What invention or scientific discovery was most significantly ahead of it's time

Great Debates
1

I’m trying to identify the invention and/or scientific discovery that was most significant and truly “ahead of its time?” And it’s the “ahead of its time” part that is the most critical to me.

For example, I’ve recent been reading (again) about both Marconi and the Wright brothers. It’s seems that while they were all brilliant and dedicated, if they had died in childhood for argument’s sake, that their respective inventions would have been forth coming soon, as others were also working on their respective projects.

So I’m trying to identify inventions of scientific discoveries that were significantly ahead of their time in that if they weren’t invented/discovered then, than the world would have waited years for it.

2

My vote is for Eratosthenes measuring the Earth’s circumference and angle of tilt with 2 sticks over 2000 years ago and with remarkable accuracy.

3

The Phaistos Disk comes to mind. Movable type, 3000 years before Guttenberg, but since it wasn’t developed, probably isn’t what the OP has in mind.

4

IMHO the mechanical computer, about 2,100 years ago:

5

But this was almost certainly predated by similar devices. It’s probably less that it was ‘ahead’ of its time and more that historians had previously underestimated aspects of the technological sophistication of the time.

6

Michael Faraday discovered the essential principles of the electromagnetic field and informally formulated the intimate relationship between electricity and magnetism (which were largely regarded as separate, although occassionally co-occuring phenomenon) circa 1832. He later hypothesized that these electromagnetic lines of force were infinitely graduated and extended through evacuated space, i.e. comprise what we would now characterize as “fields”. However, his lack of mathematical training kept him from formulating a model that would be accepted by other physicists, and the concept languished for several decades until James Clerk Maxwell picked it up and developed a rigorous mathematical model describing Faraday’s theory in his groundbreaking 1864 monologue A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. Maxwell’s model was elaborate, consisting of twenty differential equations and an equal number of variables, used a notation (quarterion algebra) that was unfamiliar to physicists of the day, and was essentially unsolveable by the techniques of the day for all but the most trivial of conditions. He later published a simplified model in 1873 as A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, but it wasn’t until after his death that the obscure tinkering scientist and engineer Oliver Heaviside reduced Maxwell’s model to the collection four vectorized laws that bear Maxwell’s name, in the process making the theory widely accessible but removing some of the fundamental insights that Maxwell had about the nature of the electromagnetic field that would not be rediscovered for another couple of decades.

Faraday and Maxwell were both well ahead of their time and their peers in understanding the nature of electromagnetism as it is currently understood and used today, and that advance, unfortunately, retarded the general understanding and application of electromagnetic principles until they were sufficiently simplified.

Stranger

7

What exactly does it mean to be “ahead of it’s time”?

Agreed that at certain times there are dozens of people working in a particular field, and if one of them drops dead another person picks up the slack. Airplanes, radio, sewing machines, steam power, electrification, telephones, these are things where the guy who gets all the credit for the invention was just the first guy to reach the patent office. The necessary prerequisites for the work are already in place, it just takes someone talented enough to put together a working version of the idea.

So when we look at inventions, we often see this pattern. Someone has an idea for the invention, writes it down or discusses it, maybe fiddles with it a bit, but the idea is dropped and mostly forgotten for a while–years or decades. Then someone takes up the idea, builds working versions of it, but it exists as a toy or curiosity. It’s expensive, fragile, not very useful. Some people see the potential of the invention, but most have never heard of it. Then other advances remove the barriers that were preventing the development of the invention, and suddenly the invention is produced everywhere and is in mass use.

So who is the inventor of the invention? The renaissance guy who doodled about it in his notebook? The guy who built a toy version of it? Or the first guy to make a profit selling the invention?

If an invention is significantly ahead of its time, then it won’t be understood until the time for the invention actually rolls around. And then people will look back, and say that Lord Whoever back in whenever wrote all about the invention but was ignored until John Doe back in whenever figured out what it meant.

So without Lord Whoever, we’d still have the invention, because Lord Whoever’s contribution was not recognized until John Doe came up with it independently, started reading into it and found out that Lord Whoever wrote about it a century ago.

If Lord Whoever’s work doesn’t get ignored, but instead gets developed and used, then his work wasn’t ahead of its time after all, but rather of its time. If it gets ignored, then gets rediscovered, then Lord Whoever wasn’t actually important, and his work really would get duplicated by someone else when the prerequisites for the work are finally all in place.

But given all that, it seems to me Newton’s work on physics are pretty far ahead of their time, and they were recognized right away. Newton was way ahead of his time and his contributions probably wouldn’t have been duplicated by anyone for a very long time. Note that his invention of Calculus was famously duplicated by Liebniz. Without Newton we still get calculus, without Liebniz we still get calculus, without either someone else would have figured out calculus pretty soon. But Newton’s work on physics stands by itself, nobody else could have done it, and most importantly the work was recognized at the time and wasn’t shoved into a notebook and forgotten for a hundred years.

8

Heron of alexandria (ca. 200 AD) invented s team turbine…had he been able to perfect it, who knows where we would be now.

9

The Arabs created an automaton orchestra back around 1200; the Greeks have the antikythera device; the Chinese made gunpowder; I think the problem wasn’t creating things “ahead of their time”, it was having the financial incentive to go into production mode and spread your invention. I think it’s probably not until the 1900s that you start to get technologies that require equipment that can’t be built by hand with ordinary tools.

