In 1979 when I was at school in a maths class the teacher (for some reason) was talking about graphine and how it would be a game changer when invented and I said - why don't you get a bit of pencil lead and put between two bits of cellotape, rinse repeat until you got a thin layer. I was lambasted and ridiculed by the teacher.
THAT is another reason why it takes so long to invent X. People who shouldn't, quickly dismiss and idiot label anything outside the box of thinking. Still irks me, even today how I was not strong enough to stand my ground (probably been put in detention for answering back) and how I accepted that I was wrong.
> why don't you get a bit of pencil lead and put between two bits of cellotape, rinse repeat until you got a thin layer.
I am a bit skeptical of your Account, but it is also not quite as trivial as that. The key insight wasn’t just the mechanical exfoliation (scotch tape Methode). This had been used before and wasn’t new by itself. The key insight was transferring it onto a SiO2 substrate. So, no worries you most likely did not miss out on your Nobel Prize ;)
Its not about that, its about dismissing practical trains of thought - outright. Ironically, the author of the article is such a person.
> To invent something is to invent a practical version of that thing.
It is not. Like with everything from the chain of command to the chain of events it takes all links in the chain to make it a chain.
You might as well argue that it is marketing that is responsible for the invention or that the consumer in their decision to purchase the newfangled contraption decides if the invention is real or not. Or no wait, the financier, he is the true visionary.
> If your “invention” is impractical, it’s just a demo or prototype
Oh, that is only this and that. Someone who trivializes the prototype doesn't have what it takes to envision it, let alone make it. Hardly a position fromwhich to judge those who did and do.
Furthermore, if I understand the position, the patent office would not agree to the OP's definition either .. as long as the original maker of the "prototype" could describe the mechanism well enough. The inventor of the "practical" version would have to articulate what it took above and beyond the prototype and even then only be able to patent that part and not including the invention covered by the proto.
The patent system is supposed to be to encourage knowledge sharing in society by granting monopoly in exchange for full disclosure of invention details. Imposing an irregular concept like "practicality" on top this is counterproductive.
Practicality is not straightforward. Was Edison's light bulb practical on its own terms or did it become practical only after the invention of electric power generation and distribution? What about economies of scale? .. and so on.
I suppose from point of view of idea retention and acceptance - for the idea to go 'viral' - you need a strong practical example.
Humans are really great at taking into use new practical tools. Not so much taking in a half-established concept and turning it into something usefull.
So, from point of view of innovation, you are right. From the point of view of what matters from historical perspective to get a new idea stick, the author has a strong point.
Fair enough, I know it's true, it happened and nothing to gain proving otherwise.
Sure it wasn't the golden solution, but it was on the right track and would of enabled others to progress as at that time there was nothing.
> So, no worries you most likely did not miss out on your Nobel Prize ;)
Just so you know, I don't care for such things and even throw a chess game just to avoid having to go up in front of the school and didn't like public attention.
Turned out I was autistic spectrum, a diagnosis that was late in life for me, mostly due to the time - 70's.
My point was and with a personal example how easily something wonderful can be glibly dismissed and shot down before it even gets a chance to try and take flight instead of explored or explained why it won't fly.
Happened to me as well. It hurts that I couldn't stand my ground while my ideas was being ridiculed by a college teacher in front of my colleagues. I know exactly how you feel.
That day I learned the important lesson of not trusting "authorities" blindly.
This type of response from a teacher baffles me. Why would you not just:
"You see, the problem then becomes how do we (overcome the problem in the approach known to me)"
Or, if I don't know why it would not work, suggest the student look into it, report back to everyone. With generous compensation in study credits or whatnot.
The real problem is teachers are unwilling to admit "I do not know: maybe your idea would work and they didn't think of it; or maybe there is some flaw in it. If you are really interested I can help you figure it out in independent study"
It is hard for me to admit that myself even now that I'm aware and try to train myself to do that.
I agree it's not a particularly good response, but I can imagine a teacher reasoning that:
1. A minority of students want to stump the teacher [1] - maybe out of interest, maybe to show how clever they are, maybe for sport.
2. Schools cover a very broad range of topics, and it isn't humanly possible for every science teacher to have an in-depth knowledge of every single question.
3. The teacher fears, if they answer a question with "I don't know" it will reveal they haven't used their knowledge of graphene in their day-to-day life, and some students will take that as a proof the subject is 'useless' and a 'waste of time' as even the most scientifically inclined person they know hasn't used it.
Obviously, (3) is a mistake on the teacher's part - it's quite possible to have a subject be important without you knowing every detail of it - but I can imagine how any inexperienced teacher might end up thinking it.
Also, intuitively when you pull two bits of tape apart both bend, and when you bend a pencil lead it snaps. And if you stick tape to a painted wall and pull it off, you'll pull off jagged flakes of paint rather than halving the thickness of the paint. So if someone gave me 20 seconds to answer whether it would work I would say probably not.
This was high school and I was 12 at the time and recall it like yesterday, even the desk I was sat at, types of chair, table - most vivid.
I'm sure university and high school teacher levels are at a different level and equally we are talking late 70's and with that - things have changed much - even at universities I dare say.
Also, not all teachers are the same - you have good ones, you have bad ones, you also have good ones who have bad days and with that, even bad ones can have good moments.
It might not have been a university, and the teacher might not have been university level. Perhaps he just didn't know what made the suggestion impractical or wrong, he had just heard that graphene was the next big thing or whatever.
This was the 70's, unsure of the teacher's actually qualifications of Miss Sidwick. Equally previously she had pulled me up for not showing the working out on some maths, I said I'd done it in my head and the answer is proof enough. Yes I appreciate now how people need to see how you got the answer - exam technique etc as without that they presume you cheated ;(.
I was good at maths, though I was in the lower level maths class due to some X/Y system in which they took english and maths and chunked students together in a split along those lines (I'll touch upon that in a bit). I'd done an equation and the teacher said well you can't do it all in your head and proceeded to put (from a book) a two variable equation - something like 2x+5/y=7 - what is X and Y - something like that and I gave the answer to which the teacher said - well I want to see working out anyhow after the attempt to prove her point had failed to get the result and had expected me to fail to provide the answer.
Later during mock exams I got 4 questions right that nobody in the entire school had gotten right and the head of maths (the good higher qualified maths teacher Mr Frost) who I had no dealing with pulled me aside and queried why I wasn't in his class. He even went to the head to try and get me transferred across but was shot down as my english was poor and even when I said, well you already have people with poor maths in the higher tier - that got dismissed and with that - much of my schooling was self educated.
