The last day of the year is often a time for regrets.* However great our achievements, there are always things that we could have got done during the year but just – somehow – didn’t. Or we did them, but embarrassingly late. Peter Hague extends the idea to humanity as a species:
Silver chloride and ammonia have been produced since antiquity, and the camera obscura is similarly ancient. The only real tech barrier to photography was a lens to allow enough light in to form an image – and Europe has been able to make them for about 800 years. Medieval science just overlooked the idea.
If the right knowledge had been found out, we could now have photographs of Tudor soldiers displaying the body of Richard III, Columbus and his crew ready to depart, and London before the great fire.
Mechanically powered moving pictures may well have followed, and you might be able to see silent film of the US founding fathers.
That the available technologies were not combined for centuries is to me a catastrophic loss of information.
The comments to that tweet add stirrups, wheelbarrows, moveable type, long-distance signalling and many other inexplicably delayed technological advances to the list of missed opportunities.
Bah humbug to the lot of ’em. A load of pointless whining about trivialities. If you ask me what things humanity has to reproach itself for not having invented earlier, I robustly answer, “Zero!”
*Or it bloody well ought to be, anyway. If you are capable of going to a New Year’s party and drunkenly singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again too few to mention” and not immediately mentioning a long list of regrets, buzz off back to your home planet and leave us humans to enjoy ourselves in our own fashion.
A photograph of (say) the corpse of Richard III would have been of no more use than a hand-illuminated miniature of the same thing. What caused the development of photography was the concurrent development of several other necessary technologies – paper-making at-scale, cheap high-speed printing of books and newspapers, high-speed (relatively) distribution by road and rail, and so forth.
As with most technologies, development of a single capacity in isolation usually goes nowhere, because every significant technology consists of an aggregation of several or many other technologies to produce an effective whole. Cayley and Pilcher knew all of the principles required for sustained, powered flight 50 years before the Wright brothers were able to bolt on a sufficiently-developed and powerful engine to prove it. Seeing single-point technologies in isolation like this is fun and interesting, but tells very little about the overall development of technology.
llater,
llamas
It is always difficult to put yourself into the mindset of previous generations and cultures.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
The ordinary person in Medieval times worked on the land and changes had to battle against entrenched tradition. If you risked the harvest your family could die. The warrior class risked defeat although improved weapon technology was desirable. The Clergy and clerisy placed great weight on the religious knowledge available – new stuff risked allegations of heresy.
As always, benefits and trade-offs.
+1 to both the comments above. Never forget the nasty/brutish/shortness of life for earlier people. And the social organization that had no opportunities (or only exceedingly rare ones) for inventive peasants to follow brilliant ideas to completion, and–no small thing–be personally rewarded for them so as to encourage others. There’s nothing inexplicable about it.
Under the leadership of Comrade Commissar Miliband, we are about to embark on the experiment of seeing if an advanced society can be powered by windmills.
Obviously, it can’t. You can have an advanced society; you can have a society powered by windmills. You can’t have both.
We are in no position to criticize our ancestors for not progressing fast enough, when our society is about to tip into a new dark age, in every sense of the term.
Happy New Year!
Just wanted to stick my oar in here and double plus @llamas and @discoveredjoys.
The precursors to an invention are not necessarily just the specific chemicals and devices to make them, but really the capital, the demand and the social context in which it happens.
In a sense it reminds me of those what-if scenarios from history. What-if a fire team of modern marines had faced a whole Roman legion, or what-if a pair of F-15s had transported back to Pearl Harbor day. The answer, generally speaking is, they’d be destructive but would probably not make a long term difference. An F-15 against a Zero? The Zero doesn’t stand a chance. An M-16 against a hundred Pilums? The question is how many can you take out with a single round. But the great challenge in war is not the specific weapon systems, rather it is logistics. What happens when your F-15 runs our of missiles or fuel? You are screwed. What happens when the fire-team has run our of bullets and grenades? Them Romans are going to be real pissed about the one thousand of their fellows you have mowed down.
The context needed to produce an invention is fairly broad. I comment because I have made the argument that inventions generally speaking happen when the can happen, when the precursors and conditions are in place. Which is why patents are such a terribly destructive force.
Neil and Buzz landed on the Moon before anyone put wheels on a suitcase.