10

1600 additional years of industrially driven climate change without the science to understand it or mitigate it would have been interesting. The US would certainly be a much smaller place today, from the Pacific coast in Colorado to the Atlantic maybe somewhere around Indiana – though it might be too hot or too stormy for anyone to actually be able to live there!

11

Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine comes to mind. It was a programmable digital computer with all the major elements we recognize in a modern computer – memory, processor, the idea of instruction sequences working on operands, etc. And it was conceived a hundred years before the first working electromechanical computer and subsequent electronic computers were developed. And Lady Ada Lovelace thereby became the world’s first programmer.

Sadly, its mechanical complexity was such that it was never built, and Lovelace’s programming was only on paper. So it doesn’t count as an actual “invention” but rather a very far-sighted concept that was too far ahead of its time to actually be built. Had someone of Babbage’s caliber had access to anything like modern electronic or electromechanical memories and switching devices, the fields of computer engineering and software design would be immeasurably more advanced today.

12

Claudius Ptolemy measured the laws of incidence and refraction using exactly the same kind of device an undergraduate might today. Despite what you may read elsewhere, his measurements must have been extremely close to the correct onbes (we only have his “crunched” data, not his raw data), and if you plot angle of incidence vs. angle of refraction, his curves are extremely close to what we would measure today. He formulated a law relating these two, which was functionally very close, even if he didn’t get the right formula. you could have used it to develop geometric optics. But he didn’t, and neither did his followers.

About a thousand years later, ibn Sahl redid the experiment, and derived the correct law, that the sines of those two angles are in proportion, with the constant of proportionality the refractive index. His work was pretty much ignored, and wasn’t translated into western languages until a few years ago.

Circa 1600 Thomas Harriot in England rediscovered it again, but nobody noticed.

Finally, twenty years later Willebrord Snel (sic) and Rene Descartes independently rediscovered it, and it was notriced. Descartes used it for his theoretical work on the rainbow.
Interestingly, circa 1300 the Persian astronomer/mathematicians al Farisi and al Shirazi, and the Frencgh-German monk Theoric of Freibourg almost simultaneously experimentally studied the rainbow, tracing the rays of light through large models of water drops, and correctly identifying the paths for the primary and secondary rainbows. al Farisi even observed the tertiary rainbow. If they’d had ibn Sahl’s work, or even Ptolemy’s incorrect formula, they could’ve put the observed light paths together with the law of refraction and obtained a complete explanation of the rainbow three centuries before Descartes and Newton.

13

Heron’s device (presuming it was built) was even more removed from even basic steam engines as the Mysorean Rockets (Mysorean rockets - Wikipedia) were from the Saturn V.

14

Global warming will not cause Waterworld.

15

I am not sure “type”/pictograph/hieroglyph stamps count as movable type, at least the way we understand the term.

(Nor, it should be noted, have any other examples of such “printing” been found, or any of the stamps/slugs. The Phaistos Disk is truly one of antiquities deepest mysteries.)

I’d lean towards the Antikythera Machine, myself. Advanced gear-driven engineering to a specific and precise purpose, with the technology used for nothing else of consequence (that we know of) and not rediscovered for some 1500 years.

16

What I’ve read about the machine says that it was NOT a unique use of gears – that gear-driven machines were actually quite common in the Roman world. Another example is the Vitruvian odometer:

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEV2G1SARWM2EABUFXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTByMjB0aG5zBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzYw--?p=Roman+Odometer&fr=yfp-t-901#id=1&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.leonardo-da-vinci-models.com%2Fda-Vinci-Models-Odometer-p7.jpg&action=click

(It was featured in an article in Scientific American, and showed up in one of Lindsay Davis’ Marcus Falco mysteries). What is unique about the Antikythera mechanism is its orrery-like use for predicting astronomical events.

17

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that you should wash your hands before going from one patient to another, especially a woman about to give birth, to prevent puerperal (childbed) fever, which killed countless women and babies. This was years before Pasteur, and if enough people had listened to him, so many people would have been saved.

18

I nominate Dennis Gabor for inventing the theory of holography before lasers were invented.

He knew that you needed a coherent source of light, but none were available in 1947, when he first forumulated his theory. It wasn’t until lasers were invented in 1960 that his theory was proven correct and workable.

This is one of things that I don’t think would have been a self-evident use of lasers without his theory.

19

Key word is advanced. Single-junction gearing is not unheard of back to Roman times, and maybe earlier. The complex stack of gears, including a differential gear pair, and multiple simultaneous functions is (AFAIK) unlike anything found before clockworks more than 1000 years later - and maybe not until minute-hand movements.

20

The Antithykera mechanism was indeed amazing. I don’t think there was anything else like it in the ancient world.

It would be romantic to push back the construction dating to 205 BC, the time of Archimedes and Apollonius but I’m not sure that makes sense; It was Hipparchos, born about when Apollonius died, who developed a very accurate model of celestial orbits.

Carman and Evans date the mechanism via its “epoch” – lining up its zero point with known orbits. But why do Carman-Evans assume the mechanism was constructed at the time of its “epoch”? Wouldn’t it have made sense to allow the clock to look a century or so into the past, so that historic eclipses and other astrological events could be shown? What am I missing?