As simple as a bicycle looks to us, it is the culmination of many small advances in ideas, technology and manufacturing. Without gears and a chain drive, you have a clumsy, hiwheel device. Without rubber, you have a bonejarring ride. Without strong metal, you have a frame that is impractical, bulky or fragile. Without spokes, you have a heavy wheel. Without ball bearings, you have too much friction.
You could probably replace any one of these items on a modern bike and make it work, but they didn’t have any of them, and someone had to combine the various concepts into a practical device. In the absence of instant Internet communication, it takes a long time to share even small pieces of knowledge and solve the many construction problems inherent in such a sophisticated design. And yes, compared to a travois, a bike is sophisticated in so many ways.
A lot of the basic tech requires a much finer degree of construction than was typical for that time.
Cameras, or rather film, are a series of chemical processes. Until the advent of modern, scientific chemistry in the early to mid 1800’s, they would not have had the knowledge or supplies to produce photographic media. Not to mention clear glass lenses - which required purified glass-making and knowledge of glass-grinding.
Phonographs - assuming we’re talking about the big horn mechanical things, not electrical? First, the drive mechanism was a wind-up spring. I don’t recall that Greek or Roman metallurgy had reached that level of quality, at least not consistently.
The bicycle is another interesting issue. Again, the level of metallurgical and hand-craft prowess did not allow for that fine a level of manufacture. So a bike wheel would be, say, wood. How thin? Too thin, and it shatters on potholes and rocks after a day. Too thick and it’s a monster to ride. What do you make the axle out of? How do you make the steering column? How do you attach the pieces so that they don’t break with all the bouncing? The penny-farthing bike was an attempt to build a bicycle that could achieve a decent speed above walking speed while cranking the wheel directly because the precision and reliability of manufacture required for chain was still expensive at that time. But - those bikes were mostly air, relying on the quality of wire technology to make extremely strong but light-weight wheels. A bike so heavy and awkward that it took more effort to travel using it than it took to walk - would go nowhere.
Casting technology had a long way to go. Even in the middle ages, when they started casting cannons, it took a while to develop the tech to cast one flawlessly enough that it was safe not to blow up with a shot.
Another thing we forget is the cost of energy. The amount of wood or charcoal to do even rough metallugy is immense. It’s no surprise the first application steam engines were put to, were needed for, was draining the coal mines as they got deeper.
then there’s the scale of industry. People were experimenting with various things in the 1700’s and 1800’s because you could by this material, refined, on the open market. The Wright bros could make bikes because you could buy chain, you could buy tube steel, you could buy welding equipment and supplies, you could buy machine tools.
As for science - again, the progress. Many more elements had been refined, were available off teh shelf, arrived from halfway across the continent thanks to technology. Not only did the greeks not know about some elements, they probably did not have the supplies to creat the precise alloys needed to make quality spring steel, stiff steel frames, etc.
I’m more amazed that they did not apply simple tech to simple jobs - for example, harnessing a water wheel not only to grind grain (IIRC, the romans did this with padle-wheel barges in the river during one seige). Why not use a water wheel to turn a potter’s wheel, instead of doing it by hand or foot, for example?
Don’t be too hard on them. While the ancient Greeks didn’t invent many things that they could have, they did invent an actual working analog computer. The Antikythera mechanism is the only fully confirmed ‘out-of-place’ technological artifact ever discovered. It is much more complex and requires a deeper level of scientific and technical accomplishment than some of the other things being discussed.
Absence of rubber makes the bicycle pretty pointless. And you’ve already got donkeys and horses which serve the same purpose and don’t need macadamed roads.
What about chariots? The Egyptians had incredible technology built into their chariots. I’m not seeing why a bicycle needs a better road or better wheels than a chariot does.
How good were the roads in Europe and America when the bicycle actually was invented?
The Romans at least had paved roads and early bicycles had no peddle or chains and had wood or iron wheels: http://wwwdelivery.superstock.com/WI/223/463/PreviewComp/SuperStock_463-4115.jpg
Those still go faster and easier than walking and the Egyptians rolled stuff on logs and the Greeks had axels. Chainless bicycles are at least as efficient as skateboards and skis.
The early phonographs were non-electrical hand-cranked deals and quite simple… I made some like that as a kid.
The Greeks knew about and used photosensitive colors and also understood optics, lenses and the idea of the camera obscura. The first credited modern Photograph used bitumin on metal plate as a receptor surface and early negative/positive photography on paper “plates” used simple Potasium Ferrocyanide. The first precursor of the photostat for that matter was a lensed photograph on a statically charged plate dusted with charcoal/resin which was then heat fused after exposure.