But, yes ++ to Fraser, Llamas and DJ. I mean was Babbage’s Analytical Engine alone ever really going to get us a steampunk internet?
For me the enormous fuck up was the UK Gov ignoring Skylon and pissing an enormous heap of cash they invented on building a Stephenson guage railway from somewhere near London to somewhere near Birmingham whilst playing Windy-bastarding-Miller. Why is it I think if George or Robert Stephonson were around now they woudn’t be fecking with railways? This is what happens when you let arts and anti-social “scientists” run things. We get diversity co-ordinators not actual progress.
And – to look at the other side of the coin – these questions about ‘why didn’t they develop this-or-that technique when they had all the elements?’ tend to overlook or dismiss very-real and very-sophisticated developments that were made in those times, usually because they were in fields that are less-relevant today.
You only have to look at a Persian double-recurve bow, or a Cremona fiddle, or the gear trains of a C16 Dutch windmill, or the fantastic metal-work of the Saxons, or the boat-building of the Baltic, to see that our forefathers were quite-capable of developing the most specialized and sophisticated technologies imaginable – when the circumstance of their time and place could benefit from them. I just watched an account where the wreck of a C16 ship was recovered from one of the Frisian islands, yielding examples of women’s clothing so skillfully made that they can scarcely be replicated today. But to have a photograph of such a creation, at that time, woukd not have profited anyone in any way – no matter how interesting that photograph might be today.
llater,
llamas
PS @ Fraser Orr – sorry – not going to have the patent discussion with you again 🙂
About patents: I discussed this with consultants when i started a one-person computer-vision company. They told me that it is more convenient to keep my software secret, which i could not do if applying for a patent.
But as i understand, the situation is completely different for pharmaceutical companies. Without patents, there is no way that they could profit from their investment in research.
@llamas
You only have to look at a Persian double-recurve bow, or a Cremona fiddle, or the gear trains of a C16 Dutch windmill
Or another great example of this is the Aeolipile created before the birth of Christ, which was a steam engine that produced rotational torque. It needed some work to be practical and certainly wasn’t efficient. But it was simply a curiosity until such times as the the cultural context allowed the use of such a device. It was another 1800 years before steam power became the driver of the industrial revolution (no pun intended.)
And FWIW the development of steam power was delayed by thirty years as people waited for Watt’s patents to expire (there was a massive amount of new innovation in this area almost to the day the patent expired.) And, I think perhaps most sad of all, that remarkable man James Watt spent decades using all his considerable abilities defending patents rather than inventing new things. Which is a dramatic waste of his talents for half his life.
PS @ Fraser Orr – sorry – not going to have the patent discussion with you again 🙂
No problem, I think we have covered that ground at great length in the past. Happy to agree to disagree.
Uhhhh I seem to recall pioneers of photography going through all kinds of chemicals to find ones that worked… then working on the entire chain of chemicals that would fix the image.
So I call BS on some of this…
It really gives off the scent of someone – some Uni-educated liberal arts someone – who has never rolled up their sleeves and tackled a technical problem.
Things are always obvious in hindsight.
I studied Engineering. Even with all the modern resources available to us, when we had to actually develop a useful physical application in our final years of study, the process was amazingly non-linear, multivalent, sideways-incremental, unexpected, and chaotic. And that was largely without socio-political or economic constraints.
(Cue Led Zep’s “I Can’t Quit You.”)
It wasn’t only early days for steam power – it was very early days for the patent process.
Watt’s patent is used in patent class (law school) to show that patents which are horribly overinclusive and broad ought not be granted. Watt’s patent was just that, which is why it shut down competition for so long. It basically claimed ownership of any use of steam power that had not already been built by Thomas Newcomen.
It was akin to Musk trying to patent any and all spacecraft return other than sea-drops.
So I still consider the Watt example as being a bit overblown. It’s a good example, not of the wrongness of the concept of patents, but of the importance of granting them carefully. He deserved financial protection of a few great bits of engineering. What he got was far too much, and it stifled improvement rather than fostering it.
Precisely why patents were developed. To prevent this.
