technology

As in the title, I am interested in what inventions , technology and discoveries would still be possible without an industrial revolution. i.e. without machines, precision manufacturing, or engines. Name as many as you can; I find it hard to think of many, but certainly invention would not...

What is the most advanced level of technology that is possible to reach for a society which never Industrializes? Something like France under the Revolution and Napoleon (1780-1820-ish tech level)?

Let's assume that WW1 and WW2 are somehow avoided. How do you see computers developing? Do you believe that the field would lag behind compared to its OTL counterpart? Is it possible that the opposite is true, that the field could be even further along in certain scenarios? Ultimately, how...

Do you think the Industrial Revolution could have happened earlier in Europe if the Black Death didn't strike in the 1300s? By the 1300s, Medieval Europe was a very advanced and well-organized civilization. The knowledge of Western European monasteries, and the engineering expertise of the...

Is this plausible or ASB? When Columbus reaches America in 1492 he comes across a technologically advanced civilization, similar to Captain Cook in the Green Antarctica timeline when he becomes the first non-Tsalal to reach Antarctica. The Natives in this TL aren't industrial and don't know...

I was reading some Wiki articles on the University of Chicago and found out that in the thirties, there was a proposal to merge it with Northwestern into the "Universities of Chicago" due to financial difficulties during the Great Depression. This is extremely interesting to me, as both...

As many of us know, tropical cyclones worldwide are named to reduce confusion with communicating between forecasters and the general public. In the late 19th century, Australian weather forecaster Clement Wragge began informally naming them with letters from the Greek alphabet, South Sea Island...

OTL, as i understand it, animation was super early in the twentieth century. But how early is it possible? Guilded Age? Progressive Era in the US? what might some effects be of this medium arising decades earlier?

Now, something I never understood quite right why cellphones showed up so late. I remember watching a mid 1970s anime and one of the characters took a small radio that worked exactly like a modern cellphone, but still the cellphone only became widespread on the late 90s or even the 2000s in...

Many depictions of European advancement seem to lump together post-Medieval European advancement as a straight path to modern technology and science. As if "we got rid of pesky feudal lords and Medieval thinking patterns, had Protestantism allow merchants, and had Leonardo Da Vinci envision...

What was the main OTL event and/or time period which finally sealed that Europeans will ultimately conquer and spread their culture and way of life across the globe? What was the latest POD when this could've been easily prevented?

How do you think European (and later American) history could have progressed if Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other Reformers would have been butterflied away? When encountering these debates on online forums, I've read pretty mixed-bag responses. A Catholic for example told me, that a Moon...

Specifically: moveable print and typewriters (precursors to word processing today) seem to thrive in OTL due to Western adoption of a standard alphabet. The Chinese actually had woodblock printing but it was unweidly due (as I understand it) to the extensive character set of their writing...

I recently posted a thread asking why Native Americans never developed ironworking independently. Now I'd like to ask: what if they did?

As far as I know, Native Americans never independently developed ironworking. Why is that?

How early could gunpowder have been invented?

Would you say it's possible for photography to be developed significantly earlier than it was IOTL?

Is it possible for example for an OTL-like timeline to develop VHS, but never develop DVD? Develop audio cassettes, but never develop mp3?

While there are claims that it was invented earlier, the first record of a telescope comes from the Dutch Republic in 1608. How early could the telescope have been invented?

What if just like previous developments towards an industrial level of production, like the Roman proto-industrial developments, and the later Song Chinese advancements, the Western European trials towards an Industrial civilization have also been a failure, the late 18th century push towards...