The invention of paper about 2000 years ago in China, with its several important uses, qualifies as significantly ahead of its time. We know that because China kept the recipe secret and paper-making spread very slowly. According to Wikipedia, the Islamic world learned the secret recipe for paper by interrogating prisoners taken in the 751 A.D. Battle of Talas, at least six centuries after the Chinese recipe was perfected.
Again, I wouldn’t say that was necessarily ‘ahead of its time’. It’s more a case of China being ahead of the rest of the world at the time. Many things produced in China at the time would have been considered far advanced, unless you happened to live in China, where they would have been considered normal technological progress. The same is true for all ‘great’ civilisations.
Though more mundane, the Colt model 1911 was an advanced design for its time.
Steam turbine, eh? Pffft!
The guy invented a vending machine. That’s what I call ahead of its time.
Not ahead of his time. Not only wasn’t he unique or first to recommend hand desinfection (mind you just washing your hands wouldn’t be enough), he was also wrong about the particulars of the problem.
Semmelweis recommended washing with a mild chlorine solution, which would certainly have been enough.
Pretty much by definition you can’t “invent” something without the technology to make it happen. Dennis Gabor actually made holograms in 1947. Therefore, he must have had a source of coherent light.
Gabor used narrow transition lines in a mercury discharge lamp, highly filtered.
Coherent light certainly existed before lasers. Coherent light certainly exists in nature. All light is coherent, to some degree (se below), but most natural light is effectively incoherent, or partially coherent.
What’s important, in making holograms (or any good interferometry) is the coherence length – the length over which the light remains in some phase relationship with other parts of the beam. In nature the coherence length is very short – only a few wavelengths (but that’s enough to cause diffraction effects, including the rainbow). Gabor’s filtered mercury light had a coherence length of less than a millimeter. What made the laser so exciting is that the coherence length could be measured in inches or in feet.
You can only make a hologram of an object smaller than the coherence length. So Gabor’s holograms were essentially “flat” from a human scale. They didn’t look 3D. What Leith and Upatnieks did in 1962 was to take the first obviously 3D holograms, using long coherence length laser light.
Gabor was “ahead of his time” in the sense that his invention was capable of much more than the technology of his time allowed, although the techn ology caught upo in 15 years. Not really “significantly ahead of his time”. Other technology has a better claim on that.
The annoying thing is that it would have been perfectly practical to build the analytical engine at the time. The difference engines built recently have proved thoroughly constructable and work. The real impediments were organisational and financial, and could have been overcome.
Vaccinations? The Chinese were doing a form of them a couple thousand years ago.
I don’t think we’re on quite the same wavelength here.
I’m not crediting Gabor with inventing lasers, but inventing a practical application for lasers. I’d agree with you if there were evidence that Einstein anticipated this application of laser technology.
However, I agree with the later post by Cal Meacham, which is both clarifying and informative:
Yes. I didn’t intend to imply Semmelweis recommendations were a failure, just the opposite. What he recommended was disinfection, even if he was actually aiming at removing the corpse smell. Which is slightly different from “wash your hands” as Denarii Dame wrote. Just a nitpick though.
True. what we have to remember…Heron was a solitary genius who worked alone. he could not order parts, or have a machine shop make something from his sketches.
Inventions like the automobile came about because there was already a machine tool industry able to make the required parts.
Cite? (I’m curious)
AFAIK, the aeolipile , also known as a Hero engine, has no practical usages.
Umm, not really since for most of that 1600 years they were casually burning wood and coal for heat and cooking. And you exaggerate the amount of water rise.
Perhaps not then. But, if you wanted, you could easily make a dynamo out of such a device.
Well, In England it was fairly common to deliberately get infected with Cow Pox, as it was rarely deadly, and it protected you from Small Pox.
I possibly should have used the term “inoculation.” Not sure how different if any that is from “vaccination.” But this cite lists 10th-century-AD as the first inoculations, and here, so make that a thousand years ago. I’ve also read of evidence in India about the same time.
Both of the above I first learned about in college.
To add: In fact, I recall an essay by the historian JM Roberts illustrating how China invented a lot of firsts that the world just wasn’t ready for, mechanical clocks and gunpowder as two examples. They were largely just curiosities until the West managed to take off with them.