Pre-industrial era inventions that could have been invented in the middle ages

[Sime]

As title says.

I'm writing an alternate history (with some fantasy) book and i need some ideas to have the late middle ages look more modern. I need a list of advancements that could have been made without resorting to an industrial revolution.

So, what are some pre-1750 inventions that could have been developed in the high middle ages? I'm thinking about the 1000-1300 period, the so called little Renaissance, in Italy or the Low Countries.

I already have a list of inventions from 1400 to 1700, but i need to know which are feasible with the technology of the high middle ages.

 

[RavenMM]

As title says.

I'm writing an alternate history (with some fantasy) book and i need some ideas to have the late middle ages look more modern. I need a list of advancements that could have been made without resorting to an industrial revolution.

So, what are some pre-1750 inventions that could have been developed in the high middle ages? I'm thinking about the 1000-1300 period, the so called little Renaissance, in Italy or the Low Countries.

I already have a list of inventions from 1400 to 1700, but i need to know which are feasible with the technology of the high middle ages.

It's not a pre-1750 invention, but basic hygiene in medicine could go a long way. Microscopes were first invented in thr 17th century, they could be the reason that there is a simple germ theory. Ether as a simple anesthetic would also work. (You need more Sulfuric acid for this, but making it is pretty simple, if the right kind of rock is around). It was called sweet oil of vitriol, which is a good name for an old school anesthetic.

 

[racefan31]

So, what are some pre-1750 inventions that could have been developed in the high middle ages? I'm thinking about the 1000-1300 period, the so called little Renaissance, in Italy or the Low Countries.

I'm guessing the telescope.

 

[carlton_bach]

Anesthesia. Aether was synthesised in the 16th century, it just needs someone to have a lab accident to notice its anesthetic properties.

 

[Albidoom]

They could've re-invented sanitary sewers way earlier that they did OTL

 

[carlton_bach]

They could've re-invented sanitary sewers way earlier that they did OTL

I'm not sure there. The problem here is not understanding the principle, it's marshaling the labour and resources. A medieval society with the administrative structures and finances of an early industrial state would have no technical problem building sewer systems. In fact, some medieval cities did, to a degree. The problem was always the inability to fund and maintain them, never the engineering.

That brings up an interesting question, BTW. A lot of inventions can technically be built with the technology of earlier periods (we have a traditional annual thread about Roman bicycles). I suspect, however, that that only works if you already know what you are trying to do. There is a level of development that you need to reach before you can invent something because your first version is going to be crap, and it still has to work. A medieval bicycle built by someone who understands bicycles might work, one built by someone who has a vague idea of what he night achieve would suck.

Then you need the right social conditions. Call it 'social technology' - the ability to fund invention, train people, disseminate information, that kind of stuff. This is where you will need to make some big decisions for your TL. The technological sophistication of the fifteenth century can support mechanical looms and spinning frames, printing presses, possibly even railways and optical telegraphs if you can find a plausible way for society to fund and run them.

 

[carlton_bach]

A favourite of mine that could theoretically happen earlier is mature statistics. Link it to an empirical school of medicine, perhaps. Doctors dedicate themselves to gathering data on treatments. It is found that pooling their results helps with rare diseases. Centres of medical science accumulate huge amount of data, and that becomes a problem because at some point, too much information helps nobody.

The solution is to make lists. Then you tot up results. Then people begin poking and prodding the data, and tentatively arrive at concepts like probability, return on investment, short- and long-term outcomes, average, median, standard distribution... Once you know those, you can do something better than magic: you can do government and finance.

 

[Saphroneth]

There's a concept called "Steam Engine Time".

Gibson’s quote:

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time *because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it. When I came up with my cyberspace idea, I thought, I bet it’s steam-engine time for this one, because I can’t be the only person noticing these various things. And I wasn’t. I was just the first person who put it together in that particular way, and I had a logo for it, I had my neologism.
​

In Kelly’s words:

When it is steam-engine-time, steam engines will occur everywhere. But not before. Because all the precursor and supporting ideas and inventions need to be present. The Romans had the idea of steam engines, but not of strong iron to contain the pressure, nor valves to regulate it, nor the cheap fuel to power it. No idea – even steam engines — are solitary. A new idea rests on a web of related previous ideas. When all the precursor ideas to cyberspace are knitted together, cyberspace erupts everywhere. When it is robot-car-time, robot cars will come. When it is steam-engine-time, you can’t stop steam engines.
​

Other examples are, of course, aeroplanes.
Seems relevant here.

 

[Ramontxo]

The Montgolfier Balloon. After all it uses the very well known Archimedes Principle and could have been guessed by any one throwing leaves or old papers to a fire.

 

[Polish Eagle]

Horse-drawn railroads. A single horse could pull more than a 20-mule team if the load were on rails.

 

[Falecius]

A favourite of mine that could theoretically happen earlier is mature statistics. Link it to an empirical school of medicine, perhaps. Doctors dedicate themselves to gathering data on treatments. It is found that pooling their results helps with rare diseases. Centres of medical science accumulate huge amount of data, and that becomes a problem because at some point, too much information helps nobody.

The solution is to make lists. Then you tot up results. Then people begin poking and prodding the data, and tentatively arrive at concepts like probability, return on investment, short- and long-term outcomes, average, median, standard distribution... Once you know those, you can do something better than magic: you can do government and finance.

