The historical figure that strikes me as "most likely to be a time traveller" is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was accidentally killed during the war. The Romans wanted to capture him and use him for their own purposes. It's possible that could have changed history quite a bit.
Heron of Alexandria is another candidate that gets a lot of space in that book. He invented the first steam engine way before his time. But also many other insanely elaborate mechanical devices. Including an entirely mechanical little theater, with mechanical puppets and music.
Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest inventor of our time might be applying his work to video game engines.
> Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only.
I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?
Yes that's probably why the industrial revolution didn't happen. There's a good comment below that explains other societal reasons why the industrial revolution didn't happen, like the lack of contract law and investors.
I also read a great theory once (but I can't find it again through google!) that the industrial revolution really required the invention of the cannon first. Building an efficient steam engine in roman times would have been incredibly expensive and dangerous, because of their primitive metal technology. The cannon created a tech race between nations to develop more/better/cheaper/lighter cannons. Which resulted in better metal working tech. Once you can make big pieces of metal that can withstand and direct the pressure created from explosions, steam engines aren't too far away.
But Heron's invention was still useful, and would have been the fastest moving thing ever built up to that time. Perhaps it could have been adapted to military applications, like flinging tons of rocks really fast at high speed?
The thing you can't recall in your second paragraph sounds like the sort of "chain of inventions" that James Burke used to explain on the old BBC series Connections. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) )
See in particular episode 6 in the original 1978 series (just going by the summary on Wikipedia).
I'll chime in here to add The Day the Universe Changed, on PBS. Less "invention" specific and broader, about how certain concepts shifted us. It has also aged better, in my opinion. Connections, especially its last episode, seems rooted in a certain place and time.
All of those Connections shows with James Burke (Connections, Connections^2 and Connections^3) were totally phenomenal to me when I saw them and absolutely sparked my interest in inventing. I still occasionally watch the original Connections series, having downloaded them to my collection.
Steam engines need fuel. There's no coal (to speak of) in Italy.
Europe's coal belt starts in Scotland, runs through England, into France (and a nubbin in northern Spain / Portugal), Germany, and Silesia.
Oddly enough, the first countries to industrialise were, in order, England (which wasn't busily falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders), then (after they'd stopped falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders) France and Germany. They remain the heart of the European economy, a century and a half later.
The third great set of coal deposits were in the United States, though that was a country that also had tremendous forests, more readily accessed (and frequently local to where energy was needed). Coal consumption didn't exceed wood as a fuel until the 1880s. The US also benefited from oil, and was the world's leading extractor of oil from the 1860s to the 1950s. Having first developed coal, iron, railroads, canals, and steamships, the US could usefully transport that oil from the remote rural regions in which it was found (Titusville, Pennsylvania, Ventura, California, Spindletop, Texas) to the urbanised regions (New York, Philadelphia, Boston) where it was used.
The bootstrapping of technology was itself a really interesting story -- gunpowder, metallurgy, iron, fuels, steel, electricity, and prime movers, most especially diesel and gas turbine engines. See Vaclav Smil (Energy in History) and Manfred Weissenbacher (Sources of Power) for more on this.
As you mention yourself, the US got by using mostly wood until relatively late in the second industrial revolution. There is still a lot of useful energy in wood. Even ancient rome burned a ton of wood for heat and their own industries. It would have been more expensive and less sustainable sure, but I think it would have been enough to start. There is also wind and water power which was utilized a lot during the start of the industrial revolution.
Rome and the Mediterranian had a long history of deforestation, going to Egypt and Sumer. The first story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be read as a story of ecological limits and deforestation.
Roman heating systems, hypocausts, had voracious fuel appetites. I'm not finding a solid reference but believe one could consume a ton or more of wood daily. That was imported from distant locations.
Early industrial windmills and water wheels typically produced 10 - 20 kW of power, with perhaps a few thousands throughout Europe, for a total power capacity of a few tens of MW. The power availed by coal and oil is thousands and millions of times this.
U.S. woodfuel consumption wasn't sustainable, and hasn't increased from levels of the late 19th century.
I'm trying to say that it would be possible to start some industrial processes and automation. A water mill is enough to power a lot of machinery, and they could have become more efficient as they developed the technology. There is a huge amount of energy in moving water and air.
I've heard it said that the bicycle basically needed the car, despite seeming to be much simpler: accurate mass production of ball bearings, chain drives, and pneumatic tires were all driven by car manufacturing but needed for really practical bicycles.
But bicycles are useful on their own (possibly more so in a world where cars do not exist), so the existence of bicycles alone could easily have driven innovation.
Bicycles are hugely useful -- they were the first mode of transport that was affordable to an ordinary person (though relatively about as expensive as a car today), and didn't require feeding, shoding, tackle, or stabling. With a bike, a person could move beyond 3 miles in an hour, or get to and from a railroad station allowing for much longer commutes, visits, or recreational travel.
As of the late 19th century, horses consumed about 25% of the grain production of the US. Much of that was to provide drayage of people and goods to and from railroad stations or train yards.
Not within an urban context, and not much elsewhere. A donkey or ox required grazing access -- which meant either owning your own land or having access to a commons, as well as a stable. Bicycles, despite many other issues, don't poop.
A horse was a major capital investment. And a donkey can't carry all that much weight -- a light adult, perhaps, but only just.
