care if that big box becomes slightly smaller?

That miniaturization is basically what enabled the whole smartphone industry.
The large-scale availability of small and powerful chips in turn enabled the
drone / quadcopter to become feasible (a quadcopter is too unstable to fly on
its own, and there's no real way to stabilize it mechanically like we do on RC
helicopters; it has to be stabilized electronically).

I think the best inventions come from recognizing the kind of qualitative
leaps you can do from evolutionary advances to existing technologies.

~~~
Robotbeat
Or rechargable batteries. Even lithium ion batteries weren't better than state
of the art NiMH batteries when they first came out in the 1990s. Evolutionary
improvement let us develop quadcopters, e-bikes, e-scooters, electric cars,
smartphones, e-cigarettes, tablets, and countless other devices that simply
weren't that practical 3 decades ago. And this process continues.

------
bacon_waffle
My favourite example of an "idea behind its time" is the torque amplifier,
which enabled mechanical analog computers on invention in the early 1900s. It
is made of nothing more complicated than a source of rotary power, a couple
drums/pulleys, and string/rope:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_amplifier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_amplifier)

~~~
fernly
I don't understand why this is called an "amplifier" rather than simply "a
clutch". The torque input is always the same; there is no "amplification" of
the torque. The tensioned rope or spring simply applies more or less of the
torque to the output, by varying the friction on the drum.

~~~
bacon_waffle
The output gets more torque, just like a capstan allows a person to amplify
tension on a rope. Maybe this will explain better than the wikipedia page:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ailf7bz9H0o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ailf7bz9H0o)

edit: spelling, grammar...

~~~
fernly
The reason I wondered, is that in years past I had serviced machines that used
a "wrap spring clutch"[1] which I knew used the same principle. These are
mentioned in passing in the Wpedia article on clutches[2] where it says they
obey the "Capstan equation". That article[3] opens,

> The capstan equation or belt friction equation, also known as Eytelwein's
> formula, relates the hold-force to the load-force if a flexible line is
> wound around a cylinder (a bollard, a winch or a capstan)

So there's the generic idea, which can be viewed as a clutch or a bollard. The
bollard is an "amplifier" in the same sense that a transistor is, where a
small controlling voltage regulates a larger current flow. However the wrap
spring clutch is on/off, not proportional, so is effectively a torque SWITCH.

[1] [https://www.warnerelectric.com/products/clutch-
products/wrap...](https://www.warnerelectric.com/products/clutch-
products/wrap-spring-clutches)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutch)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capstan_equation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capstan_equation)

~~~
bacon_waffle
I think a better transistor analogy than a FET is a BJT, where both the
amplified quantity and control signal are electrical current.

The key difference between a clutch and torque amplifier is that, with a
clutch, the output shaft power all comes from the input shaft. The torque
amplifier's output shaft power mostly comes from the output drum, not the
input shaft. The drums are constantly spinning, powered by some external
source.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNNkNc7mFJ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNNkNc7mFJ4)

------
Alex3917
It's crazy to think that the modern bicycle was invented the same year as the
modern car, both in 1885. Although apparently the ball bearing was a limiting
factor for the creation of each.

~~~
sitkack
The vast majority of advancements come directly from materials science. New
materials are so strongly correlated to advancements, that I think there
should be national labs that run government scale experiments to search for
new substances.

~~~
redis_mlc
> The vast majority of advancements come directly from materials science.

This is one of the most thought-provoking comments I've ever seen on HN!

Can you expand on that for a couple of paragraphs?

~~~
NikolaeVarius
I don't think these are the "best" examples as they are probably not
completely accurate, but there is probably a reason why the Stone Age, Bronze
Age, Iron Age, and Steel Ages exist as a concept.