As far as I can tell none of these inventions require technology or knowledge that was not available to the elite in Ancient times. The issue seems to be the plausibility of folks “just not thinking of it” or folks demonstrating it to complete indifference. That is what I can’t grasp… the idea that given how many people there were and how little time was wasted watching TV people didn’t just come up with this stuff much earlier. For that mater the first TVs were mechanical systems which didn’t use any electronics but instead rotating perforated discs.
Certainly the printing press requires no fancy technology… I have hand built lever presses that print woodblock but also lacquer on paper intaglio. The Chinese came up with printing on paper by rubbing with oil/charcoal from carved stone but again, why didn’t someone in Greece think of it?
I just can’t figure out how *someone *wouldn’t think of this stuff. So I guess that is my question… what explanations of people “not thinking of stuff” have been proposed?
A good example I’ve seen used of that are stirrups. A simple and useful idea that probably could have been invented soon after horses were domesticated 4000+ years ago…but wasn’t invented until much later.
Besides stirrups, IIRC the crank handle (a mechanism needed for bike pedals) was a medieval invention.
Good point, the most logical piece to have invented would have been the printing press, but despite a lot of other similar printing and stenciling techniques, building a device to print arbitrary text seems to have occurred to someone very late in history. (There are, IIRC, handprints from paint - a crude form of stamping a design - found in cave paintings.) The Romans had tons of carved inscriptions - nobody figured out “i can make a reverse of this by prssing clay into it, then take that and stamp”? The chinese and the europeans both had the concept of the ink stamp as a form of seal.
Along this line of thought - the vast majority of people in Greek/Roman times were not wasting time because they little enough leisure time to spare from gathering the resources needed to survive. Most people were involved in food production with long hours of manual labor because they had to be. Education and literacy was not available to most people.
Some of the privileged few no doubt had free time and excess resources to enable them to invent something - but then they probably had less incentive as well.
And, why do people (in general) still blame their feelings on others or circumstances, when it’s a very established fact that we all cause OURSELVES to feel however we do (sad, nervous, anxious, fearful, irritated, resentful, jealous, etc.) and thus not only create emotional pains for their selves but also (as scientifically documented) create or exacerbate physical problems?
Well, I think there is a difference between a peddle-less bicycle and holographic computer technology. The latter would be predicated on a series of technological developments relatively close to it in time; capacitors, transistors, lasers and concepts like logic gates and stereography while a simple bicycle, camera or phonograph can be built using bronze age technology, engineering and physics but don’t appear until much later.
I don’t remotely think “'cause they were stupid” since I imagine people in the past must have been required to be far more intelligent to get along in life then we are required to be now no matter what walk of life they found themselves in. I think there must be some structural aspect to the matter.
How about this… a list of important/useful/economy-changing inventions that are simple in design and could have be developed in Roman times using only existing knowledge, technology and manufacturing processes…
Bicycles, cameras, phonographs, treadle sewing machines, fixed and movable type printing, woodblock printing, etching and engraving, programmable card punch looms, music boxes, swamp-cooler air conditioners, passive water filtration and cooling systems, water-based solar heat storage, telescopes, dental fillings, eye glasses, hectographs, ditto machines, carbon paper, deck prisms, light focusers… what else?
This is pretty clearly false, certainly with respect to cameras and phonographs, and probably bicycles too. Your notion, for instance that “simple Potassium Ferrocyanide” would have been readily available to ancient Greeks is, frankly, ludicrous, and several posters have explained to you what prior technologies, that were unknown to the ancients, are needed for building workable phonographs and bicycles. Less obviously ludicrous, but equally wrong, is your implicit assumption that they would have had ready access to glass of a suitable quality for making useful lenses, or knew the techniques for making lenses out of glass (or even that lenses were a thing). (And if you think a pinhole camera with a bitumen “film” is in any way a practical proposition, well, I just do not kknow waht to say!) I have already explained to you why, if the idea of a bicycle had crossed the mind of an ancient Greek, they would have immediately dismissed it as unworkable, even if he had thought it might be buildable.
They were no more intelligent or stupid than people are now, but stupidity has nothing to do with it. The issue is that you vastly underestimate not only how many other technologies and tool have to have been invented and mastered before most intentions become practicable or even thinkable, but also how difficult it is to come up with truly new, and viable ideas. Inventions and scientific discoveries very often seem obvious in retrospect, once you know about them, but in nearly all cases it took a long hared process of development, and several brilliant insights to come up with them in the first place. I would suggest that you find and read a book or two about the actual history of how the film camera, the phonograph or the bicycle (or indeed many other inventions) actually came to be invented. I think you might be surprised at what a long hard complex process it was, and how much “prior art” and hard won knowledge it all depended upon.
Pretty much none of those, to start with. (Maybe I will give you wood block printing as something that perhaps could have been made to work back then, if anyone had thought of it, or had thought it would be a good idea if they had. But there is little call for printing until there is a large market for books, and little market for books until literacy is fairly widespread.)