The US horse population in 1915 was 20 million, contrasting with about 100 million people. Keep in mind that most of those horses were in commercial use -- drayage, farm traction (a large combine would be drawn by 40 horses), etc.
Numbers for England/UK are harder to come by, but a Google Answers thread gives 3.3 million for late Victorian Britain, and 14 million in Europe in 1800, the latter against a human population of 203 million.
Though you raise an interesting question: what was ownership of draught animals throughout time, and how did that compare with bicycle sales in, say, the US, England, France, and Germany from 1880 - 1920 or so. Keeping in mind that mass private automobile ownership wasn't really a thing until the 1950s, even in the US.
Ball Bearings and Chain drives were mass produced for industrial machines, and saw use in bicycles before automobiles. Pneumatic tires as already mentioned were invented for bikes and made their way to automobiles.
The industrial revolution requires coordination on a vast scale, and a lack of bureaucracy that can arbitrarily block it. Hence its emergence in free market countries.
After initially being skeptical and disliking him for libertarian leaning political reasons, I've come around to wondering if John Maynard Keynes might have been even more right than we have imagined.
Slave labor is kind of an extreme case of the paradox of thrift. Slaves have no disposable capital and they flood the labor market down to zero. Slavery is like a permanent deflationary spiral. There is just no reason to innovate or invest in anything except conquest and luxuries, which describes most ancient cultures well.
Had the Greeks or Romans abolished slavery and set a minimum wage we might be flying to Proxima Centauri in a fusion rocket starship by now.
kinda describes what's going on in developing countries too. The lack of innovation in developing country might have almost nothing to do with the previously popular and highly peddled concept of "inferior races"
Humans are wired for scarcity, but scarcity thinking is bad economics. We need to realize and own our power and start thinking in positive sum race to the top terms instead of fear based austerity terms.
Alternatively, if the industrial revolution had been advanced by 1,000 years, we might be halfway through learning how long it takes to recover from fossil-fuel induced climate change.
I'd add a dose of social myopia. Even without slaves, you'd have to make everybody imagine a world taming forces. I believe up until Newton, the value of technology and its pace was very different. So people wouldn't align and go that deep into physics and engineering. It's a bit of a stretch for steam power, but another instance is electricity, a phenomenon which was known at the time but would require way too much desire and stack to master.
ps: This is something that distort my perception of the world. Somehow similar to the comma.ai birth, the owner believed the others were caught into a limited view of the world. It's possible that a lot of stuff that we dismiss because we believed in others are "limiting" our existence. But the brownian motion seems unavoidable for now.
The other issue with having most of your labour performed by slaves is that the slaves themselves generally don't have the motivation, or education, or chance of actually being taken seriously to propose even incremental process improvements.
That's what you think. The nobility would usually sit in Rome or any other nice place and leave administration of their landholdings to a competent slave. Read Cato the Elder's Agri Cultura for details. Demotivation would be an issue for those slaves low on the food chain but not for every slave. For more contemporary examples, look no further than Daenerys' Dothraki handmaidens.
Sitting in some other nice place while a slave oversees administration of your landholdings is well documented in the US south too. See e.g. https://www.amazon.com/Time-Cross-Economics-American-Slavery... . They take pains to emphasize that slaves were educated, motivated, and taken seriously.
There's plenty of historical evidence that industrialization and slave labor do not mix (for example, the US North industrialized and the South did not).
It's not so easy to draw firm conclusions from Roman society, because the historical record of that is a little thin. The Nazis employed slave labor, but they had a lot of trouble with sabotage and intentionally shoddy work. Game of Thrones is entirely fiction, and is zero evidence as an "example" of slavery.
Prison labor is used for menial labor. See what I wrote about the nazi's use of concentration camp labor. Sweatshops and workhouses are not slave labor (and also are used for menial labor).
So, this starts to get into somewhat interesting territory. I'v been thinking about automation and its contrast with industrialisation.
From the start of the industrial revolution through about the 1960s, the principle mechanisms were division of labour and application of more energy per worker. There was some automation, but it was largely at a very simple scale -- Jaquard's loom, duplicating patterns on lathes and machining systems, dies (a simple mode for reproducing complex shapes).
But for the most part, what wasn't being substituted for was the worker's skill.
Since the 1960s or so, that's begun changing. Soup-to-nuts factories produce goods with little or no worker intervention. CAD-CAM systems translate design directly to machining.
Automation, in short, replaces the mind of the worker, rather than the muscle.
This also calls to mind the question of just what it is that labour is. I'd consider it a compound factor of production:
1. A prime mover.
2. A complex manipulation system.
3. Skill and processing knowledge.
4. A control system through sensing, processing, feedback, and resulting process management inputs.
Labour-as-muscle has been subject to replacing since the time of draught animals, water, and wind power, though at a vastly greater rate with steam, electrical, and internal-combustion power. The result has largely been an amplification of labour via energy inputs.
Substituting for the information-processing capabilities of labour is another matter. It does mean, however, that increasing amounts of skilled work might be replaceable with a much less-skilled technician. I've seen this trend in the IT world over the past several decades, though there remain points at which greater skills are still in demand.
This makes the viability of coerced labour, including the coerced labour of sweatshops and workhouses, as well as actual prison slave labour, for complex goods, far more viable.
That doesn't diminish Heron of Alexandria's accomplishments in any way, I highly doubt it was anything else than either an original invention or an independent re-invention.
Super interesting historical figure, right up there with Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci.