Also I think it makes sense since materials science is more applied
chemistry/physics/engineering, so naturally materials science is huge because
it represents 3 fields of knowledge interacting.

~~~
bllguo
im not sure "steel age" is a common term, but I agree with the idea. the
(second) industrial revolution was spurred by availability of steel

anyway, you can take it further. the information age we are in is arguably
characterized by silicon

------
mncharity
I was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday. Long sigh. "Why did
it take so long to..."? Regrettably not. "How very long will it eventually
take to...", write an intro Astronomy textbook, that doesn't bungle the color
of the Sun? I still don't know of a single one. With true-color in a leading
image, and in illustrations. With no misconceptions about yellow stars, or
scattering to yellow, or blackbody color, or color perception. With explicit
mention of stellar classification color's non-perceptual white-point of blue
Vega. With correctness from clarity, not from ambiguity and omissions. Such a
text could have been written any time in the last few decades. People have
been suggesting it. So how many more decades will we wait? It's a mistake to
confuse systemic communication, coordination, and incentive dysfunction, with
"people don't care" (as the interventions needed are different)... but they do
superficially look so similar.

Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of
chemistry education content. I'm currently trying to decide whether to create
a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about
transformative content improvement. "Atoms are little balls"; interactive
_accurate_ simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are
_lots_ of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in
papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely
on youtube. A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on
youtube. So to achieve a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, _show
the bleeping thing_ ", would require a lot of mucking about, asking after
images, educating about copyright... sigh. At least accurate electron
simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing
expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran. And yet, for how
long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content? One
more year? 5? 10? 25? More?

As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do
that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do
> that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet"._

Most of it caused by "who's going to pay for it? I can't afford to do it on my
own". And, sadly, the need to make money at every step of the way is what
causes a lot of these problems. You wouldn't have to educate anyone about
copyrights when dealing with pictures of atoms if there weren't a couple
layers of rent-seekers in between you and the photographer.

> _a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing"_

One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do yet is a kind of "continuity
of zoom" image from everyday scale to nanoscale. Imagine a video (or better
yet, a frame with a slider you can drag back and forth yourself) depicting an
object - say, a metal sheet, or a fly's wing, or something - that starts in
1:1 scale, and then the zoom level gradually increases, going through
overlapped perspectives of camera, optical microscope, ... [whatever they use
in the middle] ... up to a scanning microscope, so you can watch as the image
is being zoomed all the way to the atomic level. With no jump cuts in between.
Would do wonders for people's sense of scale and understanding of what the
world is made of.

~~~
ghaff
See Powers of Ten from 1968. Although I imagine there are more recent
examples.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Haven't seen that. All the recent examples I saw were vector drawings (Flash
animations, then HTML5 ones, and their renditions on YouTube).

Still, I assume that that 1968 video was mostly fiction and artist's
imagination between ~ 10^-5 and 10^9. With current-era tech, we should be able
to go down to 10^-8 with a real shot of a real object.

~~~
ghaff
It’s by Ray and Charles Eames and is considered to be pretty groundbreaking.
But, yes, we know a lot more and have more imagery regarding the small scales
in particular than we did 50 years ago.

------
teej
If you liked this article I would recommend “How To Invent Everything” by Ryan
North. The book is effectively a time travelers guide to reinventing
technology.

~~~
The_Fox
This book actually does try to answer questions like "what's necessary to
invent the bicycle?"

According to the book, bikes depend on 2 major branches:

Bikes -> Spinning wheels -> Natural fibers -> Farming

and

Bikes -> Steel -> Kilns/Smelters/Forges (this has quite a lot of decendents)
-> Mining -> Farming

Very interesting book.

------
ggggtez
>Wheeled Luggage

I think that one is pretty obvious. You need to be a traveler going somewhere
you need to bring luggage to... but it has to be somewhere you can't just have
someone help you or use a dolly (e.g. taxi or hotel) but also needs to have
smooth surface for the wheels (roads/sidewalks/flooring...), and it has to be
a traveler who can't just afford to hire a servant/car/cart/horse to transport
those goods.

Prior to train stations, is there any reasonable place a traveler could want
to go that would even cause the necessary demand for wheeled luggage?

~~~
Mvandenbergh
Probably not but wheeled luggage was invented almost two centuries after the
railway!

~~~
bluGill
The railroad provided wheels. Every station had a large cart. Unload your
trunk from the carriage to cart, then push the cart up to the train, then load
onto the train where it was stacked. Nobody had to personally handle their
luggage much, and they also typically carried a larger volume of stuff. As
such built in wheels wouldn't have been desired for rail road travel as there
already was wheels available when you needed them.

------
tunesmith
I wonder if there have been any truly physically-gating dependencies? Meaning,
physical and natural phenomenon where certain advances were impossible before
they happened? For instance, certain technology that absolutely could not have
existed before, say, a certain comet flew past because before then there was
no evidence to believe X. Is there any reason to believe that we couldn't have
been at this technological level 1,000 or 10,000 years ago?

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Things getting cool enough after the big bang seems to be the obvious one.

