A few earlier innovation PODs

(I know that some of these have already been covered in posts on this board by other people, but I’m trying to get several of them together in a list.)

What if the ancient Greeks or Romans develop a place number system with a zero? The Greeks had to discover a number of their mathematical principles the hard way, by the painstaking use of geometry, because they didn’t have a decent number system. Surely it’s possible that some intelligent classical thinker with a fondness for unusual solutions could invent an entirely new number system.

What if the ancient Greeks or Romans developed crossbows? Many of the Hellenistic and Roman catapults worked on the same principle as crossbows, but there is no direct evidence that anyone ever designed a version that could be used by an individual soldier. (Some military historians think that crossbows may have been used by Roman soldiers in the 3rd, 4th, or 5th centuries, but there is no direct evidence for this.) Would this have had a major impact on the way that war was fought in the classical world?

Could an effective working steam engine have been developed in ancient times? We know that the basic principles were understood by at least a few Hellenistic Greek scholars. We also know that the Greeks actually built rails in some of their mines and had rail cars that were pulled or pushed by animals or people. What if someone had put the ideas of steam engine and rail car together? Is this even remotely plausible?

What if the bicycle had been invented earlier than the late 19th century? There is a controversial drawing in the notebook of one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s pupils that appears to depict a bicycle, although some scholars believe that it is a forgery done by one of the people who worked on restoring the manuscripts in the 1960s. What if Da Vinci or someone else around the same time built a working bicycle? Would it be too uncomfortable and/or dangerous to become widely used given the lack of inflatable tires and the awful condition of most roads at the time? Could a working chain be built with 16th century metalworking?

Native American civilizations never used the wheel for anything except children’s toys, largely because of a lack of domesticated animals to power wheeled vehicles. However, what if someone in Mesoamerica or the Andes or the Mississippi valley developed something like a wheelbarrow – a load-bearing wheeled vehicle that was powered by people rather than animals? It’s not surprising that this didn’t happen, given that wheeled vehicles in the “old world” were developed for animals to pull long before they were developed for people. Still, it could have happened – could it have made any significant difference?

What if gunpowder was developed earlier and/or was used extensively in weapons as soon as it was invented? The basic ingredients are common enough – I think that someone could have stumbled onto the idea in virtually any civilization in the world that had reached roughly the bronze-age level or higher.

What if gliders capable of carrying people aloft with at least some degree of safety had been developed before the 19th century? As an alternative, what if hot-air balloons had been developed earlier?

What if cotton, sugarcane, or rice had reached the Mediterranean world in Greek or Roman times and had become widely cultivated?

What if windmills and/or water wheels had become widely used in the Roman Empire? Windmills weren’t developed until medieval times, but it seems that the principle of a windmill was known, because there is an account of miniature “windmills” being used to power mechanical novelties in the Hellenistic period. Water wheels were developed during Roman times, but they apparently weren’t that widely used. It was only during the medieval period that they became common.

This isn’t really an “innovation”, but what if there was a species of cool-weather rice that was native to much of northern and western Europe? What if it was domesticated locally before wheat and other grains arrived from the Middle east, and remained the preferred crop in areas that were wet enough to grow it? If I remember correctly, rice produces more food per unit of land than most other grain crops, which is why rice-growing areas often have a VERY high population density. Could this give Europe a much higher population earlier in history?
 

Straha

Banned
1 It all depends. Maybe we'd get a greek scientific revolution and romans on mars but as I said it all depends.

2 Europe has better bows so it resists the mongol invasion. Al-Andalus is stronger and doesn't become fragmended.

3 Longer lasting and more expansionistic. Scotland,ireland,germany and arabia become roman provinces.

4 an earlier postal system could appear..

5 umm... more carts to carry aztec sacraficial victims?

6 higher technology

7 earlier worldwide exploration

8 a larger population. Rome develops more like China with staying pagan and having lots of mystery cults. Rome expands farther with the british isles'the canaries,dacia,nubia,mesopotamia,arabia and axum being in rome

9 earleir commerical revolution

10 more highly populated europe _WILL_ happen
 
One problem with an early steam engine is that many parts of workable steam engines need to be precise, which requires skill in metallurgy that was achieved in OTL with gunsmiths.

Oh, btw, I'll be implementing quite a few of these (indian/arabic numerals, steam engines, gunpowder, airships) in my Roman Timeline (which I'll get around to when I'm feeling ambitious).

Also, about rice, it would compliment, and not replace wheat. Wheat grows where its dry, rice where its wet. I believe Eastern Asia had both, which could be one reason why they were heavily populated, as Europe only had wheat. Corn, fyi, grows where its too wet for wheat and too dry for rice. Very convenient.
 
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Here's one I would like:
What if, in Babbage's time, it was realized that the electromechanical relays used for telegraphy could be used in an Analytical or Differential Engine? Would Queen Victoria have a computer?
 
She could've had a computer, albeit it would be veeeerrrryyy slow. No use for databases or office software, only for highly mathematical stuff, like calculating logarithms. (That's what Babbage invented his engine for anyway.) Maybe a simple slide rule would've been as useful (hmmm, when was the slide rule invented?).