The "hellenocentric" narrative can inadvertently contribute to bias against other very nearby civilizations that communicated with them and contributed to the technologies.
There's an interesting text on parabolas called "On burning mirrors" by Diocles which comes to us only through an Arabic translation:
Entertainment is fertile soil for creative invention; it is often an environment which eschews rigid, pattern-based development in favor of creative expression.
I've spent a fair amount of time in video game development and in enterprise software; without a doubt, my experience reflects that creative developers are drawn to video games, whereas the few that found their way elsewhere have a sense of being exotic caged animals.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that some mathematical formula for Unified Field Theory (or similar physics concept) was originaly derived as a part of a game engine and patented.
I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier (spoiler: poorly).
Articles like this make me appreciate even more how little difference there is between us and humans thousands of years ago. I wouldn't have figured out how to make a working wheel, and I've seen one. I have no idea where I picked up the idea that "ancient civilizations were dumb", but the more I read, the more I appreciate how little difference there was.
BTW, if you haven't, you should definitely check the "Primitive technology" channel on Youtube.
Two really good literature treatments of your fantasy are Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. They both have as major plot elements a character who has a lot of knowledge of fabrication techniques, and recreate their technology in a primitive situation (one involves time travel, the other is stranded on a primitive island).
On another note, I've heard that the first thing you need to fabricate (beyond basic hand tools) is a lathe. Once you have that, you can make a better lathe, which can make various other machine shop tools, etc. until you have a whole workshop created. Although this probably assumes that you still have access to modern (as in the last couple hundred years) materials to work with.
Gingery did even better than showing how to bootstrap from a lathe. He showed how to bootstrap the lathe itself starting from building a charcoal foundry and chunks of raw metal. Be careful, though: this is a rabbit hole that draws maker-types like rare earth electromagnets. Once you read through Gingery's books, you can easily find yourself wandering down the library stacks and Net pulling up information about how to make more-precise machine tools from less-precise tools.
It is information like this that makes you realize how incredibly fragile our civilization's tech stack is. Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level. We take a most of our tech stack for granted. This would matter if we had a civilization-wide energy crash, so if the catastrophic-scale climate change or oil crash predictions come true then this would be more than a passing interest for just the recreational primitive tech hobbyists.
We could recreate society relatively quickly if enough people and artifacts survived and human society itself recovered quickly enough. When people know for certain something is possible they are much more determined to make it happen. Bits of knowledge would trickle through the survivors and help accelerate the process.
Unfortunately during a collapse of society you very rarely find hospitable environments. By the time society itself recovers and has the resources to spare everyone who knew of the old world is dead and a lot of the artifacts are ruined or destroyed.
Seed vaults, storing equipment and books in salt mines, etc should prove extremely helpful if such a dire situation arises. It might take a lot longer to rebuild though because there won't be any cheap, easy oil to burn.
It may be reassuring (or worrying) to see its resemblance to "battle tested" biological systems. Even the simplest cells can't just "re-evolve" a magically-removed piece, the whole thing comes crashing down.
The winning strategy so far seems to be duplication, so it's about time we get some colonies on other planets to help ensure continuation of the metaspecies.
If you have a lathe now, how long will it take for that lathe to disintegrate into complete irreparable unusability?
With a fertility rate of 1.3 among the intelligent (read: technologically capable) peoples of the world, we are far more likely to run out of people to maintain the technology than we are to run out of the energy to power it.
Indeed, if you walk into any utility company or similar, who do you see doing all the work? Middle-aged-to-old working-class white men. What happens when those men retire? Who is going to hold the infrastructure together?
Unlike a civilization-wide energy crash, this is not merely a rhetorical question.
That assumes that technologically capable people must be the progeny of technically/technologically capable people, which I put to you is not in any way, shape or form true.
Are you using the number of 1.3 from people with university education in the rich world? It seems a very narrow window through which to view humanity'a 'capable' people, who exist in all shapes and forms, all colours, on all continents, and often arise from deep poverty without any formal education, my grandfather for instance
Technological capability is more or less intellectual ability.
IQ is substantially heritable. A child's IQ is (more or less) the average of his four grandparents. The IQ of his four grandparents is largely the result of cognitive assortment within a breeding population with a certain mean IQ.
If a population's mean IQ is 70, the percentage of people with an IQ above 130 is 0 (out to four decimal places).
If 85, 0.1%.
If 100, 2.2%.
If 115, 15.9%.
The mean IQ of the white race is about 100. The mean IQ of SS Africans is about 70. The mean IQ of Arabs is about 85. The mean IQ of Chinese is 105 or so. The mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 110-115, depending on how you measure it (they are a special case).
There are probably more people possessing IQs of 130 or above in Israel than in all of Africa.
The number 1.3 comes from a rough average of the fertility of the white nations and of the high-end Asian countries, namely Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a somewhat lesser extent mainland China.
I can second this book: written in 1939, but it hasn't dated at all.
Apart from being hilarious and great fun, it's also a suprisingly serious study of just how much technology, and I'm not talking about the modern stuff, is based on a huge pyramid of other skills and technologies which you simply can't leapfrog.
Mild spoilers follow:
Our hero, after being flung back in time to Rome in the year 535, is trying to prevent the fall of the late Roman Empire when it gets conquered by the Byzantines (actually the story's a lot more complex than that, so that's simplified). He tries to reinvent all sort of different pieces of military technology, and fails utterly --- turns out reliable gunpowder is really hard to make. His clocks won't keep time, his lenses aren't round, and he doesn't even both with electricity.