The whole “patents block innovation” is BS in the modern world. It is 20 years in most of the world. Given it takes five years to develop most industrial systems, that makes it 15 years of delay. Hardly something that is going to block development forever, just enough to hope to recoup the costs of the development in the first place for most inventions.
On top of that, further developments can give a new patent. If the original patent holder doesn’t keep innovating, then they quickly get left behind as others improve their design.
The previous system, which we would return to without patents, is that the discoverer keeps it a secret for as long as possible. Which leads to it being only one company that uses that technology — which is far more expensive to consumers than allowing a patent to be sold. Furthermore, no-one else can work on improvements while it is kept secret.
Its even worse in modern society. Why would you spend billions developing a drug if your opposition could retro-engineer it in a matter of weeks? Why would you spend half your life developing something cool (say windsurfing) if all it did was cost you time and money?
I know lots of people have a bee in their bonnet about patents being bad, but they are just plain wrong. Very, very wrong. They are an annoyance that is much better than the alternative.
(This is not to say that the period for patents should be 20 years. I am open to it being shorter. But that is a very different argument. I think the current length of copyright is insanely long and needs drastic trimming.)
I beg to differ. Photography in the mediaeval era would have revolutionised all sorts of things as it is a way to convey information more objectively than an artist’s sketch.
In “to turn the tide” S.M.Stirling has some comments about this. He called them Type A inventions. The technology exists but nobody thought to actually do it. In the novel, wheelbarrows is the prime example. Could easily have been done by the Romans.
Many tech advances sit unexplored until someone figures out how to profit from them.
Making “profit” the biggest driver of human advancement, I think.
@ PdeH – and I, in my turn, must beg to differ.
Take the example of the lady’s court dress I described. You might look for an image online – it’s stunning, and stunningly-preserved. It is alleged to have belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots.
But what would a photograph of it have achieved? It could not teach the exquisite techniques of needlework. It could not teach the skills of weaving and cutting silk on-the-bias to make the dress hang and fill as it did. It could not teach the skills of the Bruges lacemakers who crafted the collar. In fact, all you could have done with it is put it into this month’s edition of Ye Olde Vogue.
I think you also bypass the tremendous skills and techniques of the engravers and illustrators of the day. From Rembrandt and Durer on down, there were legions of these men who could produce images approaching photographs in quality and detail – if such a thing were wanted or needed. But it seldom was.
Mind you, when such skills were needed, they were used. From Notre Dame to Westminster Abbey to the great ‘wooden walls’, huge, complicated edifices relied on skilled draughtsmen and illustrators to turn the concepts of their designers into what builders and carpenters would fashion. It’s perhaps a pity that so little of their handiwork survives for us to see, but what there is is stunning in its quality and detail. The sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci – just his sketchbooks, mind – should be enough to show that graphical representations in those times were more than fit-for-purpose. A photograph, or many photographs, would have added little or nothing to contemporary understanding of the task at hand – no matter how interesting it might be to us today.
On a side note – I was intrigued to learn, when studying C18 trade, how much of the smuggling from France to England consisted of engravings, prints and even dressed miniatures, all intended for ladies in England to see the latest fashions from France. So the quality of information was apparently quite adequate to suuport a lively trade even using those older technologies.
llater,
llamas
the experiment of seeing if an advanced society can be powered by windmills
But it’s not just windmills.
Factor in the energy storage for when there is no wind, and the additional windmills needed to charge it up.
And that’s just to replace existing electricity generation, even more are needed if you move from direct fossil fuel powered energy like an ICE to one that needs electricity.
How long have they been trying to build a single rail line from London to Birmingham?
Even if you dismiss the madness of the extent of this project, the idea this could be done in one generation is pure fantasy.
The stirrup is an odd one – as it indeed should have been in use in Europe long before it was, true one does not need stirrups to stay in a Roman saddle (it is four cornered – Romans COULD and DID used shock cavalry – contrary to what historians claimed up till only a few decades ago) – but getting on to a horse was difficult for people who were not super-fit, hence all those mounting blocks one finds along Roman roads, some old fat man (like Paul Marks) would, if he fell off his horse, have to lead it along the road till he came to a mounting block – which is a bit daft.