Heck I even had to argue to be allowed to do the computer studies course and only as I made a passionate plea directly to the head teacher (Mrs Creek) was I able to be allowed as I explained that it was my career vocation and not some whim and apparently made a strong case and was allowed. Turned out after first week of the class would come to me if they had a question before going to the teacher as I was that good at it.
FYI - we are talking high school here in the UK - not university at all.
In the UK it is primary school>secondary (high school)>A-level/college and then University. I did college BTEC computer studies and went straight into my first job working for government in IT and the youngest in the whole department by around 6 years.
The school in question was Hadleigh High School in Suffolk and still there today and I'm sure has way better teachers mostly due to time advancement as the 70's was a long time ago.
AS for the graphene - It was a case of they didn't have anything or way to make the single atom layer and that is when the idea of the sellotape and pencil lead came about having as a child messed about and saw it - though never rinse repeated infinitum - but having heard that, by the teacher they had yet to achieve that, postulated my idea and thoughts and the rest I explained.
School wasn't a great place for me, lots of bullying - thngs like being autistic spectrum makes you social awkward and many thought I was gay and would be bullied because of that, this went on for years and less issue nowadays and when I went to teachers about it there response was "Well, are you gay", I said "No" and the response of "Well, what's the issue then" was classed as acceptable in the end.
The bullying eventually stopped after I got forced into a fight and ended up putting the offender unconscious and in hospital for several days. Though do note that I had done everything possible to avoid that fight and in the end didn't even get a detention. Though standing in a hallway as a child balling your eyes out thinking I'd killed somebody and my life was over is an experience far worse than any false punishment.
Though experiences at primary school was just as bad and I was a terrible swimmer - needed so many swimming aids that I looked like the Michelin man. We always had a swim race end of year term and as I couldn't swim I didn't want to do it, yet I was made to partake and as you can expect - everybody had a great laugh at my expense. Year later I'd spent whole year learning to swim, joined a swimming club and got really good, swam for the county. That year - all the other students refused to partake if I was allowed to swim and guess what - the teacher didn't make them swim and denied me of my social justice.
So in short - school was pretty darn shit from my perspective and experience. But that is and was down to my autistic spectrum.
Yes, that is where you start questioning everything. If you never run into that situation and follow instructions to the letter the system will reward you to such extend that you cant imagine anything wrong with it.
You will forever think you can have a negative number of baskets with a negative number of apples in each and by those means create as many apples as you like without involving trees in the process. Like Jesus.
As as lesson, "question authority" is twice as long lesson a "obey" and equally as pithy. Would you mind sharing a time where you found it was better not to question things so we may better understanding what values of "everything" you find useful? Presumably you are no longer two, and answer every question with "why". (Especially the question why, itself.")
Some inventions are gated by scientific discovery, particularly in materials.
For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron, causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium. But it wasn't invented until 1948. No one had done the experiment and seen that effect.
Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride. It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn't until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.
Basic research. There are a lot of combinations to try. It makes sense to try them methodically and share the results, to avoid duplication of effort.
(The experiment of course can certainly be retried, in case there was an error, but the published result has value). There was a good interview of Doron Aurbach on this, but sadly it appears to have disappeared from Soundcloud. https://www.electrochem.org/ecs-blog/doron-aurbach-commercia...
Chemistry and materials research is an especially bad fit for the startup solution model where everybody's repeating the same things, often even in secret.
The startups instead build on top of that basic research. Like electric scooters or cars were built on top of the technology of cheap energy-dense lithium batteries.
What a startup can do is focus on a technique, rather than a specific discovery, and use that technique to make discoveries. The example I'm thinking of is Siluria, an MIT spinoff (or, at least, involving people from MIT; they were based in the bay area), which used phage display templating to make catalysts. They came up with the first practical catalyst for the oxidative coupling of methane to produce ethane. I believe they've since been bought by a larger petrochemical company.
That might be good. I guess one problem with that is that if the technique is not published or even sold, then others can't use it to make discoveries.
Discovery is half the battle. Theory plays a role.
Currently there is some research into "high-entropy alloys" which are just mixtures of metals we've known about for a while with certain special crystal properties. It's a foregone conclusion that many of the known HEAs could have been prepared in the 1930s, but would it make sense to do so? What epiphany could possibly tell you to prepare Cr19.75Mn20.10Fe20.25Co20.48Ni19.42 (Science 345 (6201) 1153-8) without having a theory of crystal deformation in metals?
Radio comes to mind. All the physical pieces to make a working, if extremely limited and inefficient, radio communications system were there since forever. People knew how to make electric current since ancient times. An antenna is just a piece of twisted metal (and in a pinch, almost anything can work as an antenna). But to get from that to a wireless telegraph, you'd either need a lot of dumb luck, or some understanding of how electricity and magnetism behave.
Computer Forensics is an area that can totally get some love. The hardware and software is designed to be used by large agencies, pricing out the consumer space (for data recovery) and the small business (for data recovery)
There are some decent open source forensics projects out there, such as The Sleuth Kit / Autopsy. I'm not sure how well they compare to the more pricey alternatives like EnCase, but they seem popular enough among law enforcement.
Research into what... I think that is part of the problem.
I was recently reading a click bait article about how some craft person knew something an archeologist didn't... The Portuguese is no one knows everything. Also look at a lot of our technological marvels ah were accidents.
More resesrch won't necessarily help, if you are already going down the wrong path
Ductile iron could have been invented before 1808 if Davy had produced magnesium sooner. So this is a 'turtles all the way down' explanation.
Or is it? Imagine a directed graph of technologies where each node has outgoing links to its dependencies. Nodes may be added randomly (if their dependencies are present), but we don't consider them important until important things depend on them. In other words, there is a PageRank threshold for "inventions".
Instead of adding possible new nodes uniformly at random, we might assume their chance of discovery is inversely proportional to the sum of the PageRanks of their dependencies. Similarly, a new web page is unlikely to link to many obscure pages. (Alternatively, I think you can add nodes randomly and periodically delete low-ranking nodes.)
The Davy reference was a bit aggressive, I must confess. The early ways of making magnesium metal would have worked on a lab scale, and would have been frightfully expensive. Practical Mg production had to wait for the large scale production of electric power for electrolysis, or for the production of silicon (in electric arc furnaces) for the Pidgeon process. Still, magnesium was being produced in large quantities by WW 1, if not before.
