Technological progression seems to depend on at least three forms of building block:
- Experience (of individuals).
- Written records; and
- Advanced apparatus/tools.
For huge swaths of human history, only (1) was available. There were obvious problems with transmitting technological insight from one person to another (or a group of others); efficiency and lack of economy of scale; danger of experience being lost so that technological regress was possible.
With the advent of (2), some of those problems became less acute, and the “compounding” of intellectual capital became more and more possible (i.e., more people could, all else being equal, get up to speed by reading Newton’s works in hundreds of printed publications than could by going over to Ig’s cave to check out the burning logs back in the day). The risk of technological regress (or of one culture coming up with something cool, but failing to perpetuate/spread it) probably essentially disappeared.
With (3), both the “innovators” and the “followers” were able to “ramp up” (horrible expression, but . . .) faster. E.g.: Joe Genius could do great experiments in 1790 with his accurate, but incredibly expensive, chronograph; Ted Everyman (and his hundreds of peers) could achieve similar advancements by 1890 with even-more-accurate, but far cheaper, timekeepers. Again, in a rough sense, you can think of knowledge as “compounding” like interest. Warren Buffet made more last year than in his first 30 years, right [WAG]?
While it’s hard to put your finger on a point in time when a critical mass of “sophisticated” scientific/engineering capability/apparatus existed, an interesting thought experiment (to which I don’t have an exact answer) is to picture a bunch of smart modern scientific/engineering types stranded in pre-history with (a) nothing but their memory and reasonably abundant raw materials; or (b) modern literature, but no apparatus; or © modern literature and primitive apparatus. I’ve often thought that every semiconductor chip or laser stands in some sort of unbroken line back to the earliest machine tools or crude mechanical balances, without which, we’d be back to the cave; but maybe I’m wrong, and there are shortcuts that would allow our heroes to get to back up to where we are now.
