What are some technologies that could have been developed far earlier than they were in our timeline?

>Would a dirigible feasibly able to have been made in the 14th century?
This is an interesting one. The ability to make the frame and skin of a (small) airship has probably existed since antiquity. Just wood and skins, really. Toughest part is making large enough quantities of lift gas. I'm not a chemist, maybe someone else can comment.

At the very least, hot air balloons could have been done, if anyone had the idea. Main hurdle there is a portable heat source. There was a family that escaped east germany in one they made secretly in their basement from mainly household materials, as a for instance, and modern examples aren't that tricky or expensive to manufacture.

>A couple which I think are reasonable was a bicycle in the late Roman Republic
Possible, but probably would have remained a novelty even if it had happened. Bicycles in our world had to become pretty refined before they were considered an alternate mode of transportation. The horse being replaced anyway by the automobile is probably also a significant part. Bikes from the 19th and early 20th century are all recreational.

>Printing press
Ancients could possibly have manufactured a press with solid plates or blocks, but keep in mind for that tech to really take off you also need a cheap source of paper AND the sociopolitical climate to create a literate population. Moveable type takes a fair bit of precision to make as well.

My picks would all be more abstract - modern democracy, economics, banking, management, stuff like that. Creates more time for people to work on "side projects" and allows upward mobility for the intelligent. How many might-have-been geniuses and inventors lived and died in obscurity because they happened to be born to peasant parents and never had access to equipment or education?

>abstract technologies

That's a good one, and something that I'm going to have to think on. Perhaps some memetics-as-technology, perhaps how our philosophical and public technologies combine to improve our quality of life.
I am somewhat unwilling to lean too heavily on abstract technologies because it's difficult to determine some kind of technology scale for them. The Chinese had extremely efficient bureaucracy and the Romans had excellent logistics, in fact that's what made the Empire as good as it was, how are they meaningfully different to Western bureaucracy, beyond some minor improvements in record keeping and systems technology?

>My picks would all be more abstract - modern democracy, economics, banking, management, stuff like that.
Still require socio-economic conditions though.

The oldest economical issue was how much food could be produce in excess, which determined how many people could do be anything else than farmers. As we get better at farming, we get more "free time" to do more stuff.
After all, the industrial revolution had to be preceded by the agricultural one.

Other examples are the many attempts to develop poor countries, which often encounter difficulties because every element introduced can't work without a complex environment. Can't do industry without agriculture, can't do a modern agriculture without some industry, can't do either without infrastructures, can't do that without more or less stable institutions, can't do anything without literacy, with requires some literacy to begin with, which require an half decent economy where you can afford non working kids... and so on.
A classical example is when many poor countries tried to generalise basic education... only to realise they didn't have enough literate people to teach everyone, or even to teach a generation of teachers that would be able to teach everyone. So they had (and sometime still have) to do it progressively.

It reminds me of time travelling discussions, which encounter the same issue: you can hardly bring fragments of knowledge to the past and hope to fasten history that easily.

Tl:dr : Shits take time to be built.

>Still require socio-economic conditions though.

This basically explains it

its not a matter of having the technology (see the above posts; ancient greeks had steam engines, vending machines, primitive mechanical calculators)

its a matter of "do we need it?", "will it make things easier/cheaper for us?", "is mass production feasible?"

>Other examples are the many attempts to develop poor countries, which often encounter difficulties because every element introduced can't work without a complex environment.
Most of the difficulty in developing poor countries is that the political environment isn't stable enough for development. China has developed from 3rd world mud farming to a nearly 1st world nation in two generations because of political stability (say what you like about the kindness of the communists, but they at least know what not to fuck with). People are more than willing to bring their development into your country and if you embrace that you can advance quite quickly. If your country has violent rebel groups, or a government that changes every 2-5 years, or a government that has a habit of just openly stealing stuff, then the investment just won't happen. Yes, there are growing pains, and a strong civic culture is important to develop (and that's probably what will hold China back from becoming a full 1st world nation), but really all you need to leapfrog over a couple thousand years of development is to cover that tip top of maslow's hierarchy of needs.

That doesn't happen more often because the world is and has always been and will continue to be for some time a generally shitty place with a lot of shitty people in it.

But political stability also need to be built. China is a millennia old empire, known for its bureaucracy. Modern China wasn't built from scratch either.

And when I mentioned the literacy issue, I was actually thinking about China. When the communists came into power, they knew they had a really backward country they need to educate (and not just "educate", though also that) but they didn't have enough people to do that. The "cultural revolution" is often interpreted as a brutal way to "teach" "decadent" elites the way of the people, and it was sold as such, but it was also a desperate attempt to develop literacy in the gigantic countryside they had limited power over. Or at the very least, to have someone able to read and write even in the most remote place of the country. Ultimately they did spread basic education, with less brutal, but slower, methods.