Industrial-scale production began in Germany in 1886. There was another significant change in 1924-1925 with the development of a truly anhydrous chloride melt, which significantly reduced anode wear and increased energy efficiency.
For the production of ductile iron, one major challenge was managing the loss of magnesium by boiling since the BP of Mg is so much lower than the MP of cast iron.
"Fundamentals of Magnesium Addition to Ductile Iron"
You can see multiple gating factors for why magnesium based production of ductile iron was not discovered (or at least industrialized) earlier:
- Early industrial magnesium production was expensive due to high electrolytic anode wear from impure raw materials.
- Electrolytic magnesium production was also expensive due to the high cost of electric power; 1880s-era generators had low thermal efficiency and generated electricity at high costs [1].
- Early ductile iron production suffered from high losses of costly magnesium, due to boil-off. The various economizing measures described in the second paper I linked above did not yet have their own enabling technologies available in the 19th century.
[1] I'm not going to try to reproduce my full work here, but I was surprised at the high cost of electricity I found referenced in an American chemical engineering textbook from 1940. On further investigation of the consumer price index and published historical electricity prices, I found that electricity was (by contemporary American standards) quite expensive before WW II, and relatively expensive through the 1950s. It wasn't until the 1960s that electricity became fairly cheap.
I've been digging into the topic since "progress studies" got more popular, but it seems like no one has done much in that direction (which is also what my initial hunches suggested should be tried).
There's a lot of grunt work to do if you want to label the data to match our current technological reality, but in the abstract, it still seems to me that building such models could yield interesting insights.
You can add all sorts of bells and whistles to make it more interesting (play with diffusion speed, the inherent difficulty of the discoveries required, etc.).
Equally possible that many things are discovered and due to historical time, those discoveries get lost and only measured as invented when discovered and documented.
How much has been invented and only counted as invented as it was written down and known about.
An example I've mentioned before on HN is the rotary pressure exchanger. It has one moving part, is 98% efficient, and the base patent was issued in 1988. Perhaps there was a lack of large application before reverse osmosis became a big thing?
That's wild. I'm still a bit unclear as to the advantage it has over rotating the screw, though? The inventor mentioned less dust and wider tolerances, but why?
At the bottom the tube has scoopers to bring the grain inside and those need to move trough the grain. If you keep the tube static the grain would need to go inside by gravity alone and I guess that does not work as well
> Early designs for desalination plants... have an energy consumption of over 9 kWh per cubic meter.
> Many early SWRO plants built in the 1970s and early 1980s had an energy consumption of over 6.0 kWh per cubic meter of potable water.
But it doesn't go on to list the comparable performance of the newer post-1988 patent designs (except to say 98% efficient). Do you have any idea what in terms of kWh/m^3 that converts to?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-... says Sorek produces drinking water at US$0.58/kℓ by reverse osmosis at 7.1 MPa. 7.1 MPa is by definition 7.1 MJ/m³, so 98% efficient at the mechanical level would be 7.2 MJ/m³. (As someone else pointed out, though, 98% is the efficiency of the pressure exchanger, not the whole electro/mechanical/hydraulic system.) 6 kWh is 22 MJ, and 9 kWh is 32 MJ. US$0.58 is the cost of about 52 MJ, but that includes things like the cost of building the plant and defouling it.
The pressure exchanger is 98% efficient, but that doesn't mean the entire RO unit is that efficient. The pressure exchanger recovers the ~60% of energy that comes out in the brine stream; the other 40% is necessarily lost in fighting osmotic pressure across the membrane.
All inventions have prerequisites that people don't think about. The steam engine is the first invention people think about if they were time travel, scribble something on a bit of paper and become rich. You'll need several boring things that need to happen for you to make a working steam engine.
You'll need the materials. A lot of strong, cheap steel. Preheated blast furnaces weren't invented until the early 1800's. Thomas Savery had the idea for the steam engine almost a hundred years before the Watt, but Savery's engines kept blowing up because the lack of strong steel.
You'll also need to overcome trade barriers too. You'll also need cheap coal (ironically requiring steam engines to become cost effective) and high quality iron ore (ideally from Sweden). Through out most of history, empires hated trading as it could create vulnerabilities.
There's also the market prerequisites, no one wants your expensive steam engine if a donkey pulling a wheel is cheaper and more reliable.
I think the market prerequisites are a key point overlooked by the article. There has to be some application where a low-performing version of the invention is already useful for it to be worth it to develop better-performing ones. For example, in the case of Watt's steam engine, versions were already used for the application of pumping water out of mines [1]. This application made it economically worthwhile for Watt to work on his improved steam engine. Of course, once the improved version was available, it found many new applications beyond the original one.
The usefulness of a skunkworks-type operation is that you can fund R&D that has no market need, thus unnaturally accelerating the progress of technological innovation.
Of course they have a customer in the sense that someone is funding them and owns the product, however I would propose that there is not necessarily an immediate "need" or requirements given, and there is a high tolerance for undirected or self-directed research.
The atmospheric steam engines were competitive with Watt's type for a long time. The fees charged for Watt's patent were part of the reason, but not the only one.
The book "The Perfectionists" goes into some detail on how the invention of machine tools were both spurred by other progress and an absolute requirement for it.
Much, much, much of the industrial revolution was really a revolution in manufacturing. Without being able to churn out machine parts that fit together without filing them to fit by hand, the industrial revolution just wouldn't have worked the way it did.
Through out most of history, empires hated trading as it could create vulnerabilities.
That doesn't track with anything I've read about the great empires. They all got rich off trading, and having a big empire enables long distance trade within your empire. Rome traded with Han China and could not get enough silk. One marker in the archaeological record of the fall of the Western Roman empire is the almost complete contraction of trading networks.
Thinking about this and going down the wikipedia rabbit hole of inventions scares me. I've heard the Dark Ages happened in part because society collectively forgot how to re-create the advanced technology from ancients, so once things inevitably broke, people just became that less efficient. Another area which strikes me as complex as metalworking is textiles. What if we forgot how to use the machines for harvesting cotton, spinning it into threads and then weaving it into clothes? I wouldn't be able to help at all in such a catastrophe, despite holding advanced degrees. I'm afraid I wouldn't even know how to fashion a spindle, or operate one. Hopefully the internet has enough information that this doesn't happen again?
Well, the scholars at the time thought so anyway. They were very keen on classical knowledge.
More realistically, the "dark ages" were a time of political dislocation and fragmentation of trading networks, so Europe just got a lot poorer. Rome had knit together a vast trading network, but without Roman armies you couldn't trade long distances anymore.