This requires a sort of quantitative/abstract mindset that was relatively rare in the Medieval West. Something resembling crude medical statistics appears to have existed in Classical Islamic medicine (they had hospitals where scientific work was done, which were largely lacking in the West) I don't think that the mental tools required for mature statistics to work were there.
For instance, a lot of mainstream approaches to quantitative analysis until the Renaissance had an underlying geometrical conception (it took David Hilbert a century ago to completely free maths from that) that made a lot of statistical operations with data harder to think about (this is not ENTIRELY true, however; mathematical abstraction was used in other areas where it worked, such as, particularly, optics and music, to good effect).
Probability was particularly problematic in this respect. You need a good level of abstraction to work with it. Even Cardano, in the 1500s, could not bring himself to consider his work on gambling as actual scientific stuff... numbers that not represent actual quantities? What's that?

 

[Falecius]

There's a concept called "Steam Engine Time".




Other examples are, of course, aeroplanes.
Seems relevant here.

Note that Kelly and Gibson quotes are almost entirely contradictory.

 

[Falecius]

The Montgolfier Balloon. After all it uses the very well known Archimedes Principle and could have been guessed by any one throwing leaves or old papers to a fire.

But actually creating a ballon that works is not that easy. Perhaps starting with toys? China had sky lanterns for millennia but never appeared to have expanded on the concept.

 

[Saphroneth]

Note that Kelly and Gibson quotes are almost entirely contradictory.

I don't see how they are - both support the idea that you can make a thing which uses steam to move things but not have it result in a practical steam engine UNTIL all the subsidiary inventions are in place, and once they are the idea comes out of the woodwork everywhere.

 

[alexcoppo]

For chain of events related to the development of steam engines, see the history of thermodynamics. Romans could have had all the cute toys you want but until somebody comes with the basic principles of thermodynamics they will remain toys.

I know that this sounds anathema to the ears of members of anti-scientific cultures, but engineering relies on science and science relies upon mathematics. Maverick-y "cowboy bravado" might work in a saloon brawl, it won't in a lab.

The real POD is to keep Islamic science developing at the breakneck rate it was having in 1000-1200.

 

[phildup]

For chain of events related to the development of steam engines, see the history of thermodynamics. Romans could have had all the cute toys you want but until somebody comes with the basic principles of thermodynamics they will remain toys.

There were wheeled toys in the Americas, but there never seemed to have been the "Eureka!" moment. Imagine what the Americas would have been like if the concept of the wheel had been applied...

 

[avernite]

The real POD is to keep Islamic science developing at the breakneck rate it was having in 1000-1200.

Can it, though?

Science also feeds back on engineering (microscopes and telescopes being obvious engineering improvements from looking glasses that suddenly opened fields of science), and it all interacts with society.

I mean, not having the Mongols smash half the Middle-East is bound to help somewhat, but I'd still expect a slowdown as Islamic science catches up with engineering/society.
For a slightly imprecise comparison, just look at present-day theoretical physics. There's no real major shift in society, and yet the last major succesful advance in theoretical physics (the Higgs mechanism) is about as far from the present as THAT was from the first strides into quantum mechanics. 40+ years of boom, and now a lag as it's taking ever-longer to prove the prior steps work.

 

[Nassirisimo]

There were wheeled toys in the Americas, but there never seemed to have been the "Eureka!" moment. Imagine what the Americas would have been like if the concept of the wheel had been applied...

It would be great, around about the time until they realised they wouldn't have a suitable animal to pull wheeled carts around with.

Like with the steam engine, inventions are really just toys unless there's a good context for their adaptation. It's easy for us to look back on the past and think "Why didn't they think of doing that?", and in doing so we neglect that many of the choices people made in the past made perfect sense to them. It made sense to abandon wheeled transport in the Middle East, as camels were cheap and wood expensive. It made sense not to see any possibilities with the steam engine thousands of years ago as there were no other inventions to combine it with to make it useful.

For chain of events related to the development of steam engines, see the history of thermodynamics. Romans could have had all the cute toys you want but until somebody comes with the basic principles of thermodynamics they will remain toys.

I know that this sounds anathema to the ears of members of anti-scientific cultures, but engineering relies on science and science relies upon mathematics. Maverick-y "cowboy bravado" might work in a saloon brawl, it won't in a lab.

The real POD is to keep Islamic science developing at the breakneck rate it was having in 1000-1200.

There is an interesting argument in George Saliba's book on Islamic science that production of science in the Islamic world (which while impressive, was not quite breakneck speed) only declined later than we thought. Basically, as European scientific production ramped up, funded by the growth in economies stimulated by the Atlantic trade, there became even less of an incentive for Islamic science production. Perhaps if you could get the creation of scientific academies in the Middle East funded by the government centuries earlier than in Europe, you might actually get a quicker rate of technological advancement.

 

[Saphroneth]

Hmmm...

The Chinese plow (with the turned-aside pair of leaves) instead of the western one (a blunt block) was an advance that simply was never even thought of in Europe. Similarly the stirrup is a very simple idea which was only invented once.

 

[phildup]

It would be great, around about the time until they realised they wouldn't have a suitable animal to pull wheeled carts around with.

Like with the steam engine, inventions are really just toys unless there's a good context for their adaptation. It's easy for us to look back on the past and think "Why didn't they think of doing that?", and in doing so we neglect that many of the choices people made in the past made perfect sense to them. It made sense to abandon wheeled transport in the Middle East, as camels were cheap and wood expensive. It made sense not to see any possibilities with the steam engine thousands of years ago as there were no other inventions to combine it with to make it useful.

While it is true that there were no large draft animals available for the most part in the Americas a human powered wheeled cart has greater capacity than a man's back.

.

A cart pulled by a large dog or team of dogs can move more than a travois.

Llamas can carry a substantial load on their backs, but could accomploish much mor with a cart...as lnog as they weren't on a mountain...of course, if the Andeans had used a cart, their roads would probably be wider and less precipitous.

So, I think the options were available in the Americas and that the Wheel would have been a useful and very productive tool, even without horses and oxen.