Beside, China (and other countries) were catching up, they exist in an international environment that could served as examples. That's countless ways various influences can speed up development. Time travellers or early inventors are just individuals with much less cultural impact.

That being said, I'm not saying those obstacles are insurmountable, they are manifestly not.

Glass in China.

They never developed it. They made ceramics and, well, China, and stuck with that. Because they went that route instead of glass for bottles, cups, etc, entire avenues of tech development were closed off.
Lenses being the most important here, no telescopes, no microscopes, and most importantly no glasses, which could have probably added 20 or more years to the useful life of scholars and intellectuals. Being able to read and write for 20 more years gives every smart person alot longer time to invent shit.

Whether you want to count that for an occurring earlier thing is up to you. AFAIK they straight did not have it before significant European trade, and they would have been able to advance alot faster with it.

As for the antiquity steam engine discussion, IMO that's more a question of need than capability. Yes their metallurgy was not great but if they went the expensive bronze route they could have made the equivalent of the first mine steam pumps. If they saw the use it would have been developed further just like the tech was, just earlier.

Another closer one on the steam topic is the Frank Shuman sun engine. Solar powered steam engine that had the misfortune to be developed just before WW1. If he or someone else had developed it just a bit earlier enough for the tech to have been widespread by the war we could have had significant renewable power a century ago.

There's all that shit that Archimedes made to protect Syracuse (like the giant iron claw, and the reflected heat thing) and there's the Antikythera Mechanism, which was attributed to him in antiquity and to his school in modern day

so all you need to do is introduce Archimedes to a really good metallurgist and we've got ancient Grecoroman steampunking

that, and maybe even a difference engine

Okay, I studied (briefly) the printing press when I was debating on adding it to my L5R variant setting. So here goes:
>China invents printing press that is fairly close to what we can recognize as one - plate on bottom, inked, paper on on top, heavy weight rolls over it, paper removed.
>They cannot use moving type thanks to too many characters, but they use blocks of carved wood for the plates, and there are some (read, a few) indications that they may have used sand-cast bronze plates for printing as well.
>Korea gets the tech, adds movable type once Hangul is created. Korea rejoices, but paper is still too expensive to provide the cheap hentai they need.
>Japan sticks with woodblock printing, but lays the wood down onto the papers, not the other way around. At some point, a person tries using the stencil method from kimono making for printing, but it doesn't catch on. Japan wasn't too smart in this case, and the reason they put the wood on the paper was (from what I can tell) a belief that they would have to permanently mount and inset the woodblocks to the work surface to maintain proper harmony of the workshop.
>Yes, they had to reverse the entire process so the work surface harmony would not be disrupted by adding another working surface that was properly a tool.
Okay, there we go.
Other techs: Algebra (Muslim origin, possibly earlier), Calculus (Some ancient indians had a proto form of this, went nowhere), Zero (Ancient Hindu, Maya. Maya didn't take it to its full potential), place value notation, anything mathematics. Oh, and abstract mathematics where the problem cannot be directly represented by a physical form. That is what killed Greek math.

Oh, and then we get the Gutenberg press, which used movable type (using a new alloy that allowed for crispness of the letter details) and solved the issue with evenly distributing the pressure by using the vinters grape press to put pressure on the entire surface at once.

>My picks would all be more abstract - modern democracy, economics, banking, management, stuff like that.
I think this is even less feasible than technology.

What exactly was holding back advancements in mathematics? I realize that something like 0 or the negative integer are obvious to me since I was raise being taught them but they seem like natural concepts to have come along

iirc Howl's Moving Castle is just set in an alternate early 20th century where magic is real. Also you say normie but plebs only watch the movie, I've met barely anyone that read the book.

Anyway, anything made with human hands that arose from experimentation COULD have been made at any point by an alchemist who happened to try the right thing, basically. Things like microchips would necessarily have to come after the machining necessary to construct those, that's where you get into technology that requires other technology to create and later to even devise, and then you start hurtling toward singularity.

>What exactly was holding back advancements in mathematics?
I think that's another area where it's driven by need. Mathematics has grown historically to support other fields... accounting, initially, and then architecture, engineering, astronomy, etc.

Negatives were something I understood as soon as I heard a basic description of what they were before I even knew how to read, and figured out how to work with in terms of arithmetic on my own early on, but when I was in high school the other shitheads in my AP maths class still treated negative numbers as some esoteric shit that just had rules you had to follow when working with them without understanding why, so maybe it just isn't intuitive to most minds at all.

lol autism

Fucking this. Stability, prosperity and time are the cornerstones of development, nations that remain stable and dependable inevitably do the best as people have the time and the money to ponder the what-ifs of life. Also having a free flow of ideas is crucial as you can innovate and explore the ideas discovered by other cultures.