Sometimes things were invented – but were kept so secret (for fear the enemy would use them) that they were forgotten again. This did not start with certain types of nuclear reactor and the United States Navy (we could have had small nuclear reactors powering towns and cities decades ago if it had not been for the United States government) or helium for airships (forcing people to use hydrogen for airships de facto doomed the industry) – it goes back, at least, to “Greek Fire”.
Both in naval and land warfare this was extensively used by the Byzantines (East Romans) and is one reason their Empire did not fall as the Western Empire had done (Greek Fire was used against Islamic forces trying to take Constantinople – there were many attacks) – but with the chaos of the period after the defeat (1176 AD) of the Emperor Manuel and his death a little later, all reference to Greek Fire stops (indeed some claim the secret was forgotten earlier than this) – it certainly was not used against the 4th Crusade in 1204, it seems that the secret was so tightly kept that when some people died (or were killed) the secrets died with them.
The Romans had such things as the steam engine – but it was used on for toys. Water power (quite advanced water power) was used for factories in the Roman period – factories bigger than anything seen again in Europe before the 1700s, but not steam power.
Why not? I do not know.
Advanced gearing and mechanics were also understood (as we know from the early mechanical calculating devise that was described by Cicero and denied by “clever” historians – till an example of one was found in a ship wreak) – but that knowledge was later lost.
And if the Romans did not have telescopes they certainly should have done – as they had the lenses (as did previous civilisations).
Might-have-beens, might-have-beens.
I am even told that Roman wagons are “wrong” – that although they look like later wagons, a design mistake in their construction meant that less could be carried – again a design that could have been corrected, IF someone had the idea.
Ditto the famous problem with Roman ploughs and heavy soils – which greatly limited farming in parts of Europe till the Middle Ages.
There’s the horse collar. Without it, trying to use an expensive horse as a draft animal would kill it, cheaper but more inefficient bullocks and/or slaves were used. Once you could harness a horse to a load without killing it, its productivity as a draft animal far exceeded its price.
King David’s Spaceship has it as a blink-and-you-miss-it plot point, that becomes Chekhov’s Gun in the final act.
What is a Printing Press – it is, basically, a wine press with movable metal type (made of lead – in the old days).
The Romans (and people before them) had all they needed to create printing presses – but it did not arrive till the 1400s (not in China, as modern intellectuals claim, as a printing press without movable metal type is not a printing press – the printing press is an invention of the Germans).
Even in the 1600s and 1700s there were more printing presses in the average European city than there were in the entire Ottoman Empire – but do not tell modern academics that, as, according to them, Ottoman Despotism was wonderful.
By the way – the Middle East was vastly less developed, and less populated, in 1800 A.D. than it had been in 500 A.D.
I have heard one reason for the Romans, and others, not developing steam power- if you have slaves to do the manual work, you don’t need machines. Perhaps there was no need for mechanical power? What would they have done with their slaves in a machine culture?
Re – the Romans – oh, that’s easy. They did develop and build the most-advanced industrial technologies of their times – but only in areas under direct Imperial control and populated by large numbers of fully-Romanized subjects. The watermill complex at Barbegal in Gaul is an excellent example, although of course Rome itself and the surrounding area was just packed with aqueducts, mills, flumes, races, foundries, mills and all sorts of industrial complexes.
Most of the Empire, while under Roman control, contained very few actual Romans apart from the military, who were in any case often also not Romans, either. The Imperial policy of devolution meant that subjugated lands were left to be governed largely by Romanized locals, and the only infrastructure that the Empire installed was more-or-less entirely military – roads, forts, barracks. With few exceptions (such as that gold mine in Wales that I can’t spell) local commercial activities were left to the locals, and Romans did not invest in industrial installations and so forth unless there was a very good reason to do so, and then only in lands that had been thoroughly subjugated.
llater,
llamas
@bobby b
He deserved financial protection of a few great bits of engineering. What he got was far too much, and it stifled improvement rather than fostering it.
Thanks for the info on the Watt patents, it was enlightening. I have only read around the subject, and it sounds like there is a lot more for me to learn there. Its the new year and I have promised myself that I need to spend my time doing productive things and goofing off on the web less, however, I did want to mention one thing — and I think it is the thing that gets missed most about patents.