You forget how to build Roman roads when you don't have a government around to build roads, and even if you did, you don't have the money or manpower anyway.
Medieval Europe invented a heavy plow, which the Romans never came up with, so it was not all disintegration.
Watermills were also on an evolutionary path (so to speak) in the early Middle Ages. From the dedicated wiki page [1]:
> Largely unaffected from the turbulent political events following the demise of the Western Roman Empire, the importance of watermilling continued to grow under the new Germanic lords. (...) By Carolingian times, references to watermills in the Frankish Realm had become "innumerable".
Something I'm genuinely curious. What is the minimum number of people put together in a trade network sufficient to establish a particular technological framework? A hunter gather knows just as many things about the world as I do but will generally know the same things that everybody else in their tribe of the same gender knows. And of course there's access to specialized materials too to consider, starting with getting both copper and tin or arsenic in the same place during the Bronze Age. If we were trying to establish a settlement on Mars what would be the minimum number of people needed to make it self sustaining and able to build things like computers?
It reminds me about a book (Kevin Kelly?) that discussed technology transfer - it turns out that the process isn't straightforward at all, even if you already own the technology. Any existing technology is a chain of interdependence, transferring it requires one to rebootstrap everything from scratch. It has great practical implications (not only limited to space colony), one example is developing an industrial society in a developing country - even with full technological resources from developed nations, is it possible to skip the catastrophic heavy pollution from the crude industry that historically plagued the developed world, and instead, start directly at a more modern industry system that produces less pollution? The answer is unclear, some can be avoided, but others, possibly not.
The Incas didn't even want the wheel. They had children's toys with wheels, but they didn't use wheels for anything serious. Or so I've heard. Presumably a llama carrying 50 kg on its back is cheaper and more reliable.
The Inka built and maintained an extensive road system. The wheel was not, as far as we know, in use in toys in Tawantinsuyu, as the grandparent comment suggested; it was in use in toys in Mexico, thousands of kilometers away, where there were no llamas. (Some North American peoples used dogs as pack animals, but I don't know if the peoples with wheels did that.)
I think it's just very difficult to make a rolling wheel. It's not like the Flintstones and the Far Side where you bang some rocks together and get a stone disc that you can then slot into your wheelbarrow (or, say, ride like a unicycle). Metals help a lot, and even bronze came fairly late to America, which didn't develop iron smelting until after Columbus. In Asia, the first (solid wood) wheels date to the Copper Age, close to the time of the domestication of the horse (and the donkey), which presumably provided much of the incentive. Those wheels are fairly fragile, and chariots had to wait for the wood-spoked wheel, which is much more complex.
But spoked wheels are expensive to build; even most of Africa didn't make much use of wheels until the colonial age, despite having iron, which the Americans lacked.
AFAIK the incas did know about the wheel, and could have presumably made them out of wood, but chose not to due to religious reasons. They venerated the sun and its shape, thus using something circular for such mundane purposes would have been tantamount to blasphemy.
source: some tour guide in belize.
Why would a tour guide in Belize know anything about the Inka? Had she studied archaeology in Perú or something? I suspect you are confusing the Inka with the Mesoamerican peoples in the other hemisphere, where you were.
I kind of agree with this, but only kind of. If you went back to say the 1600s and could build a working steam engine, whoever was in charge would quickly over come the market factors. They had steel hundreds of years ago and there would be enough of an economic incentive to learn how to make more of it in a hurry
Market forces work in both directions. If I have a chance to 10X my society's output, I'll do a lot to make it happen
Some argue that inventions like these at the time weren't improved upon because (slave) labour was cheap. But you are right it could be because other technology at the time didn't exist.
It's also amazing to me how quantitative, evolutionary advances to some technologies that might seem futile or superficial enable some qualitative technology leaps.
For example, miniaturization of computers seemed pretty futile to me in the 90s. Indeed, why would I care if that big box becomes slightly smaller?
That miniaturization is basically what enabled the whole smartphone industry. The large-scale availability of small and powerful chips in turn enabled the drone / quadcopter to become feasible (a quadcopter is too unstable to fly on its own, and there's no real way to stabilize it mechanically like we do on RC helicopters; it has to be stabilized electronically).
I think the best inventions come from recognizing the kind of qualitative leaps you can do from evolutionary advances to existing technologies.
Or rechargable batteries. Even lithium ion batteries weren't better than state of the art NiMH batteries when they first came out in the 1990s. Evolutionary improvement let us develop quadcopters, e-bikes, e-scooters, electric cars, smartphones, e-cigarettes, tablets, and countless other devices that simply weren't that practical 3 decades ago. And this process continues.
My favourite example of an "idea behind its time" is the torque amplifier, which enabled mechanical analog computers on invention in the early 1900s. It is made of nothing more complicated than a source of rotary power, a couple drums/pulleys, and string/rope:
That kind of torque amplifier is of limited value, and it requires fairly good materials. There's a lot of rubbing involved. Power steering uses a completely different approach.
Rope has been around for millennia, but good rope is modern. Rope before manila, a 19th century development, rotted easily. (Hemp rope rots from the inside out, incidentally, so it looks fine until it breaks.) Modern rope is usually a nylon core with a polypropeline cover. Good rubber belts are post-WWII. Rubber before neoprene tended to crack, and oil made it much worse. Precisely controlled friction is a modern concept.
(I restore antique Teletype machines as a hobby, and the designs from the 1920s and 1930s show these material limitations. The carriage return stop isn't rubber or some flexible material. There's a lever driving a piston in a cylinder to compress air which then comes out through a relief valve. Complex, but buildable with 1920s materials.)
Mine is wheeled luggage, which is very similar to products that existed in antiquity (wheelbarrow, pushcart, rickshaw). The article mentions it here:
>In general, I think we should be more surprised at long gaps for inventions that have obvious, predictable impact on major industries. For this reason, the cotton gin and the flying shuttle are more compelling gaps to me than the wheeled suitcase, role-playing games, or the bicycle, which merely offer convenience or entertainment.
I was going to comment on the same thing. There were no decent small wheels until Rollerblades came along with their molded polypropylene wheels and ball bearings. Skateboard wheels were a similar technology, but not as easy to mount on things.
There's an album cover from the late 50s of bassist Paul Chambers rolling has bass down the sidewalk with a wheel on the bottom of his bass.