The innovations he eventually ends up successfully introducing? Distilled spirits (a great money-maker!), Arabic notation, double-entry notekeeping, and semaphores.
Based on the old wooden wagons I've seen, lathes played no part in their construction. The spokes on the wheels had been spokeshaved (gee, maybe that's the etymology of that tool's name?) rather than turned on a lathe. The wheels as a whole were pieced together by hand so they'd be round automatically (i.e. spokes and rim segments were all the same length, held together by an iron hoop that just took shape around them when cooled).
Sure this is just one example, but it is what comes to mind given TFA's subject matter. Without access to iron-working, I suppose a less durable rim material like e.g. hemp could be used, which would introduce some more complications involved in tightening. If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark.
If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark.
The "what would I try to invent?" question one is fascinating. If I found myself transported back to Roman times, I'd aim to make a lens. The Romans had glass so the raw material is there. With a lens you can fairly quickly go a telescope, which has immediate military application, so would perhaps be widely adopted. Astronomy might then follow, heading off the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking. You can also make a microscope, which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms, and perhaps the germ theory of disease.
For bonus points I'd give them the decimal number system.
> the whole "Earth is the centre of Universe" thing that held back modern thinking
This says much more about how we dismiss ancient civilizations as inferior than it does about ancient civilizations themselves.
The fact is, the geocentric model was an excellent one, able to explain all observations at the time in a sensible and straightforward way. Admittedly, more data helped to develop the heliocentric model, but there were valid scientific criticisms against that model at the time. In particular, it took Kepler to provide truly sensible and strong arguments in favor of heliocentrism.
The geocentric model is so good that even today it is often the sensible model to use when thinking about some astronomical problems. I hate to hear it being dismissed as 'wrong' - because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another, they are both 'right'. It's simply that one of them is simpler than the other for most problems.
But most of all, I hate hearing people say it 'held back thinking', because I assure you that the people doing the thinking back then were just as capable of doing good, logical, rational thinking as we are today, and didn't need anyone to claim they were too stupid to think critically for themselves about the scientific understanding of the time.
> because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another
Not really, at least if you want to keep simplicity of Newton's laws which are formulated for inertial reference frames. The reference frame in the heliocentric model is inertial, while in the geocentric one it is not.
The problem is with the assumption behind "which fairly quickly leads to the discovery of microscopic organisms". In your scenario, who learns about microscopic organisms, and when?
As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?
Has a fact been discovered if one person learns of it? Or is it only discovered if the news spreads to all of society? If the latter, then science is a social process, not an individual one.
The historian Fernand Braudel points out that an Italian engineer, wanting to show off his skills, built an automated saw mill in Italy, back during the 1200s. The logs were slotted automatically and run through the mill automatically. This engineer had created an important part of the Industrial Revolution, 500 years early!!! Did it matter? No. The project was merely a demonstration. The abundance of wood was never used. How could it be? There was no system of transportation for the abundance of wood, there was no finance to cover operating expenses, nor any finance to support a building boom that might use the wood, nor any modern labor market from which the mill owner could hire more workers to do the initial cutting of trees, nor was there the modern strictness regarding contracts, nor were commoners allowed to bring civil suits against the nobility (in case of default, supposing a nobleman contracted to have a manor built), nor was the judiciary independent, nor... In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a social process, involving the creation of dozens of important modern institutions, and the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of those institutions. No single engineer, however brilliant, could jump start the process.
People deeply overestimate the value of any single insight, and largely forget about the dozens of mundane but non-trivial details a successful implementation relies on. Great entrepreneurs understand this and know how to solve enough of those "little problems" to enable a big idea to thrive, and that's the magic of it. Bad ones obsess over the idea itself.
That's impressive, but the invention of sawmills didn't need to wait until the industrial revolution. I've just come back from The Netherlands, which had massive uses in wind powered technology in the 1500's, including windmill powered sawmills that led to the Dutch golden age because they could build boats faster:
You are referencing an event more than 300 years later than the event I am speaking of. But yes, to your point, much of what was necessary to the Industrial Revolution was pioneered by the Dutch during the 1600s: contracts, fair and impartial courts, the end of legal immunity for the nobility (regarding civil contracts), modern finance, modern insurance, advanced transport, modern storage facilities, etc. This is also covered by the historian Fernand Braudel, who is worth reading.
The Dutch also benefitted by use of peat for heating and cooking fuel, which preserved their (scarce) lumber supply for shipbuilding. See Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power, Vaclav Smil, Energy in History.
One consideration is the Barring straight is very narrow compared to other ocean passages, so people may have regularly crossed each side without thinking 'new land'!
My whole point is that you don't know who "their" is. Please stop and think about who you mean when you use the word "their". Do you mean 1 person, or 2 people, or a 100, or a million? And the map you are linking to did not exist 20,000 years ago!
Their being the people who crossed from one side to another.
1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying "achievement unlocked: new continent!" And then run around telling everyone about it.
Yes, European mapmakers did not known about such crossings, but being a very remote area in 1400's they probably never asked. And from an oral history perspective it would not be anything unusual because a 50 mile ocean crossing is just a regular thing to sea going populations.
Also, DNA evidence is going to be sketchy because it's really hard to say if someone migrated 400 years ago vs 600 years ago.
