Oh yeah, putting a cover over buttons is really cutting edge.
Concrete. The ancient Romans had it, but the secret was lost for 13 centuries. Concrete - Wikipedia
Sanitary sewers.
Screw propeller.
Chain drive for bicycles.
Orrery (mechanical astronomical computer). The Greek Antikythera mechanism was constructed about 100 BC, or about 15 centuries before it was reinvented in western Europe. Antikythera mechanism - Wikipedia
Wasn’t the invention of the rifled gun barrel equally important? The Minie ball isn’t that much of an improvement without it.
Walt
The hot-air balloon. Mankind has been sitting around fires for millennia, watching the smoke and ashes rising up from it. I’m surprised it never once occurred to anyone to try to capture some smoke in a bag and see if it could lift something aloft before the late 18th century.
The obvious drawback to this for most of human history is that paper or paper-analogues were expensive and often difficult to obtain. Few people had the opportunity to doodle much, and even if someone had the idea for a flip book it would be costly to get the paper to put one together. The scroll format so popular in the ancient world also doesn’t lend itself to the production of flip books. I’m not sure how easily papyrus flips either. So while a papyrus flip book may technically have been possible, it doesn’t surprise me that no one ever had the idea (or it didn’t catch on if they did).
I can imagine some medieval monk in a scriptorium doodling in the corners of the text he was copying or illuminating, but I can also imagine him being severely punished for disrespecting an important work – and a work that wasn’t important wouldn’t have been copied.
The rifle was invented fairly early, but was used primarily as a hunting weapon because it was too slow to load with the round ball used at the time. The innovation of the Minie ball was that it had enough clearance to be rammed down the barrel but would engage the rifling when fired.
While we’re on the subject, how about bicycles or tricycles? You would’ve thought that the Greeks, Romans, or Chinese would’ve at least come up with some prototypes but the first tricycle wasn’t invented until 1680 and bicycles didn’t really appear on the scene until the 19th century.
Sanitary sewers??!! That’s crazy talk! There’s not much point to them if you have to keep them clean.
Google image search Roman bikini, for some pre-medieval examples.
You might be able to make a Sten gun with 1860 era machine tool technology, but you couldn’t shoot a Sten with black powder. In 1860 they’d heard of nitrocellulose and had tried using it as a “smokeless powder”, but it had a nasty habit of spontaneously detonating. It was towards the end of the nineteenth century that a process for stablizing nitro-based powders was worked out, yielding cordite and similar products. Our fictional time traveler could have also shown them how to make cordite, but I think this is pushing the “could have been invented” premise of the OP. (Also, I doubt that the underindustrialized South could have made much use of advanced weapon plans, with little advanced manufacturing capacity.)
Are pedal-driven designs really practical without either paved roads or pneumatic tires? Also, I’ve heard it said that an ordinary bicycle is actually a sophisticated piece of engineering, not something a blacksmith and carpenter could hack out.
Why bother with clay? Just use wood.
The Romans and the Chinese had extensive networks of paved roads. However, their lack of pneumatic tires would’ve been a problem. They probably would’ve had to use cartwheels which would’ve made the ride bumpy to say the least. Perhaps some sort of tricycle could’ve been built to transport things and for message-couriers but, overall, oxen would be more effective for the former and horses better for the latter.
This depends on the quality of the wood or clay used but I would think type made of clay would look and hold up better over extensive use.
…I could see why no one would necessarily want to do that…after all you do have stand IN fire in order to catch the air.
The first ATMs as we know them today were brought into use in the 1960s…
The first time I saw one was in 1980.
Clipper ships.
The bikini has been around for at least 1,002,010 years.
Heh—I remember the old Secret Life of Machines episode featuring the history and workings of the fax machine, even featuring a pair of Pantelegraphs.
Anyway, some (all?) of the early gliders—such as Lilenthal’s, or the Wright Gliders, don’t seem to have any major technical challenges to making them sooner. I’ll leave it up to more knowledgeable Dopers as to how much sooner, or how much of a stretch it would be to build something with the capability of, say, even a modern hang glider…though, now that I think of it, the existence of manned kites might mean it wouldn’t be that far fetched at all.
Thing is, for a practical steam engine you need at least two things: enough good quality metal to make a decent pressure boiler and a cheap source of fuel (in 1800, this was coal; there was a brief period where there was enough wood from virgin forests in North America to use that for running trains, but only a brief period). The Romans had neither coal mines nor large tracts of virgin forest near their industrial areas, and metallurgy was not at 1820’s standards. (And remember, it wasn’t until after 1800 or so that England’s metallurgy got good enough to make decent steam engines)
I wonder how well minie balls would have worked in the era when muskets were built individually. Wasn’t the big innovation of the Eli Whitney era that parts were standardized enough that you could use the parts from one musket on another one and have them fit well enough to work? If the barrel on a smoothbore musket is a little bigger or smaller than standard, no big deal since the round ball wasn’t supposed to fit perfectly anyway.
Does a minie ball require tighter tolerances?
Yeah, Tim Hunkin rules!
as Schenkman pointed out in his Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History, Interchangeable parts preceded Eli Whitney. He mentions the work of Honore Blanc, for instance.
Upon checking Wikipedia, I find that Blanc (and others) only preceded Eli Whitney by a quarter of a century or so. Even so, it certainly wasn’t widespread:
Your point about tolerancing is, I think, very significant. So is improvement in manufacturability James Burke, in his book and series Connections, points out that it was the ability to grind pistons to to be very close to the size of the chamber they must fit in that made the Watt steam engine possible – before that, too much power was lost in the gas vented around the cylinder. Similarly, the principle behind the incandescent light was appreciated and known before Edison (and others) built theirs – it was really that lack of a sufficiently effective vacuum pump that kept the dream from becoming reality – earlier vacuum pumps left in enough residual gas to oxidize the filament.
we had a discussion on this Board a long time ago about Sound Movies. Even before they found the sound recording associated with the Dickson Sound Film ( The Dickson Experimental Sound Film - Wikipedia ), it was obvious from the presence of the phonograph there that this was a case of simultaneous sound and image recording, obviously with the intent of having a sound film in 1894/5. In fact, since Edison invented the the phonograph and co-invented the motion picture, it’d be very surprising if he didn’t consider joining the two technologies. There certainly were sound films long before the Jazz Singer (which, by the way, used a phonograph, not film-based technology – even though film-based sound recording had been developed and demonstrated before its release). What kept Sound Films from being an earlier phenomenon was the lack of a usable Sound Amplifier (which, not coincidentally, also relied on good vacuums, since it used vacuum tubes) to allow you to show the film to an audience bigger than what could be gathered around a phonograph.
Othe other hand, just how did they make round ball for hunting rifles? I presume someone would experiment with different sized ball until they found one that was close enough to their rifle’s bore to work, then keep that mold for making their own ball. (I presume the tolerance of the ball is easier to control than the rifle bore.) Minie balls might require having every rifled musket matched with it’s own custom bullet mold, so it does seem a bit less practical than I’d thought; but perhaps not insurmountably so.