Seems like something that would occur the moment accounting became a field so that you could track what people owed, though I think you're right, the field wouldn't have been pushed at all without the applicable need for growth and use

How much we're ancient societies affected by things like fetal alcohol syndrome or lead poisoning, the stuff that we now recognize as things that will inhibit cognition? The question seems weird to ask only because it seem like a very superior outlook to have on the past "Oh they were just really stupid that's why they didn't have these advancements."

>if you're adept at something you must be mentally ill
Is that mindset how you cope with being stupid?

Zero comes to mind as the most obvious thing and it took ages to materialise

Followed by negative numbers

Decimal numerals

Setting "zero" hour by noon, instead of sunrise (seriously, what the fuck?!)

Ice house

Pasterisation

Destilation in any form (not just alcoholic)

Horse collars Sure, it reached the mature form in 5th century, but only in China - it took another 600 years to hit Europe

Flying shuttle

Winnowing machine

Scythe

Agricultural mower

Seed drill

Overshot waterwheel

Pan amalgamation of silver (or even just the patio process)

Parchment

Paper

Moving type

Heliograph

Each of those things are perfectly possible to figure out and/or build having access to nothing else than well-developed Iron Age tech (think Classical period in Greece), yet some of them took AGES to develop (and heliograph was literally build when it was already obsolete).
And not counting few exceptions (scythes, movers, paper), you can make all of them with Bronze Age tech.

Oh, and I would forget:

Tooth saw

>they could have made the equivalent of the first mine steam pumps
Don't want to go against your argument, because I generally agree with your entire post, but you are missing one, important detail here.

Ancient mining was not shaft mining, nor deep mining. To even need mining pumps, you would need completely different type of mining operation. Instead, they were just finding a horizontal veins close to surface or going horizontal to a mountain slope and dig it out. Not to mention things like bog iron, which was main source of iron ore well into Late Medieval Period.

And they were mining like this for two reasons - no proper tools and... lack of techniques to deep deeper due to water. So it's a vicious circle - nobody dig deeper, because they didn't have pumps, so there was no initiative, to develop pumps.

Also, the pump itself, even a hand-pump, would be great, since antiquity didn't figure out any sensible pump, unless we count the Chinese ones, but those came in 4th century AD, and it wasn't antiquity in China either.

>Heliograph
Having one also means you have heliotrope, so you can have a pretty precise surveying without knowing lenses. Or glass. And unlike "iron sight" theodolite, you don't need precission tools to make one (same applies to lense version). Sure, it's limited to good weather, but who cares, if you got super-precise, super-useful measuring tool from few bronze mirrors.

Macadam roads.

It's so fucking simple the fact it wasn't developed until 1820s (so the time when railway became a thing) is just plain wrong.

>Sometimes the technology is played as mundane as in that Avatar series what I never watched
First of all, you should watch it. It's literally one of the best shows that came in last... I don't know? 20 years?

Second, it's about a Not!Japan conquering primitives all over Not!Asia, because they've did a bit of industrialising, while everyone else is agrarian or even hunter-gatherer. Kinda. Sorta.
Either way, the bad guys are evil conquering colonialists that thrump locals, because they have access to some pretty nifty toys, while everyone else is busy building bamboo-and-paper huts. This and "industrialising" war, along with extensively using magic users as soldiers.

They would have needed shit like the Uthburt Swords levels of good quality or Damascus Steel.

But by then the steam trinkets were all but lost lore to the general population.

Exactly what I was saying. Basic arithmetic is as old as writing, because one of the first uses of writing was to keep records. Geometry and trigonometry grew out of the needs of architects and engineers. Calculus was developed to cope with issues that originally came up in physics and astronomy. And so on.

That's not really the main problem.

The issue is that it was creating large sheets of good quality metal reliably. This is especially true for steam engines which subject the vessel to great stress when dealing with useful amounts of energy, and to get that energy you need a good sized steam engine.

A 30" sword about 2" wide at the base in good quality metal is tricky but by 1000AD foundries were churning them out. A boiler large enough to power a mine pump, to say nothing of a train is orders of magnitude more difficult.

>I don't buy this Whig history idea of 'progress' leading towards some inexorable sense of 'ages' or 'eras' that are distinct from one another.
I've seen some shit on Veeky Forums, but I think this is the first time I've seen someone attempt to take the Whigs to task for being Whigs. This is some weapons-grade, "gets shit done" level of autism. Keep on being great, Veeky Forums, and don't let those Whigs get away with shit.

FAS wasn't really an issue before distilled alcohol became a widely accessable commodity. It takes a hefty, highly concentrated doses of strong alcohol on long period to get such effects.
In short - while it was possible to end up with FAS-affected kid, it was much harder to "achieve", because both the rate and amount of consumed ethanol were MUCH smaller.

Electric cars
Petrol engines took over beacause battery tech at the time wasn't good enough and petrol has great energy to weight - but it could have gone the other way easily and the political implications of not needing the Middle East to be under dictators or Texas mattering

I've got a better one:
Biofuel

After all, Diesel build his engine to run on fucking oil. First peanut oil and then vegetable oil.

