well, printing presses were around earlier (especially in China). the basic mechanism was used in wine presses, olive presses, cheese presses, and the like. My understanding is that the critical invention that Gutenberg came up with was Movable Type.
The mention of evolution got me to thinking: How about genetics? So far as I know, Mendel wasn’t taking advantage of any body of knowledge that hasn’t been known since the dawn of agriculture.
Boxer briefs.
If someone had only had the idea, the ancient Greeks could have have understood cartesian coordinates- they would have loved the unification of algebra and geometry. And it might have set them on the road to functions. Math might have advanced a thousand years earlier than it did.
They’d need to have 0 first. Which is another example of something that could have shown up much earlier. I believe that the Greek’s were philosophically opposed to the concept of 0 as a number.
All this way and no one’s mentioned wheels on suitcases and other luggage?
An ancient Greek, Aristarchus, suggested that it was the Earth that was moving, not the Sun and stars, in contrast to the commonly accepted idea that the Earth was stationary and the heavenly bodies moved around it. This was treated with extreme skepticism, as the Greeks were aware that rotating objects should throw off loose bits due to the centrifugal effect. If the Earth was rotating, they argued, people and goats and so forth should fly off into the sky. Plus, what could be keeping the Earth moving? It’s so huge!
Imagine if they had only taken this argument to its logical conclusion: that you don’t need a force to keep objects spinning or moving (we now call this inertia, or conservation of momentum & angular momentum.) Combined with the force of gravity, this would also explain why the loose bits don’t fly off–they have momentum too.
They could have discovered Galilean physics (inertia), maybe a good chunk of Newtonian physics (forces & laws of motion) AND Copernicus’ idea of a heliocentric solar system in one fell swoop.
Here’s something I was wondering about: from the early days of artillery the idea of a breech-loading cannon was obvious, but it was never practical- the designs they tried had a depressing tendency to fail or explode. Eventually by the end of the nineteenth century rotating breech lock designs made modern artillery possible. My question is, could the right design have been implemented earlier if only someone had come up with it? Or was the concept just unworkable until machine-tooled high quality steel came along?
Alas, without it, 1884 was like 1884.
Ok I’ve been using this one all weekend and it’s a cracker. But when someone challenges me all I can say is “I read it on the internet”. I know this isn’t GQ but is there a cite for this?
I think that to be accurate one can say that no manufacturer of clothes put them as standard issue until 1922. The idea appeared early but it did not caught on until then.