PS: I am not saying this 100% happened, but it seems very likely.
Interestingly, Edison realized that inventing a light bulb was not enough. He had to invent the power generation and distribution industry to make it usable.
If you lend someone money, how would you get them to repay you? If you want to become a banker, then you need to sign contracts. You need an independent judiciary that will offer fair and impartial hearings. Above all else, you need equality before the law: the legal immunity of the nobility needs to be suspended. If someone fails to repay you, then you need to be able to take them to court.
IIRC Christians prohibited charging interest on loans (usury), not banking per se. I suppose a bank could be operated by Christians that simply accepted deposits and charged a sum for safekeeping with no loans whatsoever. I don't know that anything like that ever happened in practice, however, since anybody with enough money to require safekeeping in a vault probably had their own vault.
Likewise an interest free loan would be permissible, though there wouldn't be great incentives to offer them except to family members, for example.
What happened in the Islamic world was partnerships instead. If a merchant wanted to make a trade expedition funded by a banker, they'd set up the expedition as a partnership with the banker providing the funds and the merchant doing the work, splitting the profits, in a way that's economically equivalent to lending money at interest. Similarly, insurance syndicates tended to be organised as a bunch of merchants getting together and agreeing to pool a certain amount of funds that would be used to repay any of their losses.
(It works up to a point, but it's hard to scale. You can emulate a loan contract between two parties, but you can't have a bond market because the "loans" aren't tradeable)
Greeks had no telescope yet some of them had already devised that the Earth was orbiting around the Sun and also calculated the diameter of the Earth with reasonable accuracy.
I love this game. I think I would send the idea of plant breeding. They had this idea to some extent, but I don't think there was big public, long term effort to breed new crops or get much higher yields. If you get modern crops faster, you have larger populations, which leads to industrialization sooner. This isn't just limited to food crops, it's possible ancients could have bred plants and animals for many useful purposes.
Slightly relevant, what information would you send to the past if you had a phone that could communicate backwards in time? But there's a catch, any idea you send is converted to the closest analogue in ancient times. So if you tell them about the scientific method, they will just think about religion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/
Regarding Archimedes' chronophone, I am not sure that the premise is well-formed. I find I cannot predict what the chronophone will do because the notion of "closest analogue" is inherently ambiguous. In the worst case we cannot send any information back at all by definition.
All that being said, assuming the chronophone will let me, I'd bring their attention to the idea of the printing press. It's easily made, the benefit is obvious, and the effect is dramatic. Kind of amazing it wasn't invented earlier.
I think it's a self-defeating idea, but a useful thought experiment. It makes you think about the abstract principles behind things that are good ideas, and then the more-abstract principles behind those.
The link explains it further. The point of the chronophone is that you can't just send ideas you already have back. If you want to send the scientific method back in time, you have to actually do science. If you want to send the printing press, you actually have to think about better ways your present civilization could transmit information.
It was a fundamental break-through. We were no longer at the center of the conceptual Universe. Whether that something is the Sun, the center of the Milky Way, or doesn't actually exist in space, doesn't matter as much as the initial realization.
As far as I know, the romans never used semaphore. Maybe for practical reasons like not having telescopes, but maybe the idea just didn't occur to them. It would be pretty low hanging fruit for time travelers to introduce.
I think it was more due to not solving any problem. Same way despite Greeks inventing steam power, no one made engine from it cause there was no need. Too many slaves provided needed labor.
Runners, horses, ships moved communications fast enough. Even if you knew ceaser was coming to Rome, transport speed meant you couldnt do much with that. And yes we with hindsight cab cherry pick situations where it would help. But it was not worth cost to create, train and maintain such a system for hundreds if years for the fee.tumes it provided marginal benefit.
In other words most technology is synergistic. It really isn't awesome unless bunch other tech is at sufficient level to exploitmkit
But building and maintaining a semaphore system in a world that has slavery and where wood is cheap and plentiful (Caesar could build a bridge over the Rhine in 10 days, and that includes going out to find and chop down trees that are large enough) isn't that expensive.
The local HFT community would probably pay for a semaphore system. A lot of money could be made on knowing the outcome of events earlier than others.
On the other hand, "trees are plentiful" probably meant that sight lines were awful. Maybe, a semaphore only becomes feasible after one has cut down most of the trees.
Well sending a message that a remote province is being invaded, is useful. Especially if you can send that message days faster than runners can send messages. Its also very useful to coordinate ships.
The difference between steam engines is that steam engines were very difficult to build. Semaphore is very simple and a trial system wouldn't be expensive to set up.
The Romans did use crude fire signals, so I think that proves that they would find it useful.
Also, source of electricity may be non-trivial. Battery would need creating acids and non-metal container to store them. A simple DC generator would need a permanent magnet.
Roman legions mounted in bikes could be everywhere. Their roads already were a force multiplier. Combined with being able to feed them and have them not die of disease simple wounds. We'd all be speaking Latin.
"By the mid-1st century AD this meant that glass vessels had moved from a valuable, high-status commodity, to a material commonly available: “a [glass] drinking cup could be bought for a copper coin” (Strabo, Geographica XVI.2)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_glass
As for manufacturing lenses, you can get by without many tools with cunning techniques. Molten glass naturally forms curved shapes and can be polished by fire. Leeuwenhoek made tiny lenses in the 1600s, although no one knows for sure exactly how (he made a point of not sharing) - one technique that's known to work is drawing the glass into a fine thread, snapping the thread, and heating the end so it forms a tiny ball.
