What development in the industrial revolution was the least intuitive in its time? I’m thinking maybe Hertz’ idea of radio waves and Marconi’s useful application of them. By contrast, at the other extreme, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was probably an idea that had occurred to even the lowliest cotton picker, but only Whitney rolled up his sleeves and built the simple device.
Vulcanized rubber. It is far from intuitive that natural latex plus sulfur plus heat would make a substance so different in properties from the raw materials.
I wonder if something like that (and in fact, lots of somethings like that) were discovered by accident – as is said, for example, of the invention of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.
I’ve always thought that curing olives in lye would qualify.
One so basic as to be forgotten: the Hollerith Code.
Using holes in a card to represent a character. Which immediately established the idea of a “byte” - the amount of something required to represent a character.
And then, the over-type to represent things which do not occur in nature - EOF for one.
Re-reads thread title
Industrial
<blind person
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Plastic would be an example of something that was discovered by accident as a byproduct of a totally unrelated industry, but very unintuitive and not something than an inventor would get up the next morning and look for after a Eureka moment in bed.
Rubber is called rubber, because for a very long time after its discovery, no useful purpose could be found except as an eraser, to “rub” out pencil marks.
Henry Ford, I’m told, once said he liked to hire the laziest men he could find, because he could depend on them to find easier and more efficient ways to do things. The wheel, he theorized, was not invented by the most diligent worker on the job site, but by the laziest.
Braille predates it by 65 years and served much the same purpose: to encode characters in a form that could be read by someone or something that could not read regular writing.
Gasoline was originally sold in bottles in drugstores for use as a cleaning agent.
Bar codes.
An intuitive approach would just be machine-readable/human readable labels. But making up bar codes, which humans can’t (by and large) read is non-intuitive…but damned effective.
With advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, we’re getting past bar codes again, and into the more intuitive idea of label-reading scanners. But what a side-show!
Another thing in warehousing that should have been intuitive, but wasn’t, is “wave” shelf-picking. The idea is to computerize your picks, so you grab things off the shelf in the direction you’re traveling. Instead of jumping back and forth, you arrange your list to match your path through the warehouse.
(Housewives have known this one for years, sorting their grocery shopping list according to the layout of items, shelves, and aisles in the store.)
And the punch card itself predates the Hollerith Code by almost a century. They were originally used for mechanical looms like the Jacquard Loom. Those punch cards weren’t directly encoding characters, but they were encoding digital information which could be used to render characters or images in the weave.
IIRC for centuries prior to that, arbitrarily complicated patterns could be woven with manual draw looms, which would have had conceptually similar patterns recorded on paper.
My library has bar codes on the books. But they are located on the cover, so are not (I don’t think) readable on the shelf. If the bar codes were on the spine, a library could quickly solve the (fairly serious) problem of mis-shelved books, by having somebody walk through the stacks from to time with a scanner programmed to detect catalog numbers that are out of sequence, and then manuually reshelf them. Simple intuition based on existing technology, but not executed.
I bet the most non-intuitive industrial breakthrough is something along the lines of a chemical reaction or a physical process, like the refrigeration cycle, or the Haber process.
It’s probably some fairly simple process that underlies just about everything used in the modern world- like some organic chemistry process used in petroleum refining or something else along those lines.
While the actual discovery might have been a random event, it was part of a planned process. Charles Goodyear had been working on the problem for five years. It was very likely he was going to try sulfur and heat at some point in his research.
It might seem that any one individual industrial chemical pathway is so complicated or strange that it would be hard to replicate. But chemists have been mixing chemical A with chemical B just to see what would happen for centuries. And throw in hunchbacked assistants who don’t wash out the beakers correctly so you get a little Chemical X mixed in, and you get all sorts of goofy reactions happening hundreds of times a day.
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Another thing in warehousing that should have been intuitive, but wasn’t, is “wave” shelf-picking. The idea is to computerize your picks, so you grab things off the shelf in the direction you’re traveling. Instead of jumping back and forth, you arrange your list to match your path through the warehouse.
(Housewives have known this one for years, sorting their grocery shopping list according to the layout of items, shelves, and aisles in the store.)
[/QUOTE]
And now I have a much better idea of what those “WAVE 3” type labels on my Amazon boxes mean.
So they send someone out with a cart full of totes and the computer tells them to put one bundle of towels from Aisle 2, Bay 14, Slot 6 into Tote 4, a box of bolts from Aisle 2, Bay 15, Slot 10 goes to Tote 3, etc… I know Amazon’s warehouses are stocked with the “Find a hole and fill it” method rather than attempting to keep similar items together. The hive mind is presumably clever enough to group the orders being picked in Wave 3 as they all need items from just Aisles 2, 5, and 10, so the picker doesn’t have to waste time traveling aimlessly through Aisles 6, 7, 8, and 9.
As you said, people have sorted grocery lists like this and saved time by not going down the snacks aisle if they’re not buying potato chips for eons. Amazing that it took so long to apply such a seemingly intuitive principle to picking orders.
Coca-cola was originally a medicine. Whoever had the idea to put the syrup into carbonated water and sell it as a soft drink made a heck of a breakthrough, and, at least to my modern mind, not something that I’d intuit to do with any sort of medicine I’ve ever bought.
And, notoriously, grocery stores subvert this by rearranging their stores periodically, to increase the number of impulse purchases.
In my industry (oil/gas exploration and development), I’ll nominate the Flame Ionization technology used in gas chromatography.
“OK, so you separate some hydrocarbon compounds from each other and burn them in a hydrogen flame, in the presence of a high voltage, and this ionizes the carbon atoms; the high voltage attracts the ions to an electrical conductor, creating a tiny electrical current that can then be amplified to measure the amount of carbon and thus the original hydrocarbon content…” (head asplodes)
Libraries for some time have had RF scanning technology of some form or another.
My local library has had RFID chips on their books for a while. To check them out, just place on a raised flat spot on the desk. No optics involved.
One college library way back when (>20 years ago), had thin strips that were slid into the spines of books which were readable by RF scanners. (Not at all like RFID chips.) The main purpose was to prevent people walking out with books before checking them out. But that only worked against people who didn’t know about the strips.
OTOH, for shelving purposes there’s a lot of noise from so many close together plus location isn’t exact.