Certainly patents are a stimulant to new invention, this is self evidently true, however that is only one side of the coin. Patents are also a drag on new inventions. If an inventor has to stagger through a minefield of patents then his new invention is disincentivized. If he has to pay some license to some dude who got to the patent office ten minutes before him (or ten days or ten years), then his incentive to make his new innovation is substantially decreased. There are about one million more things I could say on this subject, but to keep the discussion focused, let’s leave it at that.
So there is an incentive and a disincentive. The theory of patents is that they stimulated more invention, which is to say the incentive is larger than the disincentive. Where is the data to support that claim? Simply speaking there isn’t any. After 300 years of patents as we know them, there isn’t data to support the basic premise on which they are built. Insofar as there have been studies, they have been limited and they have largely concluded that the incentive and disincentive are equal or are slightly more of a disincentive.
So if your goal is to make more innovation in society there had better be some pretty strong evidence that government granted monopolies are a net benefit. Before you take away the right for a person to profit from their ideas, you had better have some pretty strong and convincing data that society benefits from restricting that person’s freedom. And, as far as I know, there isn’t any such data whatsoever.
And, even if there were, who is going to make this fine distinction that your law classes demanded on patents — enough to be profitable, not enough to be too broad? Some government official? I assure you I have dealt extensively with both patent lawyers and PTO bureaucrats. There aren’t too many Elon Musks in there. Because of course all those brilliant minds are on the outside inventing things getting frustrated by some PTO bully.
“Mechanically powered moving pictures may well have followed, and you might be able to see silent film of the US founding fathers.”
Yes, and if Washington had all of our current technology, he could have taken a selfie of himself crossing the Delaware, and then posted it on Facebook for all his buddies to see.
Sometimes I think that they were better off without all of our flashing and beeping crap.
Aye, there’s the rub. It’s going to be dependent upon some chosen “expert” making a judgment call.
Which is what’s making me fear that, while it’s a great theory of property protection, it might just not be workable. And that was the ultimate class consensus on the Watt discussion.
@bobby b
Aye, there’s the rub. It’s going to be dependent upon some chosen “expert” making a judgment call.
Right, and that “expert” is a government employee. Which is to say some JV wannabe inventor who didn’t have the chops to make it in the real world so instead became some cushy, guaranteed, can’t get fired, keep my pension bureaucrat, whose job is to sit in judgement of people who actually have to produce useful work for a living.
The principle of “innovative” in patents is based on this ridiculous fiction, as explained to me but a $1500 an hour patent lawyer — imagine you are sitting in a room with every patent relevant to this current one. Imagine you know nothing at all except what is in those patents — is it sufficiently different in those terms to be “innovative”?
That is how this swamp dwelling, couldn’t get a real job so works for the government civil servant is using as the yard stick to measure all your sweat and toil. It is of course utterly ridiculous, utterly unrelated to the real world. But you give the government the job and that’s what you get.
Which is why I think your class came to a very wise conclusion. I wonder how many of them, despite this conclusion, went on to work in IP? The money sure is good!! And you get to hang with some of the most interesting and innovative people in the world.
In defense of patent lawyers . . . .
(I bet I get ALL the Google searches for that particular phrase . . .)
. . . All of the guys I knew who went on to become Manhattan-condo patent lawyers – 4 of them, tbe – came into law school knowing exactly why they were there, and all of them held one or more PhD’s in some specific area of engineering. They were all clustered at top of class at the end.
I once sat through a meeting involving a genetic-manipulation patent case, mostly to take notes because the real flunky lawyer #3 couldn’t be there. (Yes, I was a substitute flunky. Gotta start somewhere.)
The discussion at one point dealt with the actual science (and mechanics of the science) behind the particular splicer being defended. Of the ten people in the room, it became clear that only two could even begin to have that conversation – the inventor, who headed the client company, and the lead patent guy for the defense firm.
The inventor commented that that lawyer was the only person who knew the science as well as he did.
To be really good at patent law is hard. They’re not ALL overpriced.
@bobby b
In defense of patent lawyers . . . .
I don’t think patent lawyers are dumb, on the contrary the ones I have met are all pretty smart, and rich. It is the government flunkies that are dumb.