>What are some technologies that could have been developed far earlier than they were in our timeline?
You could literally fill books with all the possibilities.
I've just recently been reading a manga Jin about a modern neurosurgeon sent into the past trying to advance medical technology and technique despite the limited tools.

Technology and knowledge is not necessarily always accepted or fully integrated into society. Someone developed a simple steam "engine" in ancient rome that was never more than a novelty or toy, knowledge of many medical treatments was lost and rediscovered over time. In the manga I mentioned the character receives a lot of push-back to his surgical techniques that seemed radical or dangerous without proper understanding.

Something else to consider is that examples like howls moving castle or avatar are more magic-tech than pure technology. Given magic, technology would probably develop very differently.

Pretty much everything. Wizards and alchemists can replace the industrial technology necessary for toilets, lightbulbs, bullets and cars. All medieval or renaissant concepts that didn't get to be until machines could deal with them on a timely manner.

This.

Daimler building his car with Diesel engine and we are living in completely different world.

>What are some technologies that could have been developed far earlier than they were in our timeline?

Exoskeletons

Powered exos/armor will be very handy by pretty much everyone. They're fucking versatile machines that can makes any task easier.

Imagine that, with some good ol' fuckery and tinkering in alchemistry, mechanical and "magic" (i.e. SCIENCE!), bunch of Nubians with power armor are engaging elite Romans, also in power armored segmenta, exist.

I'm confused user?

Are you denying that it's wrong to say that Whig historiography is nonsense or that many people don't think of history in a fundamentally whiggish manner even if they don't use the term?

Are you also upset when Freud gets mocked? It's long outdated but the impact on the popular understanding of the subject is huge so we have to deal with them.

>A couple which I think are reasonable was a bicycle in the late Roman Republic. I reckon they would have been able to have made a bicycle.
Wouldn't they need rubber?

early bikes had hard wood wheels much like a wagon

There is a bigger problem, that a lot of people ignore:
Chain drive.

Despite its simplicity, chain drive assumes you can manufacture large amounts of cheap chain belts. That is impossible without having access to pretty decent pressing techniques, along with equally good metal rolling.
I'm not saying it's not possible to hand-made them, but it would make them absurdly expensive, and that's something you don't want to have from a bike.

But this reminds me what this thread lacks so far:
Pedal-powered paddle boats.

You could probably use an appropriately braided rope or leather instead of a chain

Sure it won't last as long and you won't be having multiple gear shifting but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I was literally agreeing with you for taking the Whigs to task, so I don't know what you're on about here? Let me say it very clearly, so even a mongoloid retard like yourself can understand:

Whigs bad, fuck Whigs.You are trashing Whigs, go you, that's cool.

>You could probably use an appropriately braided rope or leather instead of a chain
Or you could just stop before you say something even more stupid.

You need a chain drive to make a bike. That means half-decent chain-belt and at least two iron cogs fitter for that chain.
That's a fuckload of precision, machine work

The math pusher is back. I do this every time this thread comes up.
Okay, so the first uses of math comes from basic resource tracking - how much of X do I have? Addition and subtraction.
Then you start getting more advanced about the time that writing evolves: if I have X people producing Y amount, how much do I have? Multiplication as a faster form of addition. X people consume Z amount, how long before Y becomes nothing? Division as a faster form of subtraction.
Shortly after that, if the numeric system supports it, you see fractional amounts - after 20 days, we will provide 1/X rations to the workers for 3 days. Stuff like that.
Accounting is what creates the need for negative numbers, allowing credit/debit amounts to be understood as a single number.
Agriculture is the first main push towards creating geometry - the need to determine field boundaries after the Nile flooded is what drove the Egyptians to create it, along with the Pythagorean Theorem before Pythagoras (or they at least understood it before formalizing its rules, we know very little of Egyptian mathematics, but they had a very good grasp of geometry and fractions from our surviving sources).
Architecture is another major drive, especially Sacred Architecture. Which means (especially in light of Mayan and Vedic cultures, along with Greek and... Pretty much every ancient culture) that the second primary drive for ancient mathematical progression is Religion. (Will continue in a bit, needs to fix some stuff at home)

>A couple which I think are reasonable was a bicycle in the late Roman Republic. I reckon they would have been able to have made a bicycle. Not with the gears we have, but probably fat little fingered gears that a knotted rope could have slipped between. This could have moved a lot of men more cheaply than horses.
I disagree, even with roman roads bikes would just be too flimsy and intricate. Advancing carts/carriages would make more sense.

>But not technically impossible, right?
It's not that it would be impossible for them to make some kind of "bicycle" but that it would be too expensive/flimsy/inefficient to actually be useful and spread.

>And why didn't the technology spread?
Chance. A great confluence of factors from economic and governmental to religious and everything in-between.
Even today you can see different degrees of acceptance and resources going to different avenues of research and technology for political and religious reasons.