But on a more serious note, maybe modern encryption? The physical gate being
the literal ability to get rocks to count fast enough to finish decrypting
something before the heath death of the universe

~~~
zenhack
I'd actually put modern crypto in the opposite bucket: there's virtually no
physical constraints at all. You could do RSA by hand if you had to, and if
nobody _else_ has computers, you can pick a key size small enough for doing it
manually to be practical.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Oh I agree. I guess I was approaching this from the angle of the use of long
keys where it would be literally impossible to decrypt unless computers exist.

We could also get into the sub argument of math being a property of the
universe. Does encryption exist if we don't discover it? Trying to imagine a
universe where our concept of math is impossible to the universe just not
working that way

------
nickdothutton
Please take the time to enjoy this. I’ll leave it to others who know the work
of James Burke to explain
[https://youtu.be/7G8YHWbi-9U](https://youtu.be/7G8YHWbi-9U)

~~~
spitfire
Oh damn you to hell!

I cannot see a james Burke show/presentationwithout being sucked in and
watching the whole thing. It’s just not possible. Even if I’m just walking by
I get sucked in.

Why can’t today’s presenters/media types be as good as him?

------
LeonB
Perhaps economics/accounting ideas would be able to be invented sooner, as
they have less reliance on physical materials/supply chains etc.

Here's my 3 favorite candidates:

\- insurance based on statistics

\- double entry book-keeping

\- credit cards

How early could they have been invented? (How early were they invented in
primitive forms?)

~~~
MperorM
That's a really interesting observation. My knowledge on the history of
finance is woefully inadequate, but stocks seem to be another concept that was
popularized very late.

------
mmhsieh
the author sets out on a very difficult exercise, made more so if he does not
include the other inventive civilizations. documenting china's inventions, for
instance, required more than a lifetime of work by Needham; volumes continued
to come out even decades after his death around 1990; some dozens of densely
worded volumes comprise his masterwork and it is still thought to be far from
complete. some of what the British patent office was approving in the 1800s
were already in their modern form in china at the time of Christ. such
examples are many, and I expect similarly so for India, the Arabs, the
Persians, the Mayans, the Incas, etc.

------
hirundo
Why is it taking so long to invent the semantic web? It could have a large
economic impact, but solutions don't catch on. We have a specific way to say
"I am a teapot", but not a generic way to unambiguously make simple statements
like that. At least not a way that has gained traction.

What's the missing tech? Maybe there isn't one, and we're just an Eli Whitney
coder away from making it happen.

~~~
lmm
The semantic web is a solution in search of a problem; most websites don't
have semantics beyond "the page looks like this", and couldn't be trusted to
describe them accurately if they did. Enabling a machine to understand a
website in the same way that a human can would be valuable, but is probably an
AI-complete problem; in the meantime the best path towards it is probably
platforms for easy mostly-automated web scraping or testing (In fact the most
useful stepping stone towards a semantic web I've seen is probably adblock,
with its simple slider/checkbox interface for telling it "this piece is an ad"
in the cases where it failed to figure that out).

Maybe "why are Selenium tests so flaky? Can we do better?" would be a good
starting point if you want to work on this problem. The inability of most
(all?) companies to write _good_ browser-based test suites is effectively
those companies' inability to recover the semantics _of their own site_.

~~~
Tainnor
I never made the link between semantic web and the pain that are browser
tests, but now that you say it, it makes sense (especially if you use semantic
attributes to identify the page elements for your tests).

------
3pt14159
My favourite idea is the internet. The romans could have done it with flags /
torches and towers. Don't tell me it wouldn't pay for itself. Sending data
over long distances at that type of speed would have paid for itself multiple
times over, even if it were one tiny fraction of the bandwidth we have today.

~~~
anewvillager
There's something like this in the movie Lord of the Rings: The Return of the
King

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6LGJ7evrAg)

I wonder if this method of communication was EVER used by any civilization.

~~~
detaro
It's been described throughout history, so quite certainly.

~~~
anewvillager
Ohhhh, that's true!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon#For_defensive_communications_\(historical\))

------
thadk
The ENIAC credit seems to be further complicated by the tube based code-
breakers that came out 3-4 years before on a top-secret basis, only in the
last few decades documented publicly:
[https://daytoncodebreakers.org/brief/one_sheet/](https://daytoncodebreakers.org/brief/one_sheet/)
and
[https://daytoncodebreakers.org/more/sitemap/](https://daytoncodebreakers.org/more/sitemap/)

------
jasoneckert
I misinterpreted "X" as meaning "X windows"

Good article, but I still wish it was about X windows...definitely a buzzkill.