And I’m also not suggesting that they are overpaid. They definitely use the law to generate lots of value for their clients, irrespective of how illegitimate it might be. After all, if he is selling his soul he should definitely charge a premium for it. 😊
The corporate patent counsel who handled the majority of my patent cases would always say that ‘patent examiners are parent lawyers who couldn’t make it in private practice’, so there may be some truth to the rumours 🙂.
llater,
llamas
Patents are just another barrier to entry. All regulation is a barrier to entry that rich folk can afford to endure but which poor folk cannot afford to defend.
OK, I am going to take this thread topic and bend and mangle it outrageously, just because I think the following is . . . funny, or ironic, or something.
1. Twenty years ago: “The spoof ad opens with the suicide bomber leaving his home and jumping into his VW Polo. The bomber parks at a busy London restaurant where carefree diners crowd the pavement. Cut to the terrorist sitting in his car as he pushes the button to detonate his bomb. The blast is contained within the car, saving the diners. The ad ends: ‘Polo. Small but tough’.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2005/jan/23/arts.artsnews
2. Yesterday: Someone exploded a bomb inside a Tesla Cybertruck outside the the Trump Hotel in Los Vegas. The driver was killed, but damage was quite limited outside of the truck
According to Musk and somewhat backed up by police sources, it sounds like the truck was strong enough to contain the blast and direct it mostly upwards, thus saving lives of people nearby. (Now I cannot find the right tweet.)
– – –
I just thought this was funny, in a tech-near-misses kind of way. 😉
I read a semi-fictionalised account of Gutttenburg. Very good. It’s somewhere in the house… Yes, he did adapt the wine-press and yes, the Chinese (sort of) got there first. But, the Chinese language does not lend itself to moveable type and Europe at the time of Guttenburg was… interesting. Guttenberg had technical struggles with things like metallurgy but he also had problems with the acceptance of the very concept. From the start he wanted to print a Bible but… Bibles were produced by monks in scriptoria who would recite the text as they copied. This lead to many mistakes because of course not all the monks worked at the same rate. This is one of the reasons Guttenburg wanted to print a Bible. You get it right first time, then you got it right. But there were forces against him. How can a machine replicate the word of God without speaking it? This was a big issue. To this day in places like Afghanistan they have prizes for kids (boys only, obviously) who can recite the Qu’ran most beautifully. Very few of these children speak Classical Arabic so they are simply memorising sounds. It is the same principle. In the beginning was The Word… And the word can’t be mechanical. Except of course rote learning a text you can’t understand sounds pretty mechanical to me. My primary school made us all do it with times tables. The complete opposite to what maths ought to be.
Oddly enough my Sister-in-law lives in Mainz. They have a big celebration of Guttenburg and a very large wine festival.
bobby b,
This was the Guardian headline for the Cybertruck explosion…
“One dead after Tesla Cybertruck explodes outside Trump hotel in Las Vegas”
You just read that and you think it exploded of itself. Not unknown for electric vehicles.
@mongoose
Patents are just another barrier to entry. All regulation is a barrier to entry that rich folk can afford to endure but which poor folk cannot afford to defend.
Right, this is an entirely separate argument regarding patents, but an important one. The way patents are sold in the culture is that they protect the little guy against nasty big mega corp running over them. When in reality, nearly all the time, exactly the opposite is true.
OK, I’m done with my OT rant about patents.
@bobby b
2. Yesterday: Someone exploded a bomb inside a Tesla Cybertruck outside the the Trump Hotel in Los Vegas. The driver was killed, but damage was quite limited outside of the truck
I think there is a lot more to this story than meets the eye. On the surface we think “looney Radical Islamist blows his shuhada ass up hoping for 70 vigins.”
But the driver was a non muslim special forces green beret with many years of honorable military service including two bronze stars. And those crazy shuhada-s hate America, not Donald Trump or Elon Musk in particular. And why a Cyber truck which have a reputation for being extremely strong rather than just a Tesla X, which would blow to pieces pretty easily?
So like I say, there is more to this than meets the eye, and I’ll be curious to see what develops, or if we hear anything. I am amazed that that monster who shot up Las Vegas from his window in the Mandalay Bay remains completely a black box. Nobody, or nobody in the public, seems to know anything at all about that incident.
It think it is all very odd indeed.
Re: The Vegas exploder:
https://x.com/GBNT1952/status/1874932093081571618
(Good questioning thread.)