Did the pilots in the 50s lug their own bag of clothes & shaving gear, on those flights with half a dozen stops to Australia? I always imagined this was simply taken care of by the airline, hotel to hotel, even if the pilot looked after his own professional gear. So I don't think their cash wages relative to porters are all that relevant. But would be interesting to know when this switched over.
Senior airline pilots in the 1980s made a lot of money.
But that's not so relevant. I can't come up with a realistic case where it's more effective for any party to have the air crew pay for porter services out-of-pocket, rather than paid by the company.
A few points: air crew have pretty good mobility, and limited space for luggage, so there isn't much need for a porter service for more than one bad.
The crew have to handle off-hours, like after most airport services are closed, or redirected to another airport.
To be effective, the porters need access to everywhere aircrew can go - airline offices, passport control areas, and more. Doable, but it requires agreements from the airport and airlines.
Flight crews aren't that big, so it makes more sense (IMO) for the airlines to arrange those services, than to have the air crew - no matter how well paid - handle it themselves from their salary.
>Senior airline pilots in the 1980s made a lot of money.
Junior stewardesses. At any rate senior airline pilots made a good middle class income, certainly not wealthy with butlers. Even paying someone minimum wage to carry the bag to the airport would be a significant chunk of change.
The thesis is that wheeled bags were created due to "air travel by people too poor to have someone else cary the bag".
I read this as meaning specifically passengers, but I'll accept that it also applies to flight crew.
My counter-thesis is that even if they could afford porter services, wheeled luggage is still useful, and there's no reason that a, say, $5 million/year salary would have precluded the creation of wheeled luggage for flight crew.
It really must be porter services, as personal butlers isn't a realistic possibility. Consider that crew changes mean the butler may end up on a different flight than the crew member, at the last minute. The butler could follow in a private jet, but it needs the same range, and the ability to handle the same weather.
Could Besos, working as a steward with a last-minute flight change into La Guardia when all slots are full, also bring his butler along with him? I ... don't think so?
If we say they are all centi-millionaries - and assuming that commercial travel would exist in that case - we still need to consider peer pressure. Every rich golfer can afford golf cart rental to go from tee to tee. But it's part of the sport to walk it, and those who don't, and where there's no health issue or other reason preventing walking, are frowned upon.
Does the King of the Netherlands, in his part-time career as a KLM pilot, use a porter or steward? From what little I could infer, no, he does not. But he does short-haul flights, so that's not really conclusive.
Edit: You wrote: "Even paying someone minimum wage to carry the bag to the airport would be a significant chunk of change."
The upper bound for that is the cost of a taxi ride. The crew member would want to be on the same transport as the luggage.
And for overnights away from home, I believe the airliner pays for hotel and ground transport already.
My favorite hard slogs are the zipper and the cotton harvester. The former took something like 30-40 years to develop and then no one wanted it. The latter took 100 years of tinkering.
Yeah and zipper was the result of trying to design an mechanical Hook-and-eye closure. Which look nothing like a zipper. And definitely fits the articles point that somethings couldn't be made until all the supporting pieces were in place.
A lot of inventions were initially hand crafted and then automation was applied to reduce cost. Think sewing pins. For zippers automation was necessary from day one. As you said hard to make. Likely cannot be made by hand.
I don't understand why this is called an "amplifier" rather than simply "a clutch". The torque input is always the same; there is no "amplification" of the torque. The tensioned rope or spring simply applies more or less of the torque to the output, by varying the friction on the drum.
The output gets more torque, just like a capstan allows a person to amplify tension on a rope. Maybe this will explain better than the wikipedia page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ailf7bz9H0o
The reason I wondered, is that in years past I had serviced machines that used a "wrap spring clutch"[1] which I knew used the same principle. These are mentioned in passing in the Wpedia article on clutches[2] where it says they obey the "Capstan equation". That article[3] opens,
> The capstan equation or belt friction equation, also known as Eytelwein's formula, relates the hold-force to the load-force if a flexible line is wound around a cylinder (a bollard, a winch or a capstan)
So there's the generic idea, which can be viewed as a clutch or a bollard. The bollard is an "amplifier" in the same sense that a transistor is, where a small controlling voltage regulates a larger current flow. However the wrap spring clutch is on/off, not proportional, so is effectively a torque SWITCH.
I think a better transistor analogy than a FET is a BJT, where both the amplified quantity and control signal are electrical current.
The key difference between a clutch and torque amplifier is that, with a clutch, the output shaft power all comes from the input shaft. The torque amplifier's output shaft power mostly comes from the output drum, not the input shaft. The drums are constantly spinning, powered by some external source. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNNkNc7mFJ4
It's crazy to think that the modern bicycle was invented the same year as the modern car, both in 1885. Although apparently the ball bearing was a limiting factor for the creation of each.
The vast majority of advancements come directly from materials science. New materials are so strongly correlated to advancements, that I think there should be national labs that run government scale experiments to search for new substances.
The largest contingent of physicists do work on Condensed Matter Physics, which is essentially materials science https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.02789.pdf For exactly, the reason you suggest: they get the largest amount of funding because it is the most economically useful subfield.
I don't think these are the "best" examples as they are probably not completely accurate, but there is probably a reason why the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Steel Ages exist as a concept.
Also I think it makes sense since materials science is more applied chemistry/physics/engineering, so naturally materials science is huge because it represents 3 fields of knowledge interacting.
One of the early limitations of aircraft was their wooden construction and the lack of water resistant glues.
Of course, aluminium was the perfect material and one of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust. However it was so rare and difficult to extract that that the Washington monument is capped by a small piece.
The Bayes process and subsequent improvements have since made it common and relatively cheap.
I was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday. Long sigh. "Why did it take so long to..."? Regrettably not. "How very long will it eventually take to...", write an intro Astronomy textbook, that doesn't bungle the color of the Sun? I still don't know of a single one. With true-color in a leading image, and in illustrations. With no misconceptions about yellow stars, or scattering to yellow, or blackbody color, or color perception. With explicit mention of stellar classification color's non-perceptual white-point of blue Vega. With correctness from clarity, not from ambiguity and omissions. Such a text could have been written any time in the last few decades. People have been suggesting it. So how many more decades will we wait? It's a mistake to confuse systemic communication, coordination, and incentive dysfunction, with "people don't care" (as the interventions needed are different)... but they do superficially look so similar.
Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content. I'm currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. "Atoms are little balls"; interactive accurate simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on youtube. So to achieve a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing", would require a lot of mucking about, asking after images, educating about copyright... sigh. At least accurate electron simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran. And yet, for how long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content? One more year? 5? 10? 25? More?