>How much we're ancient societies affected by things like fetal alcohol syndrome or lead poisoning
It was ages before they were even recognized as a thing let alone had a cause identified.
Even just malnutrition had a huge developmental impact for most of humanity for most of history.

Not sure the hell it has to do with my list and I honestly don't care either. Abstract concepts like 0 or having special "letters" for numbers or going decimal aren't something requiring god-know what advances, they are the very foundation of having anything even resembling mathematics.
Nobody literally knows why Babylonians developed their retarded system based on 60, as it made as much sense to people back there as it does today. But somehow it took ages to figure out decimal

Computers. Google Antikythera Mechanism.

The one that always bugged me was Chinese fireworks. How is it that it took them 400+ years to figure out that a self-propelled explosion would be useful in warfare?

bicycles didn't have chains till the 1880's, a little over 60 years since their creation

Then I retract my statements entirely. Reading glasses are now on the birthday list.

ANNALES SMASH!

the fuck is that? Macaroni sushi?

Also not OP, to avoid tarring them with my stupid.

Given some sort of fantastical naturally-occurring gunpowder equivalent, could cultures in the Bronze Age conceivably invent matchlock guns?

The main obstacle to industrialization in ancient Greece or Rome is the same thing that kept the American South from industrializing in the 19th century: plentiful availability of cheap slave labor.

Machines require massive capital investments to initially develop (and even more to actually build), and when you can just get slaves to do the work there just isn't much motive to spend that money.

That one is pretty easy. One, the first primitive bamboo tube fireworks were next to fucking useless as weapons. Between not being able to manufacture proper milled powder, having minimal quality control over the powder you DO produce, using a non-uniform organic as casing, having fuses that were basically string or rolled rags, and lacking any understanding of rocketry whatsoever, they're lucky that they didn't just kill the person deploying them every single time. Second, China has always thought in large numbers. A rocket that sprays a tiny few frags of shrapnel means nothing when your opponent has 80,000 infantry, and the time and resources expended could be better used by arming twenty more peasants with spears. They saw use for exactly what they were useful for -- spooking horses and men, and obscuring the battlefield -- until such time as they could be deployed as weapons with reasonable return. Which they promptly did.

Fountain pens

Oh, you about to get schooled, motherfucker. Mathematical history, do you know it, bitch? Mathematics determines how complex of an infrastructure you can create.
Romans and Greeks had no Zero, and nether did their mathematical ancestors, the Egyptians. Babylon almost had zero, and oh yes, we still use their "retarded" base 60, since we still measure angles the same way they do- 1/360th at a time.
Decimal is not required - sensible notation is. Bablyon had a form of place value notation, Egyptian numbers stood for powers of 10, the Gawilor culture of ancient India is the origin of our modern numbers, and guess what the romans and Greeks had?
Bullshit. The Greeks used their alphabet with a line over it, with no place value notation. The romans had a separate number system, but it so so fucking clunky that it is actually retarded. At least the Babylonians had about 3-4 symbols (but still no true zero).
Romans and Greeks also had a weird system for the symbol values - they basically counted by hands. Symbols for ones, a symbol for five (one hand). Then a symbol for ten (two hands), then fifty (a hand of two hands), then 100 and you see the progression. Most Mediterranean math (except the Egyptians) went by that progression.
Oh, and people still say that the Greeks were the best ancient mathematicians. No, they weren't. No place value, no simplified symbol set, no zero, and no ability to abstract their math from reality. That's the big one, because with no ability to abstract math from what you can see with your direct eyes in the real world, you limit what you can do with it.
Have I got it through your head yet?

This is relevant to my interests. Funnily enough, from a sci-fi "lost tech" perspective, more than OP idea of alternate history.

What I found is that it's surprinsgly difficult to find honest to God examples of "lost tech" like we have in genre fiction.
We have metric fuckloads of "aborted tech" so to speak, tech that wasn't that useful at the time and so kinda died, even if in retrospective seems like it was "just right there" for what in another time or place was an amazing development. China's attempts at a movable type, the steam "tricks" of the greeks, even Incas' supspended bridges (tough actually they didn't really die).
But all that wasn't really something people NEEDED. It's not like a Canticable for Leibowitz's return to the dark ages after nuclear war.
Aside from smaller very specialized tech (damascus swords, hydraulic concrete) even the actual dark didn't mean tech was "lost". Sure, a smith in say England couldn't for his life make something like a roman lorica, but a smith in Byzantium could (they didn't use it anymore but you get my point).
I get that the phone you're reading me on is juuust a tiny bit more complex, but still, the New Dark Ages are trickier than one would think.

Problem with the Bike Legion (which sounds like an awesome band name, if I may say so myself) is the lack of latex for early tires. Without that, even a road optimized is worthless, even if I think a roman smith could make the crank and the chain (I guess in iron? Hope you don't use that when it rains Brutus).
But now goddamit, I want a setting with legionaries on bikes. Seriously.