> I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier
I wonder the same. If I was suddenly teleported to the middle of a forest, without anything, not even my shoes and clothes, and no chance of any contact with civilization again, what SHOULD my first few tasks even be??
Imagine a modern human, ideal in health and strength and faculties, and immune to disease or aging, teleported butt-naked to a copy of the planet Earth where there never had been any humans — so no chance of radio, or rescue choppers seeing your smoke signals, or finding any technology that you didn't make yourself.
The only thing that person has is a version of Wikipedia in their brain, so they know how everything is built and how nature works.
How long will it take for them to resch current levels of technology, and be able to construct a device like the one you're reading this on? Would two people make a significant difference?
Gaaa! I can't find the reference to a short story I've read about an over-developed future where the entertainment of the time is "athlete performers wearing body/environment capture suits" who are trained for "any scenario" and then randomly dropped into alien primitive populations where they have to survive, live without detection, and their "reality show goal" is to become a leader or otherwise pivotal to that primitive race, all the while not being discovered by "the Federation" type of modern police because such intervention with a primitive race is highly illegal. The public watches it all in a "body sim" like VR player. Is this triggering anybody's memory? Can't believe I'm blanking on the author...
If it was one human, they'd die off before reaching any significant technological level. However someone who's been on a survival course should be able to survive for the length of their natural life (minus modern medicine), the first few days being the key.
Transporting a man and a woman doesn't help much either because there probably wouldn't be sufficient genetic variety to produce a viable species. I think I read you need thousands of humans to do that, and then there's enough spare capacity beyond mere survival to ensure that knowledge gets passed on.
I'm not sure I would have the goal of the "modern world" in mind if transported to a pristine planet! Millions of people want the technology but not the stress and pollution of the rat race. A small remote coastal settlement in a temperate climate with some technology to make life easier (fishing nets, agricultural tools) sounds ok!
Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.
1. What are the chances of any us surviving outside of human civilization if all technology was stripped from us, even if we had memorized all of humanity's combined knowledge?
2. How long would it take to replicate current technology from scratch, if all the research was already done for you, and you were basically immortal?
By "from scratch" I mean skipping the creating-the-universe part, just starting without any preexisting tools other than what you may find in nature.
I've given some thought to #2, from the perspective of a mildly-transhuman child left by herself in a jungle (it's a novel..), and came to the unfortunate conclusion that...
Maintenance is a killer. There comes a point, fairly early in technological development, where it's simply impossible for any single person to keep everything working and still have time to improve on the situation.
That's true for even the most benign of environments. Hana, unfortunately, was stuck in a rather damp jungle.
Actually, Terry Pratchett's _The Long Mars_ discusses this, to an extent.
(In that setting, you can build a very simple machine --- powered by a potato, which actually makes sense in context --- which can take you to a parallel Earth. You can take what you can carry with you; but not iron, which stays behind. Turns out that setting up a society from scratch using only hand tools and brain power is kinda hard.)
Hmm. I've read the first book in the series (must get around to reading the rest), which is mainly exploration and doesn't focus too much on society-building, but as an engineer I'm not sure I buy that bootstrapping in a new Earth without bringing any iron/steel would be that difficult.
It would be an effort, but I think we could retool to bootstrap industry mainly using aluminium and copper alloys (engineering bronzes particularly are great materials). Some titanium and nickel alloys in the mix.
The first two are excellent. But then you can tell that Pratchett's influence has waned, and Baxter's bitterness and misanthropy is creeping in; in The Long Mars everyone's painfully disfunctional and whiny.
I'm still not sure I want to read the last two. I swore of solo Baxter books after getting burnt by Titan.
Sigh, that's another one on my reading list. I thought Baxter's Voyage was a wonderful novel - quite dry, but masterfully put-together, using NASA's true history to inform how an alternate history might have gone. Titan seems irresistible, but it sounds like it might be quite bitter.
We spend most of our time either learning to be a cog in society's machine, or being that cog.
Most of today's cogs are useless in ancient times. "What is this 'full stack' you speak of, stranger?"
Most of the past's cogs are useless today. "So you're good with sticks on wet clay? Cool story bro."
Either stranger could adapt to the times, but they'd be very inefficient because they'd never be fully integrated to the larger machine, having to relearn every interaction that a native just takes for "the way things are."
You recommended "Primitive Technology" which I thought of as well while reading the article. It would be really neat if he did an episode on making a more complicated wheel and axle structure.
Also, I would highly recommend "The Cross Time Engineer" series as it's this same scenario but works through how he's able to apply his modern knowledge as leverage to work up from a boatman earning pennies to running the country.
I would try to do math and finance earlier. I think calculus is usually underrated when people consider "most important inventions", and the idea of investing for fractional ownership in an enterprise turned out to be non-obvious but really really useful.
The trick might be to try to leverage the knowledge of the contemporary craftsmen. Not sure how you establish the credibility to do that, but you don't actually need to know how to fit a wheel to utilize the concept.
That's more a mass production thing isn't it - we had trolleys of various forms you could load your bags on to.
Strong plastics, probably made such mass production cheap enough.
People rich enough to have wheeled luggage in the past would have just used servants, it's seemingly economics rather than technology that prevented such "inventions" as attaching wheels to things permanently instead of temporarily.