As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".
> As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".
Most of it caused by "who's going to pay for it? I can't afford to do it on my own". And, sadly, the need to make money at every step of the way is what causes a lot of these problems. You wouldn't have to educate anyone about copyrights when dealing with pictures of atoms if there weren't a couple layers of rent-seekers in between you and the photographer.
> a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing"
One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do yet is a kind of "continuity of zoom" image from everyday scale to nanoscale. Imagine a video (or better yet, a frame with a slider you can drag back and forth yourself) depicting an object - say, a metal sheet, or a fly's wing, or something - that starts in 1:1 scale, and then the zoom level gradually increases, going through overlapped perspectives of camera, optical microscope, ... [whatever they use in the middle] ... up to a scanning microscope, so you can watch as the image is being zoomed all the way to the atomic level. With no jump cuts in between. Would do wonders for people's sense of scale and understanding of what the world is made of.
> I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do [...] continuity of zoom [...] overlapped perspectives
Years ago, when React was a mere virtual dom library with delusions of grandeur, I did a prototype of a customizable zoomer. Images, videos, maps, molecule viewer, and stacks of such. Zoom and drag around. So folks could create custom zooms for whatever topics they cared about, with whatever media they could find, with whatever concern for copyright they felt appropriate. In part to create an incentive to surface media from peoples' drives. It was a slog, and failing to focus on staging through an MVP, I burned out on it.
Now, with web dev far more mature, and browser 2D css far less buggy, an MVP would be rather easy for someone to do. Basically take a list of image urls paired with meters-per-pixel values. Here's an old simple images-only user test, just in case a hands-on motivates someone: http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/ZoomB?v=A&p=Gaax2&za=Hrr... .
I dropped the ball on that one. Long contact list of professors who wanted an email when it was usable. :/
But apropos our topic, our communication and coordination, tooling and culture, is missing something, when valued progress is allowed to have half-decade bus factor ones. Dropped-ball factor ones?
That's what the company I work with tries to do (among other things) https://youtu.be/ojW9d9HIQC8?t=15 Although it's really challenging to do well in realtime in google daydream grade VR
If one were unconstrained by development effort and sales, concerned only with deep transferable understanding, I wonder what one might explore with representations that were less cartoonish, more physically realistic?
Directly rendered electron density? With "bonds" implicit. Plucking, distorting, ripping, and assembling molecules grabbed by their nuclei. Or poked with others. With realistic and explicit time/space scale and dynamics. Captures of ab initio simulations, with their rich complexity and ambiguity.
Nuclear density, with alpha clusters, liquid drops, interesting shapes, and again, a hands on realistic dis/assembly and messing around.
It's pragmatically hard now. But arguably possible. So now, or years from now, there exists the question of how might it be used, how much might it help. How hard should we be trying to make it happen some years sooner rather than later. But we don't seem institutionally set up to explore such questions.
> google daydream grade VR
Yeah. I'm so very looking forward to the next year or three of hmds, especially AR. Wait, "in realtime"? I'm mostly bottlenecked on angular resolution. What challenges are you facing?
Haven't seen that. All the recent examples I saw were vector drawings (Flash animations, then HTML5 ones, and their renditions on YouTube).
Still, I assume that that 1968 video was mostly fiction and artist's imagination between ~ 10^-5 and 10^9. With current-era tech, we should be able to go down to 10^-8 with a real shot of a real object.
It’s by Ray and Charles Eames and is considered to be pretty groundbreaking. But, yes, we know a lot more and have more imagery regarding the small scales in particular than we did 50 years ago.
> There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube.
My approach to this, when I was in such a situation, was to put them on Wikipedia with the most liberal license possible. Assuming someone else hadn't already put a better picture, that is!
And from there, they made their way into other academics' presentations and suchlike - exactly as I intended.
Good approach. But that's a path, a pipeline, with a lot of steps, and potential for friction.
You've learned and been persuaded about what was originally a hypothetical benefit. Curationally sorted through a pile of media and made tradeoffs and selections. Learned about copyright and licenses, and had misconceptions about them addressed. Sufficiently resolved any concerns about its impact on you selling some media to publishers. Made a decision. Learned about the pragmatics of uploading. And executed.
The difficulty of facilitating that process varies enormously. Instant email responses, to contemplating the ethics of joining a line of graduate students following their professor like ducklings, struggling for a moment of attention. Self-spun-up on copyright, to repeatedly not getting it, to 'I sent you the image, just use it and cite me, this lawyer stuff is bs'. 'Here's an image' to 'let's make arrangements for you to come by and choose one of them'. A graduate student available and motivated to catalyze the process, or not. And so on. It can be trivially easy, or "this is just not going to converge any time soon".
It might be nice to have better infrastructure, to reduce the energy barrier here. Something more than libraries' scattered "creating OER" docs. Or someone for whom such community facilitation is their focus.
If you liked this article I would recommend “How To Invent Everything” by Ryan North. The book is effectively a time travelers guide to reinventing technology.
I think that one is pretty obvious. You need to be a traveler going somewhere you need to bring luggage to... but it has to be somewhere you can't just have someone help you or use a dolly (e.g. taxi or hotel) but also needs to have smooth surface for the wheels (roads/sidewalks/flooring...), and it has to be a traveler who can't just afford to hire a servant/car/cart/horse to transport those goods.
Prior to train stations, is there any reasonable place a traveler could want to go that would even cause the necessary demand for wheeled luggage?
The railroad provided wheels. Every station had a large cart. Unload your trunk from the carriage to cart, then push the cart up to the train, then load onto the train where it was stacked. Nobody had to personally handle their luggage much, and they also typically carried a larger volume of stuff. As such built in wheels wouldn't have been desired for rail road travel as there already was wheels available when you needed them.
I wonder if there have been any truly physically-gating dependencies? Meaning, physical and natural phenomenon where certain advances were impossible before they happened? For instance, certain technology that absolutely could not have existed before, say, a certain comet flew past because before then there was no evidence to believe X. Is there any reason to believe that we couldn't have been at this technological level 1,000 or 10,000 years ago?
This isn't technology, but the supernova of 1987 [0] confirmed our understanding of supernova physics, and gave us useful bounds on the mass of the neutrino. Even today, it gives stringent constraints on new hypothetical particles, which would have changed how the supernova played out. Unfortunately, we might have to wait decades to centuries for the next one.
Things getting cool enough after the big bang seems to be the obvious one.
