What revolutionary technologies did OTL miss?
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The Clive-Less World TL has the Physiocrats triumph over the Mercantilists, so by the modern day they've advanced from fluid computers to chemical and DNA-based ones, as well as machines using synthetic bacteria and artificial neurons to process data. They'll never have integrated circuits but the bleeding edge of computers is a vat grown synthetic brain that combines all four types into one device.
You don’t even need vacuum seal. Pasteurization and ceramic jars would revolutionize food storage.
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It's not a technology, per se, but Pierre Leroux's circulus theory could have had knock-on effects on agricultural productivity in the 19th century. He advocated what amounted to a tax payable only in waste that would be reused as a fertilizer for crops. It's never called by that name in Philip José Farmer's novel Flesh but it's explicitly a part of the post-apocalyptic society's agricultural system.
Punch card programable machinery in the early 1800s. Now this was actually utilized to an extent, but it was mostly only for power looms. Theoretically though it could have been adapted to more industries. A world that skips right from the earliest phase of industrialization to widespread automation would be very alien.
Magnifying glasses were always a thing and it was a well known fact that they could set stuff on fire
So to go for that to furnaces is not a big jump and it certainly would be revolutionary, specially since the interest was there
So to go for that to furnaces is not a big jump and it certainly would be revolutionary, specially since the interest was there
Hero's engine is something I'd prefer to steer away from because it's been talked about a ton already and I'm not sure if Roman society and political economy was ready for it, there didn't seem to be any interest in it?
I am a bit late to this thread but i was recently studying the history of lathe and I think at lot of the incremental improvements to the lathe (adding a turret, etc) were obvious to later generations but well within the forging and casting abilities of iron-workers. Those incremental improvements seemed to come in around every 20 years or so.What real-world tech did our collective human civilization or species miss out on until too late, preventing us from experiencing an era based in it?
An example could be the potentially highly efficient heat engine, the Stirling engine, which shows up in its namesake S.M. Stirling’s The Peshawar Lancers as an alternative to the internal combustion engine.
Stirling engine - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
What if had arrived earlier and beaten the steam engine?
I suppose the Difference Engine is the canonical genre example of a technology that we have now but we didn’t arrive at earlier at the appropriate time for which to spark a revolution.
Actually Heron’s steam engine is a better example, but it’s a little exotic and interesting compared to alternative tech that never made it big.
The use of sauerkraut or lemon juice as treatments for scurvy. Scurvy killed at least two million sailors between 1500 and 1800, to say nothing of how many people got it in winter when fresh vegetables were scarce. It could have been solved far earlier than it was OTL - there were multiple people who figured out treatments for it.
Airships. Just when everybody thought they'd be cruising from Berlin to the Empire State Building via sky yacht, along comes the Wright Flyer.
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I'm personally a big fan of the optical telegraph, which did get some limited use, but not nearly as much as it could have. Once you have the ability to make telescopes on a decent scale, it's pretty easy to set up a network. So really any time from about 1610 onwards, it's feasible, and Robert Hooke did propose a system in 1684 (albeit one quite different from the systems that were actually used).
France's network is probably the best known, using semaphore, but this system seemed to have a lot of disadvantages. I'm much more of a fan of the Edelcrantz system of shutters (which is not dissimilar from the Murray system that the British Admiralty used around the turn of the 19th century) that Sweden had, as it was much faster, and could be used at night as well.
The Murray system used in Britain was able to get a message from London to Portsmouth in about 7.5 minutes, which is about 10 miles a minute (so 600 miles an hour). I've seen claims that they were able to get a message to Deal from London in just a minute, which suggests a speed of about 4800 miles an hour (which absolutely will not be feasible over long distances). The systems of OTL were used pretty much exclusively for military communication, which is how I'd expect such systems to originate, but if they can successfully be shown to have a civilian purpose, I see no reason why they couldn't become more widespread. Assuming an Edelcrantz-esque system, you've got 10 bits, and therefore 1024 combinations to work with. So alongside pure letters, numbers, symbols, and control codes, one can fit in a lot of shortened words and phrases to speed up communication.