A modicum of googling suggests Templar Knights had wheeled trunks in the 12th Century though.
I'm surprised this article didn't give some credit to the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is a main reason there are ramps you can use with your wheeled luggage instead of hauling it up the steps to a building entrance.
2) smooth hard-ish surfaces that are large enough to be worth going anywhere
Without either, the wheel on its own isn't worth much. It turns out roads are a much older, more useful invention without which the wheel doesn't make much sense.
You can use wheels without roads. Wheels were used before roads were built. Wheeled chariots were even used on battlefields, which is far from optimal circumstances. And also wheelbarrows and similar things are very useful for doing work.
hence why the wheel never really evolved in nature, because legs are far more adaptable to terrain and probably easier to grow. (modern) wheels do work on rough terrain (e.g. mountain bikes) but they're highly sensitive to scale. It's possible the idea was thought of many many times but only became practical with the advent of roads.
I heard the story differently. Wheels are only really useful if you have good enough streets to use them on and building streets is a huge upfront investment. It is also a chicken egg problem - wheels are only useful with streets and streets are only useful for wheels. Without streets you are better of carrying your stuff around than trying to push it around on wheels in natural terrain. That is also why the wheel first appeared in toys, because you can push them around on a flat table. So the wheel was probably well known before it saw widespread adoption for transportation which additionally to the lack of streets had to overcome the engineering problems mentioned in the article that come up when you scale the wheel from a toy to a wheel burrow.
Streets and roads aren't useful only for wheels. Try taking a mile-long walk through a (seemingly) flat field and through a paved surface as an experiment.
The first one will be much bumpier and tiresome than the second for any given speed, and you'll be at a higher risk of injury due to careless step. And the benefit of having a flat surface is greater the more rugged is the terrain that must be crossed. This is why, though the Incas didn't use the wheel, they had roads nonetheless. And the Romans, too, built their own roads mainly for the speedier movement of their armies while on the march.
Streets? Where we came from, we needed no.. streets ;)
I mean, didn't "streets" emerge really from commonly-travelled paths carved by feet and horse hooves and time, and really most non-paved paths are quite fine for most wheels? Perhaps they last longer on pavement, but other than that..
I didn't want to imply pavement when I said streets. The question is what commonly traveled paths look like before the wheel. If they were just desire paths, then they were not suitable for carts because they are to narrow even if they were used with horses or other animals instead of just walking. Could they already have been wide enough for example because of several people walking next to each other? Certainly, but were they? I personally can not think any path I have ever used that was wide enough for carts but never intended or actually used by any sort of vehicle.
The Romans absolutely used wheels. Those roads were so well travelled with wagons that there are still grooves cut into them where the wheels wore away the pavement. The roman armies would have used large numbers of wagons to carry all the food and supplies an army needs, which is the main reason they needed roads.
Streets happen naturally when there's enough population density and permanent structures. Of course, those things require agriculture first (or at least plentiful, permanent food sources like fish).
(A casual Google check will reveal other examples as well)
Also parent article mentions metal tools being needed to bore holes for the shaft. Other methods could do this also... people worked intricately with wood long before metal was used (although metal would certainly speed up mass production.)
As far as roads, you don't really need roads for a wheel to be useful. You just need a flat semi hard surface. People crossed the US in horse drawn wagons without roads. Not sure where the "roads" argument comes from other than, sure, better roads means more wheeled vehicles.
The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place
i disagree with this premise based on kevin kelly's simultaneous discovery phenomenon.
The fact that pretty well every invention and discovery you mention has occurred to two different people at possibly the same time. Possibly three. Possibly four. My favorite example of this is the light bulb, which in my part of the world a man named Joseph Swan gets the credit for inventing the light bulb and a terrible fraud called Thomas Edison came along and ripped him off. Well, if I live in Russia, I give the credit to Lodygin, and I'm equally cross with Edison. But actually if you drill down into history, in the 18th century there are 23 people in that decade alone who deserve independent credit for coming up with the idea of the incandescent light bulb. It was an idea ripe to be discovered. It was inevitable that it would be discovered in that decade. And that's true of almost everything. And then of course famously evolution itself, the idea of natural selection occurs to Wallace and Darwin at the same time, and Darwin has to rush into print to prevent himself being preempted. Even relativity--we tend to think of Einstein as unique in coming up with this idea that nobody else, that it took the world by surprise and nobody believed him. Well, that's true, but if you look at what Hendrik Lorentz was doing at the same time, he was well on the trail. He would have got there if Einstein had been run over by a tram. The double helix of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), incredibly important discovery--big race going on to find it. That, the technology had reached the point where we're going to find the genetic code around that time. So, there's a sort of complete dispensability of scientists and inventors that really surprises people when you think about it.
Is there any realistically conceivable alternate-history/universe where cable-suspended wheel-less trams (like [1][2][3] but closer to ground level) became the dominant method of transportation instead of huge roads and cars?
It's something I've been musing on to incorporate into some fiction, inspired by all the recent news and discussions about self-driving cars and the prospect of shared fleets.
> However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated.
Well the very nature of the wheel itself probably helped with that - I wonder if that holds true for all transportation-related inventions?