Amusingly enough I think pasterisation is the only one your average wiseman would say WOAH, that was rad, do it again.
(perhaps the flying shuttle? But didn't that happen when textiles industries were already a thing?)
The other would be interesting but not that life-changing per se. Aside perphaps from the moving type, but even with alphabets it's a not a given at all.

Didn't they do that with rivets? Or well, something? Seriously, I'm sure they could press metal alright, no?

Wasn't the arquebus imported in China after say a century since the handgun? I mean, not that much of waiting time.
Anyway, they DID invent cannons.

I think we can look at this from the opposite perspective and say that gunpowder was probably invented way earlier than it should have been, akin to cars being invented in the middle ages. It was a complete accident that came about when alchemists were searching for the formula for eternal life and people had no idea what to do with it. Had it been created to fill a military need, then I'm sure the creation of weapons would have followed it a lot quicker.

You know what you should probably do OP?

Don't focus on single inventions; try to think about some combinations of "earlier inventions" (inventions per se not terrible early but just a bit) that could spark something greater.

An Iron age with some serious oceanic ships would probably need out of my mind:
a) clinker building (at least in Europe planks couldn't be that safe if they used the carvel method, I think)
b) serious portable astronomic instruments
c) sailing rigging as the way to use the boat (galleys are fine and dandy.. for the mediterrenean)

...and of course reasons to sail the friggin ocean.

That being said, I love roman bikes and the renaissance dirigible. On the subject ot the second, my gut feeling is that you need something like natural naphta to burn, even coal isn't

Okay yes. Fuck iron golems. This shit is going in my setting. STOLEN.

Pykrete is increbibly basic for the characteristics it offers. Water and vegetable fiber turns into something resistant to cannon balls. It would keep only in cold climates, but combined with coal mining and certain microclimate farming methods, you get an inuit/siberian kingdom.

Composite metal cannons could have been invented much earlier.

Sailing against the wind and thus circunventing Africa would have been possible earlier.

The first carbon steel was made some 2000 years ago in Africa. The breakthrough required was mud taken from termite hives for its heat refraction capabilities.
uh.edu/engines/epi385.htm

Optical telegraphs were also more a matter of centralized governments like China or Rome in need than technology.

Timbrel vaulting achieves load bearing arquitecture normally associated with steel.

Many technologies requiring electrical energy today could or were achievable with mechanical and hydraulic power.

Rail wagons/carts don't require steam to be useful. People, animals and sails already give enough power.

notechmagazine.com/2016/10/pigeon-towers-a-low-tech-alternative-to-synthetic-fertilizers.html

www.notechmagazine.com/2009/07/guido-vigevanos-wind-car-1335.html

www.notechmagazine.com/2009/11/floating-citadels-powered-by-wind-and-water-mills.html

Bit of a boring one but I am always baffled that having a clean environment and tools is a relatively new invention when it comes to medicine.

Being fucking simple is also the problem. It takes true genius to create a simple solution. Which leads me to... Gaudi's method of calculating curves for his Cathedral required only cords, weights and gravity, but you must be the good kind of mad to figure out how doing a model upside-down is the answer. I'm not an expert, but wouldn't that technique benefit even megalithic buildings?

D&D magic armors fulfill those needs. I've got a character who's old, so just like Japan develops exoskeletons for their elders, he has armor enchanted to give him more strentgh, endurance etc.

>Freud gets mocked? It's long outdated
Not him, but I get upset when people get stuck on Freud when psychoanalysis itself isn't.

>Pedal-powered paddle boats
cogandgalley.com/2009/10/chinese-paddle-wheel-ships.html

Bronze is a good barrel material, firearm mechanisms can be quite simple (more than crossbows for example). I think your answer is yes.

I've always wanted to see more investigation of the intersection of magic and food production. If you accept the super common trope of magic (wizardly or godly) helping plants grow, creating or transmuting water and creating or removing light, then it would be pretty trivial to grow literally anything literally anywhere, with arbitrarily high yields depending on the cost of expending your magical resources. If magic breaks food scarcity, then you basically jump-start the material conditions for an industrial revolution without having to go through a whole heap of intermediary steps.

I understand how increased food production would allow for civilization taking on a larger scale more quickly, and that would result in more people able to spend their lives thinking instead of growing crops which certainly helps, but otherwise how does it hasten the industrial revolution?

It takes a lot of people on a lot of land to feed not many people in a pre-modern environment. Based on human history, it would be uncontroversial to say that massive increases in farming efficiency are a material precondition for industrialisation of any sort. The technological development cycle for the tools that realised those increases on our particular Earth-like planet took anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 years, depending on where you draw the line between agrarian and pre-agrarian humanity and what part of the world you're in. A whole heap of human ingenuity, not just a little bit, was devoted to getting people fed. If you shortcircuit that cycle to like, what, a few hundred years at most for dedicated and hungry spellcasters to solve the problem, what happens in terms of industrialisation? That's the question I'm asking, I guess. Maybe it's not a very interesting question idk.