------
z3t4
The article was on to something, that something only becomes viable when its
stronger or faster then a human. Because human labor has always been cheap.
I'm sure engines and other things existed before, but they where only
available for kings, or smart people with free time (money). What have been
the single most important factor for our recent technology explosion is that
human labor has become more expensive because of opportunity cost. People will
not join the army if they can get better paid doing something else. So it's
also solves wars and crisis. But it can only be achieved politically. If you
where a king, there wouldn't really be any incentive to make other peoples
life better, as you then would have to pay more for services, and the people
might overthrow you if they think they can fare well on their own.

------
jmmcd
I think the point about an "obvious" demand for a product is important, but
what is obvious changes over time. After the industrial revolution it was
obvious that certain improvements could make a lot of money in industry, but
that was not obvious eg to the inventors of the Roman steam engine.

------
dr_dshiv
In case you were curious why it took till 3500 BC to invent the wheel:

[https://www.livescience.com/18808-invention-
wheel.html](https://www.livescience.com/18808-invention-wheel.html)

~~~
notahacker
The 'why didn't the Incas, who were brilliant engineers eminently capable of
mastering the axle, invent the wheel' is a fun question too. But one easily
answered by looking at how little of their territory is flat enough for a
wheel to be useful.

~~~
dmurray
Plenty of people use cars, buses and railways in Peru today. The wheel is
definitely useful in that territory, it just wasn't advantageous enough to
over existing tech, so it needed to wait until complementary technologies had
been invented in other cultures.

~~~
notahacker
Made a lot more sense to start cutting and maintaining gently graded roads
through the Andes for civilisations who started millennia earlier with the
premise that horses/oxen were available and good at pulling stuff and once you
got through the mountains everything would be nice and flat. Iron helped a lot
too, of course.

The wheel still isn't particularly useful in reaching a number of Inca sites
even given dynamite and the internal combustion engine. It wasn't that Incas
were averse to the concept of roads so much as they didn't see why roads
shouldn't have stairs.

Llamas are good at climbing steps and terrible at pulling carts...

------
random_upvoter
My favorite example is the Edison phonograph. I see no reason why someone like
Newton could not have invented this. We could have have recordings of Mozart
and Beethoven playing the piano.

------
hyko
Colossus predates ENIAC
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer)

------
Razengan
Sometimes thinking of an idea is the hardest step after all.

How many of us have just sat there how many times, with all the tools we could
need at our disposal, but not sure of what to do with them?

------
mariushn
What software do you think could help speed up discoveries/inventions?
Ideally, something which doesn't require immense computing (like materials
simulator).

~~~
6510
Ill pester you with a riddle I came up with the other day. I'm calling it the
apples and oranges problem. If we could answer it it would increase progress a
thousand fold:

The question is: How do you compare unrelated features?

To put silly: What is more important, a led on your coffee machine or gears on
your bicycle and by what margin?

How much is CPU speed worth vs memory vs screen resolution vs battery life?

We could make a chart for each for what it costs, we could make a chart for
the technical advantage or disadvantage, we could make a chart for consumer
demand. I'm probably forgetting 10 things here....

Now imagine each of those to be dynamic(!)

If the CPU does zero cycles per second it will render the entire computer
useless. If it is 0.8 Ghz and the goal is [say] web browsing it is almost as
worthless as the 0 Ghz. In a few years 1.5 wont be enough either. The
infinitely large memory costs an infinitely large amount of money.

If we could resolve this puzzle we could make giant leaps forwards.

Until we do grandma will have to pick her phone on gut feeling and the market
will just have to anticipate that.

~~~
nradov
There's no puzzle or riddle. You compare unrelated features by looking at
customers' revealed preferences in terms of how much they are willing to pay.
Economists do this type of analysis all the time.

------
alkibiades
why did the suitcase with wheels take until 1970s

------
imtringued
The bicycle is a pretty poor example of this. The word "car" is derived from
the word "carriage". People already had horse or ox drawn "cars" centuries
before the bicycle was invented. There simply was no need for an inferior
method of transportation.

~~~
comicjk
I think you're comparing bicycles to an idealized version of horses. Real
horses get tired quickly, get hurt easily, and are quite expensive. Assuming
decent roads, a bicycle would often be more convenient, and almost always
cheaper.

From Wikipedia: "A stagecoach traveled at an average speed of about 5 miles
per hour".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach)

~~~
notahacker
> Assuming decent roads, a bicycle would often be more convenient, and almost
> always cheaper.

I think you're assuming an idealised version of roads. In all seriousness,
good roads were usually cobblestones and bad roads rutted tracks until bicycle
pioneers started lobbying for roads to be paved smoothly enough to make their
then-expensive hobby more practical for transportation than horses and horse
drawn vehicles. Asphalt and Portland cement roads were new technologies in the
nineteenth century too.

