I’ll give you the automobile as it was quickly marketed and trended fast to mass production (though one could argue that other likened concepts could contribute to the futuristic essence of transportation - the stagecoach is a good example)
The internet was used only by military for many years before becoming publicly available. Essentially the light bulb wasn’t foreseen in countries other than Europe, but still became popularly known and mass produced years later (as well as redesigned with more efficiency). Electrical means of light was thought of around 1835. The Edison Bulb was patented around 1879 and again in 1880. Not until 1904-1915 (ish) was a fully functional and efficient version of the bulb commercialized.
To say something was ahead of the very time is was invented is asinine. If you’re looking for something not foreseen or unexplainably great and common I would say the written word or first concept of musical composition.
When the Apollo program was in its infancy, it was decided that the mission would incorporate maneuvers which would require calculating certain variables in real time while on the far side of the Moon. The only solution was a computer that was small enough, light enough, and which drew very little power so that it could be incorporated into the spacecraft.
The transistor was only a few years old, but someone had the idea of putting a bunch of them on a single wafer of silicon, creating what we call the microprocessor. What was a few dozen has become billions, with changes of state possible billions of times a second. Yet, no one had ever envisioned anything like a desktop computer at that time, and there was no demand for one, as a main frame computer was always available to perform needed calculations, even if over a radio circuit.
By 1974, microprocessors were being manufactured for public consumption, and the computer revolution began. Without the demands of the space program, it is arguable that the microprocessor would still not have been developed, with all that would mean. A computer would be a large, power hungry device which could only be operated by specialists. Indeed, such devices continued to exist for years, although they became known as ‘super computers’, instead of ‘main frames’.
Even today, large computers are being built, but they are much different than what would have evolved from main frames of the 1960’s. Also, memory capacity has been drastically impacted by the needs of consumer electronics, especially cell phones. What was considered nearly unachievable in the early 1990’s is now sold at Best Buy, a one terabyte hard drive. And solid state one-terabyte hard drives are now available. This represents enormous advances in technology, which would probably have never happened without the advent of ‘chip’ technology.
So information technology, remote sensing, and many other technologies have been vastly accelerated by computer technology based on the microprocessor. And the microprocessor was years ahead of its time, because no one had ever imagined something like it.
Archimedes had the essentials of integral calculus worked out in 300 BC, about 2000 years before Liebnitz and Newton worked it out.
While it’s an impossible question, since “most” is not a scientific term, certainly Faraday inventing the electric motor and discovering that electricity and magnetism were connected, is up at the top of the list.
I’d say that high-density ICs and things like the microprocessor were advanced no more than perhaps ten years by the Apollo usage. Like wartime, the space projects pushed on technology development but did not necessarily spark them or change the long-term effort.
Put another way, I think we’d have microprocessors and RAM and such pretty much at the same state of development even if Apollo had not needed their ancestors for the lunar craft. Remember that the shuttle still had magnetic-core memory when it was first launched…
Un-put another way, can anyone think of a 20th century “invention” that was not used by the war effort and thus was notably held back in development or wide use?
Just started listening to this podcast, which starts off with the lowly screw, and the screwdriver, which apparently was invented 300 years later. Lots of interesting additions for this thread.
The wheel was independently invented twice. Once (and possibly twice) by people in Sumeria and/or the Caucusus, and again by the Olmec. It’s just that the Olmec never though to use it for anything heavy.
What really made things happen was when a couple of kids took one of those microprocessors and made a home built computer. That started a revolution we have not seen the end of yet.