But on a more serious note, maybe modern encryption? The physical gate being the literal ability to get rocks to count fast enough to finish decrypting something before the heath death of the universe
I'd actually put modern crypto in the opposite bucket: there's virtually no physical constraints at all. You could do RSA by hand if you had to, and if nobody else has computers, you can pick a key size small enough for doing it manually to be practical.
Oh I agree. I guess I was approaching this from the angle of the use of long keys where it would be literally impossible to decrypt unless computers exist.
We could also get into the sub argument of math being a property of the universe. Does encryption exist if we don't discover it? Trying to imagine a universe where our concept of math is impossible to the universe just not working that way
The two supernovae that Tycho Brahe and Kepler witnessed in a fairly close interval certainly helped to disprove the aristotelian notion that nothing could change in translunar space !
I cannot see a james Burke show/presentationwithout being sucked in and watching the whole thing. It’s just not possible. Even if I’m just walking by I get sucked in.
Why can’t today’s presenters/media types be as good as him?
That's a really interesting observation. My knowledge on the history of finance is woefully inadequate, but stocks seem to be another concept that was popularized very late.
the author sets out on a very difficult exercise, made more so if he does not include the other inventive civilizations. documenting china's inventions, for instance, required more than a lifetime of work by Needham; volumes continued to come out even decades after his death around 1990; some dozens of densely worded volumes comprise his masterwork and it is still thought to be far from complete. some of what the British patent office was approving in the 1800s were already in their modern form in china at the time of Christ. such examples are many, and I expect similarly so for India, the Arabs, the Persians, the Mayans, the Incas, etc.
Why is it taking so long to invent the semantic web? It could have a large economic impact, but solutions don't catch on. We have a specific way to say "I am a teapot", but not a generic way to unambiguously make simple statements like that. At least not a way that has gained traction.
What's the missing tech? Maybe there isn't one, and we're just an Eli Whitney coder away from making it happen.
The semantic web is a solution in search of a problem; most websites don't have semantics beyond "the page looks like this", and couldn't be trusted to describe them accurately if they did. Enabling a machine to understand a website in the same way that a human can would be valuable, but is probably an AI-complete problem; in the meantime the best path towards it is probably platforms for easy mostly-automated web scraping or testing (In fact the most useful stepping stone towards a semantic web I've seen is probably adblock, with its simple slider/checkbox interface for telling it "this piece is an ad" in the cases where it failed to figure that out).
Maybe "why are Selenium tests so flaky? Can we do better?" would be a good starting point if you want to work on this problem. The inability of most (all?) companies to write good browser-based test suites is effectively those companies' inability to recover the semantics of their own site.
I never made the link between semantic web and the pain that are browser tests, but now that you say it, it makes sense (especially if you use semantic attributes to identify the page elements for your tests).
I'm pretty sure that more 418 have been sent by machines that are not teapots than by teapots. Solving semantics is pointless when truthfulness remains unsolved.
A bigger issue IMHO is one of motivation. If Google asks to put fragments of semantic data on websites for better search positions, people are more than happy to do it, or at least spend some minimum effort on it. Few are willing to spend effort on it without a clear benefit, but the dreams sold by semantic web advocates require widespread use to be able to build the big cool things. To the contrary, many will see others being able to use data they publish without strict control as a negative. Or their users do: see Facebooks API shutdown.
Academic and hobby projects are somewhat of an exception to this, accepting unclear or non-profit benefits, and thus where you find most of this.
Of all the human inventions, written language is one of the very few that wasn't independently invented in many places, multiple times. However, it is so stupidly and obviously useful that anyone who sees it copies it and disseminates it immediately.
I thought written language was invented independently as Chinese, Sumerian, and Mayan. [1] Cuneiform influenced Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the Phoenician -> Latin alphabet.
I'll include an honourable mention to Arabic & Hebrew here, which are quite different to Latin, but I think are still related to Sumerian somehow.
The modern Hebrew (actually Aramaic [1]) alphabet and the Arabic alphabet are both derived from the Phoenician alphabet, which itself was derived (via proto-Sinaitic) from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Egyptian hieroglyphs themselves may or may not be another independent invention; they arose shortly after Sumerian cuneiform, and there was contact between the two societies, but there's no evidence of direct transfer. It's possible that just the concept of writing was transmitted, but no one really knows.
[1] The alphabet that archaeologists call the Hebrew or Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is a slight variant of the Phoenician one, just as ancient Hebrew is a dialect on the Canaanite dialect continuum. The alphabet used to write Hebrew since about 300-500 BCE is the Aramaic alphabet, spread throughout the Levant by the Persians when they made Aramaic the lingua franca in their possessions west of the Zagros.
I discovered the semantic web almost 10 years ago, and still can't get it out of my head. I keep going back to it. Before writing this post, I was just reading the JSON-LD specification. I spent all weeks reviewing ontologies and wondering why nobody is taking it seriously.
I'm convinced that the semantic web (now called "linked data") will be the next big thing. It will happen within the next 5 years. Expect to hear more people talk about it by the end of 2020.
Personal health care, quantified self, and IoT communities will adopt it first, followed by AI people. Then it will spread very quickly.
Content creators don't want the Semantic Web because it makes scraping their content easier. For example, there is a standard format for recipes. But most recipe web sites don't use it because they want everyone to read their web site and click on ads.
In order to enable the Semantic Web someone first needs to solve the IP licensing and payment problem. The friction is a huge problem because each little chunk of content has such low value to each consumer.
My favourite idea is the internet. The romans could have done it with flags / torches and towers. Don't tell me it wouldn't pay for itself. Sending data over long distances at that type of speed would have paid for itself multiple times over, even if it were one tiny fraction of the bandwidth we have today.
Going Postal by Terry Pratchett is a story involving a competition between a traditional post office and a light-based telegraph system called "clacks." You might enjoy the book and/or television adaptation.
After his death a few years ago, an idea from the book was actually implemented on the internet and is the reason you see "GNU Terry Pratchett" around.[0][1]
The Romans themselves had them too: Hadrian's Wall on the border of Roman Britain and Scotland was one place to have a flag-based signalling system which allowed messages to be transmitted within minutes across the entire length of one of the empire's shorter borders.
Given the bandwidth limitations when you're only able to transmit a restricted charset and take at least ten seconds to transmit each character and receive acknowledgement, it's hardly surprising that such systems were used to send a limited number of messages of military value rather than as a generalised communication tech, never mind an information retrieval tech.