Nah, it's cool. I'll admit I'm somewhat motivated by having a setting that should have effective agrarian magic but that I don't really want to be steampunk already.

I hear you, it's a question that I always feel vaguely weird and ill-equipped about tackling because I can't help but feel the resulting society would be basically totally alien to our understanding of societal development, and stuff I come up with just seems so clearly just-so apropos the setting at large.

Don't forget the concept of chemical batteries have been around for a long ass time.

Imagine a civilization that skipped bronze because they ended up dedicating their copper to early electricity.

>Paper/parchment
>Winnowing machine
>Ice house
>Not life-changing
Confirmed you know nothing, Jon Snow

>how does it hasten the industrial revolution
Pretty much ALL early industrial techniques require a guy doing some handiwork. Let's take the textile example.
You need a manpower to build the waterwheel mechanism.
You need a manpower to build the building itself.
You need artisan to have enough students to easily build 20 looms of the early mechanical design
You need dozens of people providing fiber, meaning they are not busy farming crops (both "their" land and the farmers themselves)
You need people who will control the entire operation, meaning 1 person per 4 looms.
Then, assuming you get even most primitive sewing machine, it requires someone to operate it in the first place, meaning you need people to do that.

And having surplus population allows to do all of that at low costs, because they have nothing else to do otherwise. You see, the thing that is rarely talked about about industrialisation is that it requires a fuckhuge and CHEAP manpower to achieve. You need hundreds of easy-to-train, doing-menial-shit workers, since early factories are no different from modern sweat-shops.

Speaking of which - you can't have effective industrialisation without at least semi-efficient education system. You must be sure your workers, or at least foreman, can read and understand instructions. You need a bunch of people doing clerical job. You need your supplier of half-finished product to understand your instructions too.

I don't know why ancient bikes would be so difficult considering the existence of chariots. The ancient Egyptians used suspension systems on chariots which worked off the same principle as a leaf spring. Obviously your ride is not going to be as smooth as modern shocks, but if a chariot is stable enough to shoot arrows from while in motion then it seems like a bicycle capable of not shattering your tailbone is plausible.

>Problem with the Bike Legion (which sounds like an awesome band name, if I may say so myself)

Clearly Roman bike troops need to be called "Velocipedites." It is necessary and good.

>is the lack of latex for early tires. Without that, even a road optimized is worthless, even if I think a roman smith could make the crank and the chain (I guess in iron? Hope you don't use that when it rains Brutus).

Egyptians made flexible chariot wheels out of springy woods (Mulberry IIRC) as part of the overall shock-absorbing system. It's not rubber, but it's not as if nobody knew how to make a wheeled ride less ass-smashing.

Granted, ancient bikes are going to suck compared to modern ones, and for various reasons I sort of doubt they would see widespread military use, but I don't think their existence with Roman-era technology is impossible.

Roman roads are probably not ideal, though. I'd rather ride a boneshaker on bare earth than on those cobbles.

Wood and skins are far, far too heavy for many airship designs, and of the available types of lifting gas available in antiquity, you're pretty much only looking at hot air. We didn't really understand helium or hydrogen or methane or that stuff until a few hundred years ago, and that's not an aspect of the technological timeline that could really be sped up all that much.

This means the big problem is the sheer volume of fuel you would need to carry. Since you'd be relying on hot air or steam, you'd need to have a fire going, and given your available fuel sources that means you're either carrying wood or coal. Either one of those weighs a massive amount for the amount of energy they provide.

I could maybe see gliders being invented in antiquity, but not vessels capable of self-sustained flight.

Didn't they buy it from Europe? I read that Romans exported glass to India, so Chinese merchants must have known about it.

This is an excellent thread, keep going guys.

One thing I'd like to add to the discussion is the Nepalese Lecsó Syndrome, as I call it. See, in Nepal, you have all the ingredients of lecsó (a Hungarian dish, goes well with rice too) but they never came up with it. Couple friends of mine have been there, and the local friends they made cook lecsó now as well.

Moral of the story is, regarding this topic, that for every idea you need someone to think of it, allow him to do that, let him share, experiment, and test, then judge the outcome fairly. You need people with enough sense to be curious and open-minded, and enough social skills to communicate their ideas without creating a hostile environment.

>Romans exported small quantity of glass go India
>Therefore, Chinese should have know it
That's one of the most retarded things I've read in a while.

Do you even Himalaya? Are you at least semi-aware India-China trade was going through FUCKING SOUTH-EAST ASIA OR STEPPES OF THE CENTRAL, meaning fuckload of middlemen? Or did you assume some idiocy in tune of "If Romans with their shit-tier glass-making techniques sold few glass trinkets to Indian merchants, that granted Indians ability to get glass on their own solely by watching it, and thus obviously spread and sold the idea further"?

