Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”

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&#x27;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.<p>THAT is another reason why it takes so long to invent X. People who shouldn&#x27;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.

Some inventions are gated by scientific discovery, particularly in materials.<p>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&#x27;t invented until 1948. No one had done the experiment and seen that effect.<p>Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride. It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn&#x27;t until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.

An example I&#x27;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?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pressure_exchanger" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Pressure_exchanger</a>

All inventions have prerequisites that people don&#x27;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&#x27;ll need several boring things that need to happen for you to make a working steam engine.<p>You&#x27;ll need the materials. A lot of strong, cheap steel. Preheated blast furnaces weren&#x27;t invented until the early 1800&#x27;s. Thomas Savery had the idea for the steam engine almost a hundred years before the Watt, but Savery&#x27;s engines kept blowing up because the lack of strong steel.<p>You&#x27;ll also need to overcome trade barriers too. You&#x27;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.<p>There&#x27;s also the market prerequisites, no one wants your expensive steam engine if a donkey pulling a wheel is cheaper and more reliable.

It&#x27;s also amazing to me how quantitative, evolutionary advances to some technologies that might seem futile or superficial enable some qualitative technology leaps.<p>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?<p>That miniaturization is basically what enabled the whole smartphone industry. The large-scale availability of small and powerful chips in turn enabled the drone &#x2F; quadcopter to become feasible (a quadcopter is too unstable to fly on its own, and there&#x27;s no real way to stabilize it mechanically like we do on RC helicopters; it has to be stabilized electronically).<p>I think the best inventions come from recognizing the kind of qualitative leaps you can do from evolutionary advances to existing technologies.

My favourite example of an &quot;idea behind its time&quot; 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&#x2F;pulleys, and string&#x2F;rope:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Torque_amplifier" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Torque_amplifier</a>

It&#x27;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.

I was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday. Long sigh. &quot;Why did it take so long to...&quot;? Regrettably not. &quot;How very long will it eventually take to...&quot;, write an intro Astronomy textbook, that doesn&#x27;t bungle the color of the Sun? I still don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s a mistake to confuse systemic communication, coordination, and incentive dysfunction, with &quot;people don&#x27;t care&quot; (as the interventions needed are different)... but they do superficially look so similar.<p>Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content. I&#x27;m currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. &quot;Atoms are little balls&quot;; interactive <i>accurate</i> simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are <i>lots</i> of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples&#x27; 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 &quot;when introducing a thing, <i>show the bleeping thing</i>&quot;, 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?<p>As with individuals, society has a great deal of &quot;yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven&#x27;t gotten around to it yet&quot;.

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.

&gt;Wheeled Luggage<p>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&#x27;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&#x2F;sidewalks&#x2F;flooring...), and it has to be a traveler who can&#x27;t just afford to hire a servant&#x2F;car&#x2F;cart&#x2F;horse to transport those goods.<p>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?

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&#x27;t have been at this technological level 1,000 or 10,000 years ago?

Please take the time to enjoy this. I’ll leave it to others who know the work of James Burke to explain <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;7G8YHWbi-9U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;7G8YHWbi-9U</a>

Perhaps economics&#x2F;accounting ideas would be able to be invented sooner, as they have less reliance on physical materials&#x2F;supply chains etc.<p>Here&#x27;s my 3 favorite candidates:<p>- insurance based on statistics<p>- double entry book-keeping<p>- credit cards<p>How early could they have been invented? (How early were they invented in primitive forms?)

the author sets out on a very difficult exercise, made more so if he does not include the other inventive civilizations. documenting china&#x27;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.

Why is it taking so long to invent the semantic web? It could have a large economic impact, but solutions don&#x27;t catch on. We have a specific way to say &quot;I am a teapot&quot;, but not a generic way to unambiguously make simple statements like that. At least not a way that has gained traction.<p>What&#x27;s the missing tech? Maybe there isn&#x27;t one, and we&#x27;re just an Eli Whitney coder away from making it happen.

My favourite idea is the internet. The romans could have done it with flags &#x2F; torches and towers. Don&#x27;t tell me it wouldn&#x27;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.

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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daytoncodebreakers.org&#x2F;brief&#x2F;one_sheet&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daytoncodebreakers.org&#x2F;brief&#x2F;one_sheet&#x2F;</a> and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daytoncodebreakers.org&#x2F;more&#x2F;sitemap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daytoncodebreakers.org&#x2F;more&#x2F;sitemap&#x2F;</a>

I misinterpreted &quot;X&quot; as meaning &quot;X windows&quot;<p>Good article, but I still wish it was about X windows...definitely a buzzkill.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s also solves wars and crisis. But it can only be achieved politically. If you where a king, there wouldn&#x27;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.

I think the point about an &quot;obvious&quot; 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.

In case you were curious why it took till 3500 BC to invent the wheel:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;18808-invention-wheel.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.livescience.com&#x2F;18808-invention-wheel.html</a>

Colossus predates ENIAC <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Colossus_computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Colossus_computer</a>

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.

Sometimes thinking of an idea is the hardest step after all.<p>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?

What software do you think could help speed up discoveries&#x2F;inventions? Ideally, something which doesn&#x27;t require immense computing (like materials simulator).

why did the suitcase with wheels take until 1970s

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