True, although this just gives me one great benefit of 'immaterial' signals.. less opportunity for the messenger to be killed on the way to wherever.
This would also put them into the modern variant of man-in-the-middle attack (which kinda existed in the renaissance, France had a case of remote insider trading for instance)
It's in another cool fantasy movie, with signal towers, I can't find it now despite frantic Google (results terrible). Was very cool, wish I could remember the name.
The article was on to something, that something only becomes viable when its stronger or faster then a human. Because human labor has always been cheap. I'm sure engines and other things existed before, but they where only available for kings, or smart people with free time (money).
What have been the single most important factor for our recent technology explosion is that human labor has become more expensive because of opportunity cost. People will not join the army if they can get better paid doing something else. So it's also solves wars and crisis. But it can only be achieved politically. If you where a king, there wouldn't really be any incentive to make other peoples life better, as you then would have to pay more for services, and the people might overthrow you if they think they can fare well on their own.
I think the point about an "obvious" demand for a product is important, but what is obvious changes over time. After the industrial revolution it was obvious that certain improvements could make a lot of money in industry, but that was not obvious eg to the inventors of the Roman steam engine.
The 'why didn't the Incas, who were brilliant engineers eminently capable of mastering the axle, invent the wheel' is a fun question too. But one easily answered by looking at how little of their territory is flat enough for a wheel to be useful.
Plenty of people use cars, buses and railways in Peru today. The wheel is definitely useful in that territory, it just wasn't advantageous enough to over existing tech, so it needed to wait until complementary technologies had been invented in other cultures.
Made a lot more sense to start cutting and maintaining gently graded roads through the Andes for civilisations who started millennia earlier with the premise that horses/oxen were available and good at pulling stuff and once you got through the mountains everything would be nice and flat. Iron helped a lot too, of course.
The wheel still isn't particularly useful in reaching a number of Inca sites even given dynamite and the internal combustion engine. It wasn't that Incas were averse to the concept of roads so much as they didn't see why roads shouldn't have stairs.
Llamas are good at climbing steps and terrible at pulling carts...
My favorite example is the Edison phonograph. I see no reason why someone like Newton could not have invented this. We could have have recordings of Mozart and Beethoven playing the piano.
What software do you think could help speed up discoveries/inventions? Ideally, something which doesn't require immense computing (like materials simulator).
Ill pester you with a riddle I came up with the other day. I'm calling it the apples and oranges problem. If we could answer it it would increase progress a thousand fold:
The question is: How do you compare unrelated features?
To put silly: What is more important, a led on your coffee machine or gears on your bicycle and by what margin?
How much is CPU speed worth vs memory vs screen resolution vs battery life?
We could make a chart for each for what it costs, we could make a chart for the technical advantage or disadvantage, we could make a chart for consumer demand. I'm probably forgetting 10 things here....
Now imagine each of those to be dynamic(!)
If the CPU does zero cycles per second it will render the entire computer useless. If it is 0.8 Ghz and the goal is [say] web browsing it is almost as worthless as the 0 Ghz. In a few years 1.5 wont be enough either. The infinitely large memory costs an infinitely large amount of money.
If we could resolve this puzzle we could make giant leaps forwards.
Until we do grandma will have to pick her phone on gut feeling and the market will just have to anticipate that.
There's no puzzle or riddle. You compare unrelated features by looking at customers' revealed preferences in terms of how much they are willing to pay. Economists do this type of analysis all the time.
The bicycle is a pretty poor example of this. The word "car" is derived from the word "carriage". People already had horse or ox drawn "cars" centuries before the bicycle was invented. There simply was no need for an inferior method of transportation.
I think you're comparing bicycles to an idealized version of horses. Real horses get tired quickly, get hurt easily, and are quite expensive. Assuming decent roads, a bicycle would often be more convenient, and almost always cheaper.
From Wikipedia: "A stagecoach traveled at an average speed of about 5 miles per hour".
> Assuming decent roads, a bicycle would often be more convenient, and almost always cheaper.
I think you're assuming an idealised version of roads. In all seriousness, good roads were usually cobblestones and bad roads rutted tracks until bicycle pioneers started lobbying for roads to be paved smoothly enough to make their then-expensive hobby more practical for transportation than horses and horse drawn vehicles. Asphalt and Portland cement roads were new technologies in the nineteenth century too.
The advantage of the bicycle is that it's lightweight enough for a single rider to make it go faster than a horse-drawn carriage. Even on a dirt path, a rider can average 15 mph while horses can only sustain that for short bursts.
It takes a pretty high level of fitness and a decent quality bicycle to sustain 15 mph on a dirt path. Something like 11 mph would be a more realistic average.
In case anyone's wondering: no, of course the word "car" is not derived from the word "carnage".
Here's what the OED says, for instance:
Etymology: < Anglo-Norman and Old French (northern) carr, carre, Middle French car (c1100), variant of Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French char (French char : see char n.2) < classical Latin carrus , carrum , post-classical Latin carra (from 8th cent. in British and continental sources) kind of two-wheeled wagon for transporting burdens < the Celtic base of Gaulish carro- wheeled vehicle (in e.g. the place name Καρρόδουνον ), Early Irish carr wagon, chariot (Irish carr , Scottish Gaelic càr , both denoting various kinds of vehicles, now also specifically ‘motor car’), Welsh car vehicle, car < the same Indo-European base as classical Latin currere to run (see current adj.); compare currus chariot.
Compare Old Occitan car , Catalan carro (14th cent.), Spanish carro (13th cent. or earlier), Portuguese carro (13th cent.), Italian carro (early 14th cent.), also Middle Dutch carre (Dutch kar ), Middle Low German kāre , karre , Old High German karra , karro (Middle High German karre , karren , German Karre , Karren ), and ( < Middle Low German) Danish karre (already in early modern Danish), all denoting kinds of wagons or carts, but not usually motor vehicles; compare further in similar senses Middle Dutch kerre (rare), Old Icelandic kerra , Old Swedish kärra (Swedish kärra ), Old Danish kærre (Danish kærre ). Compare char n.2
Nothing to do with "carnage", which unsurprisingly is related to "carnal", "chilli con carne", "carnival", "incarnation", etc. -- "carn-" there means "flesh" or "meat".
THAT is another reason why it takes so long to invent X. People who shouldn't, quickly dismiss and idiot label anything outside the box of thinking. Still irks me, even today how I was not strong enough to stand my ground (probably been put in detention for answering back) and how I accepted that I was wrong.