Lateen sails took a particularly long time to spread. They had been introduced to the Mediterranean region as early as the 2nd century BC (and had been developed much earlier in China and Arabia), but were not brought into widespread use in European sailing ships until the 1400s. This is hugely significant as a lateen-rigged ship can sail far closer to the wind than a square-rigged ship, giving it much better maneuverability, allowing it to navigate complex waters (e.g., harbour entrances) under less-than-ideal conditions, and increased the length of the sailing season -- November through May was "no-sail" season from Roman times (with numerous interesting impacts on historical events, messages, etc.).
The rig seems to be among the technologies lost during the middle ages.
The big hitch, as noted in James Burke's Connections, was how ships and sailing voyages were financed. A ship was a sufficiently sizeable investment, and financing sufficiently difficult to arrange, that conservative financiers opposed any radical explorations of such tomfoolery as them thar lateen-rigged newfangled boats.
As for other transportation innovations ... there mostly weren't any until quite modern times.
Once introduced, though, their advantages were immediately obvious, and they were adopted quickly throughout Europe.
Yes, you saw further advances in ships and navigation. Especially navigation -- position-taking and timekeeping were critical, and several innovations followed catastrophic losses of entire fleets run aground and shipwrecked into the 20th century -- see the Honda Point disaster in which seven US destroyers sailed at full speed into rocks just offshore the Santa Barbara coast in 1923.
After the Lateen rig and excepting other ship designs, the major transport innovations were canals (major construction from the 1500s onward in Europe, though much earlier in China, and some earlier European/Mediterranean instances), the railroad (1825), steamship (1810s), safety bicycle (1870s), automobile (and truck and bus -- 1880s), and airplane (1900s). These all spread essentially instantly throughout the world wherever industrial capacity (and fuel) capable of producing such vehicles existed.
And yet European naval architects continued using square rigging for most large vessels until the end of the age of sail even when they were fully aware of lateen rigging. So clearly there were advantages to square rigging beyond just conservative finance.
The vessels made use of square-rigged sails, but also carried lateen, gaff, or fore-and-aft rigging, allowing for better handling.
Just to give a sense for the significance of this (and later steam): ships could spend weeks, or even months, awaiting favourable winds to enter harbour. Improved sailing capabilities were directly beneficial to all aspects of the shipping business.
Square rig sails allow you to run with the wind more efficiently / quickly. Horses for courses...or in this case, sail rigs for the sailing you expect to be doing.
I'd run into Burke's observation concerning insurance and finance and simply found it fascinating. Been looking for a place to drop that since.
The case raises the question olueand risk of standardisation and institutions. It's one thing to establish proven norms for acting, but if you don't also incorporate some means for trialing new concepts, ventures, ideas, etc., these also make you hidebound. That's part of the problem that seems to have faced China, getting to the question of innovation and the Industrial Revolution (and another HN post).
In the case of industrialisation, lathes, machining tools, standardised fasteners and couplings, all helped bring about mass manufacture. At the same time, they're probably making it harder for some improvements to get out -- say, arguably, Linux as a mass operating system (desktop), or alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard.
Choices where there's not an obviously superior choice, but you have to choose one are even more captivating -- what side of the road do you drive on? Clearly, that's a case where you cannot leave it up to individual volition, where you must determine at the very least a regional or roadway standard, and where simultaneously choosing both options doesn't work.
I really ought to collect a set of standards-of-convention which operate similarly -- instances where a choice must be made but the initial option is arbitrary. Downstream, you end up with path-dependencies, lock-in, sunk-cost, familiarty, network effects, and more.
It could also be related to the fact that in order for wheels to become widespread you need to have terrain that they can roll on. The only obstacle to the 'need something to roll on' hypothesis is wheelbarrows which in theory should have appeared long before.
This is being downvoted, but yes, that's a crucial element. For transportation, you hard, level, vegetation-free ground.
One of the sources I've been reading (probably Smil or Weissenbacher) looks at the regions in which wheeled vehicles might have originated.
They're generally suspected to have come out of the middle east (or present-day Ukraine / southern Russia), quite possibly being developed from potter's wheels.
Wheeled vehicles don't work in sandy ground because there's too much resistance. Pack animals (horses, camels, donkeys) are far more efficient. The wheel was lost in much of Arabia for a considerable period due to this, and even today, sand tracked and blown across highways is a problem for cars.
On grassy plains, you have the problems of both vegetation and mud / soft soil. On the American prairie, you can still find, a century and a half after their passage, the ruts left by wagon trains rolling across the soil.
Hilly or mountainous country, such as that of the Aztecs and Inca, isn't suitable for wheeled vehicles, especially if your roads have stairs (as Incan roads did). Again, human porters and animals can traverse these.
Even with suitable roads, overland travel was exceptionally slow and expensive in terms of animal power, drovers, and feed required. Ships and canals were vastly more efficient, and remained the best option until the advent of the railroad. Even that required high-quality Bessemer steel (1860s) to provide rails which could handle high loads and were resistant to splitting.
The domain under discussion is transportation, not use of the wheel in industrial applications.
Spinning, water, and grinding wheels all postdate the wheel-and-axel in transportation. It is thought that the transport wheel may have evolved from the potter's wheel.
The historical figure that strikes me as "most likely to be a time traveller" is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was accidentally killed during the war. The Romans wanted to capture him and use him for their own purposes. It's possible that could have changed history quite a bit.
Heron of Alexandria is another candidate that gets a lot of space in that book. He invented the first steam engine way before his time. But also many other insanely elaborate mechanical devices. Including an entirely mechanical little theater, with mechanical puppets and music.
Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest inventor of our time might be applying his work to video game engines.