About the Greeks: AFAI can see, they had an irrational fear (well, from our point of view) from "illogical" numbers. They only could calculate with plain natural numbers, barely with fractures. Irrational numbers, negative numbers, zero and infinity were a kind of horror for them - a border they did not dare to cross. If you introduce zero, you also have to introduce infinity, because 1 : 0 = inf. But even Aristotle somewhere wrote that there is no such thing as infinity. If you wanted to introduce it, you'd have to show at first that he was wrong. But who would've dared to doubt the Great Philosopher, then?
 
Native American writing system

Also, another inovation POD- WI major native American civilisations such as the Aztecs, Incas, or Mississippi Moundbuilders had been able to develop a system of writing ? How would this have affected our knowledge and understanding of Indian culture, knowledge, language, religion and hist today ? WI there'd been an earlier version of Sequoyah who pioneered the Cherokee alphabet ?
 
Max Sinister said:
But even Aristotle somewhere wrote that there is no such thing as infinity. If you wanted to introduce it, you'd have to show at first that he was wrong. But who would've dared to doubt the Great Philosopher, then?
Wait, didn't Aristotle hold that there was no creation? That the universe had always been and would always be eternal? Wouldn't that require the idea of infinity?
 
Melvin Loh said:
Also, another inovation POD- WI major native American civilisations such as the Aztecs, Incas, or Mississippi Moundbuilders had been able to develop a system of writing ? How would this have affected our knowledge and understanding of Indian culture, knowledge, language, religion and hist today ? WI there'd been an earlier version of Sequoyah who pioneered the Cherokee alphabet ?


Well, it is now generally accepted that Mayan "heiroglyphs" were a true script combining phonetic, syllabic, and logographic elements. This has allowed Mayanists to completely revise our understanding of Ancient Mayan culture and history. Unfortunately the only known surviving inscriptions are dynastic/political records on stelae and other stone monuments and calendrical/astronomical writings in books - together with isolated things like contents labels on pottery. Although the script was sophisticated enough to express anything which could be said in Yucatec Maya, it is uncertain if it was so used by the Maya themselves. By our standards, the Mayan script was a cumbersome blend of writing systems which would have required significant effort to master...but then so is modern Japanese.

Regarding Sequoyah, it was almost certainly exposure to the concept of phonetic writing from Euro-Americans which gave him the idea to develop his syllabary for Cherokee. It is unlikley such a radical development from a completely preliterate culture would have developed on its own. It was nonetheless a tremendous intellectual achievement for someone who never became literate in English.
 
Regarding the original post, I'll tackle a few:

Mesoamerican Wheels. Your guess about the absence of suitable draft animals is probably right on, at least as far as vehicles/transport goes. What's more surprising, however, is that no other uses of the wheel concept (pullies, gears, the potters wheel, etc) were implemented, given the fact that the wheel principle was obviously understood by the potters who made the toys and Mesoamerican civilizations were into massive engineering feats and fine, even mass-produced, pottery. In general, with Mesoamerican civilization, you get the basic impression of a people who were just not very interested in technological innovation.

Gliders/hot air balloons. To me the late invention of true gliders is not so surprising given the complexity of such machines and the knowledge of aerodynamics required to make them steerable, safe and reliable. Also the fact that early glider pioneers had a tendency to fall out of the sky and kill themselves doesn't help. The late invention of hot air balloons, however, has always been a minor mystery to me, because people have been seeing things rise in currents of hot air over campfires for hundreds of thousands of years. For the life of me, I can't understand why the Greeks or Chinese, just to name a few, didn't experiment with and perfect man-carrying hot air balloon centuries before the 1700's. Had, say the Hellenistic world perfected such balloons before the birth of Christ, it may have created earlier interest in finding ways to make balloons dirigible..leading possibly to earlier invention of hydrogen-filled balloons, aerodynamically sound geared propellor systems, and light-weight power plants or man-powered engines, perhaps advancing the introduction of crude, small, but useful airships hundreds of years earlier than OTL.
 
Having all the new inventions earlier is all well and good, but we have seen many time in OTL that civilizations with advanced technologies have been unable to survive for long periods of time. THere have been ecological disasters, their farmlands became infertile, or perhaps there was continual warfare.

For any of this tech to be advanced enough to have a real impact on OTL, there would have to be peace...
 
DominusNovus said:
Wait, didn't Aristotle hold that there was no creation? That the universe had always been and would always be eternal? Wouldn't that require the idea of infinity?

Yes, I read about that too... maybe it means that there were able to think about infinity, but they certainly didn't include it into their mathematics. Maybe Aristotle didn't really mean that it existed forever as we would understand it, since I read too that he teached that time runs in circles - everything would repeat exactly as it has been, after some finite time.

Sometimes the old Greeks believed strange things, too. If you read how Parmenides stated "everything's static, change is an illusion" or Heraclitus said "no, everything's in the flow", or how other philosophers declared that everything is made from water / air / earth... but they didn't know as much as we do today.
 
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