Other guy already explained it here:

Dude, calm down. Romans traded with India through Sri-Lanka, their main interest there was Chinese silk.

>I don't realise how important and game-changing it is to have an easily accessable, relatively cheap material useful for writing, but in the same time I think ability to print would be useful
So let me get this straight - printing machine would be great invention to have, so you can print things on... thin air?

And just for your retarded ass could realise how important horse collars were - they allow a horse to pull more than EIGHT times bigger load, in the process making them also four times as efficient as oxes. To put that into some perspective - imagine someone today invented a car engine that could travel 100 km on 0.7 litre of petrol. Then tell me with a straigh face that's not a game-changer.

Then come all the agricultural appliances. But first, a minor explaination - harverst is extremely weather sensitive and work-heavy period of maintaining the field, just like sowing. You need a lot of people to do that shit even with semi-modern equipment, or otherwise it will take days, or even weeks, endangering the entire crop with single rain or shit like that.
So let's see
>Scythe
Compared with sickle, that decreases the workload roughtly 5 times, because with single swift sweep of single person, you cut down what would take 4 people to bend down, grab a handful and cut it down. The bending part is going to kill your back after entire day
>TBC

>Continuing
>Agricultural mower
Goes a step ahead of scythe, as it replaces a farmhand with a scythe with a cart that has even in most basic design efficiency of 5 guys chopping down. If done right and with semi-trained pair of workers (one drives, the other operates the mower), it can mow down a field 2 meters wide, 200 meters long (correct me if I'm wrong, but that's around the size of an acre) IN A SINGLE MINUTE. This allows a single guy with his son to operate a 20 ha (or 50 acre) estate ALONE, as long as they have a horse and a horse-pulled mower. Technically it can be even human-pulled, but that would take 4 people to do that.
Now do I really need to explain how this massively speeds things up and allows to decrease the labour required for harvest?
>Seed drill
So you are saying there is a tool that evenly spreads seeds in nice, even way, right after a plough and you can attatch a harrow to it to cover it with soil this instant? Congratulations, a single plowing team of father and son can do a workload of 30 people on their 20ha/50 acres estate! Sowing never was so much fun!
>Winnowing machine
So your daughter can just crank this levar, allowing to continously blow steady current of wind on seeds, instantly separating grain from husks? No need to throw the grain in the air and trying to catch it with the pan? Entire bushel of grain cleaned in 5 minutes rather than 5 hours? Nobody got hurt? All the grain is back in the bag? Sell me 2 of those already!

I see there is no threshing machine on the list, but that's something a "bit' more complex than the rest of those things, and the other user apparently was aiming for really low-tech inventions that took forever to crystalise

... which came to India via land through what is now Afganistan, Turkestan region, Tarim basin, Dzungaria and then finally Gansu corridor in China. Look it up on a map. Then tell us how did Romans and Chinese interact with each other, especially since the entire thing was run by middlemen and was the chief reason why with each trader the price was increasing, until silk from "somewhat expensive" in China was "absurdly expensive, emperor and top elite luxury"

And just because modern-day India and China share a border doesn't make things any easier, as that border is made by the highest mountains on this planet. It's not a coincidence that two absolutely alien cultures exist in such "close" distance.

I have no source on this diet childhood memory, but I swear I saw a program on roman Britain and they had a relatively deep mine with water being 'pumped' out by a series of water wheels essentially running in reverse. Donkey or man powered I think. Stupid inefficient and yeah lack of pump is a problem. Guess that's another thing to add to this list.

*luxury" in Rome

"Deep" for Romans meant 30 meters and only if it was gold or silver - everything else wasn't just worth the hassle.

Even medieval mines were going up to 100 for much "lesser" metals.

So to put this one into some cohensive summary:
Using seed drill you've made your planting much more efficient both in grain use and amount of labor needed (since a single family can tend a field that would require entire village to deal with).
Just using scythes you've made your harvest 5 times more efficient than with sickles. If you jump to mower - around 30 times more efficient than sickles.
And even assuming mowers are expensive, having a single one in a village is still more than enough, as you can harvest two fields a day with just one mower.

And since horses can carry 8 times more shit due to wearing collars, you've just made your land transport 8 times more efficient over any other type of horse harness. Or "just" 4 times more if your land transport was ox-dominated.

If those aren't life-changing, then I don't know what is.

I'm sure they would have known of it, ancient trade was widespread, but I don't think they ever understood or grasped the usefulness of it. And I doubt any trader is gonna be dumb enough to explain how to make the goods he's selling.

Since nobody mentioned it:
Post

Not counting Persian Angarium, nobody organised real, serious post office up until early modern period and it was still bumpy.

Chinese did, since otherwise they would be unable to run their empire.