Granted, the system does have drawbacks. Long-scale travel (i.e. from one side of the country to the other) would require "stopping points" to decode the message and clean it up (i.e. remove any backspace or other similar control codes) and for routing (though this isn't actually all that different from an electrical telegraph, and I suspect that an electrical telegraph would end up repurposing the optical stations). Poor visibility can completely shut down the system, and if you're not using the incredibly smart Edelcrantz system (which illuminated the shutters and used the complements of the code), you can't use them at night either. Also, you can see the messages being transmitted (though this might lead to some early advanced cryptographic efforts), so pay off the operators of one station and you can hijack the network (the Blanc brothers did this with the French network), though making the system available for civilian use will reduce this considerable (though privacy may still be an issue).
Also, it's not really possible to have a system work over bodies of water, as can be done with an electrical telegraph. No equivalent to underwater cables (not unless you've got some really dedicated workers).
But I can absolutely see a world where the optical telegraph becomes a much wider success earlier, which could quite easily spur on the development of cryptography (early adoption of polyalphabetic cyphers?), which in turn could encourage the development of mechanical computation. And as already said, when the electrical telegraph is developed, you've already got a lot of the infrastructure set up, and I could absolutely see a hybrid system being used for a time (wherein high priority messages are done by electrical telegraph, and less important ones use the optical system, but I'm just spitballing at this point).
France's network is probably the best known, using semaphore, but this system seemed to have a lot of disadvantages. I'm much more of a fan of the Edelcrantz system of shutters (which is not dissimilar from the Murray system that the British Admiralty used around the turn of the 19th century) that Sweden had, as it was much faster, and could be used at night as well.
The Murray system used in Britain was able to get a message from London to Portsmouth in about 7.5 minutes, which is about 10 miles a minute (so 600 miles an hour). I've seen claims that they were able to get a message to Deal from London in just a minute, which suggests a speed of about 4800 miles an hour (which absolutely will not be feasible over long distances). The systems of OTL were used pretty much exclusively for military communication, which is how I'd expect such systems to originate, but if they can successfully be shown to have a civilian purpose, I see no reason why they couldn't become more widespread. Assuming an Edelcrantz-esque system, you've got 10 bits, and therefore 1024 combinations to work with. So alongside pure letters, numbers, symbols, and control codes, one can fit in a lot of shortened words and phrases to speed up communication.
Granted, the system does have drawbacks. Long-scale travel (i.e. from one side of the country to the other) would require "stopping points" to decode the message and clean it up (i.e. remove any backspace or other similar control codes) and for routing (though this isn't actually all that different from an electrical telegraph, and I suspect that an electrical telegraph would end up repurposing the optical stations). Poor visibility can completely shut down the system, and if you're not using the incredibly smart Edelcrantz system (which illuminated the shutters and used the complements of the code), you can't use them at night either. Also, you can see the messages being transmitted (though this might lead to some early advanced cryptographic efforts), so pay off the operators of one station and you can hijack the network (the Blanc brothers did this with the French network), though making the system available for civilian use will reduce this considerable (though privacy may still be an issue).
Also, it's not really possible to have a system work over bodies of water, as can be done with an electrical telegraph. No equivalent to underwater cables (not unless you've got some really dedicated workers).
But I can absolutely see a world where the optical telegraph becomes a much wider success earlier, which could quite easily spur on the development of cryptography (early adoption of polyalphabetic cyphers?), which in turn could encourage the development of mechanical computation. And as already said, when the electrical telegraph is developed, you've already got a lot of the infrastructure set up, and I could absolutely see a hybrid system being used for a time (wherein high priority messages are done by electrical telegraph, and less important ones use the optical system, but I'm just spitballing at this point).
I am not too familiar with the technology behind punch cards, like how it can be used to build automated machines. Do automated machines using punch cards require very high tolerances?
The "Hollerith counting machine", used to tabulate census data in Russia, the US, and elsewhere, was an early form of punch-card computing, all the way back in the 1890's...
(Incidentally, Hollerith's company later became better known as "IBM" ...
)Seems feasible that that could be moved upstream in the timeline by a few decades....