What's the longest gap between when something could have been feasibly invented until it actually arrived?

I was thinking about how a Rubik's cube could have been hand-fashioned in Da Vinci's time out of wooden blocks, or maybe even a thousand years earlier, but we had to wait until 1974 for it.

Or even simpler, a trading card game like Magic the Gathering could have been made as soon as someone figured out how to draw monsters on leaves.

Then I was thinking the "pull my finger" joke is probably only a few hundred years old at most, but could have been invented by early primates.

The hot air balloon, maybe?
I am not sure exactly when it was invented, or by whom, but the basic concept doesn't involve massively advanced tech or anything. So much so that I remember there being speculation that the Nazca had developed them to plan out and later view their huge figures in the desert, despite there being evidence that it was not necessary to have a birds-eye view to construct them and similarly, no reason not to think they were for the enjoyment of their gods rather than the Nazca themselves.

Do you reckon it would have been made of some kind of cloth, or animal bladders? That would be one smelly balloon!

Before you can have MTG, you need the concept of gaming and capitalist artificial scarcity

the most compelling reason that the frisbee took so long to be invented is that no one has ever needed a frisbee and there has never been a shortage of other things that can be thrown back and forth. the same sort of dynamic applies to the hula hoop.

Huge number of sports fall into this category, I would have thought. Virtually any that don't involve a motorised vehicle. This is particularly true of those which are played indoors - the ones which people argue should be regarded merely as "games".

think boaut this a lot with music, recorded music is still a pretty new thing, tens (hundreds?) of thousands of years of tunes tossed into the wind, so many jams we missed out on haha

like there is no way nobody played the riff to smoke on the water til 1971, we've had pipe organs for thousands of years

The principle behind magnetic levitation trains (maglev) was understood and patented in the early 1900s, but the technology was only really tested in the 70s in Japan, Birmingham had an operational low-speed 600m track in the 80s, Shanghai was the first to operate a high-speed commercial maglev in 2004 and it remains the only one to this day. The old dream to connect Tokyo to Nagoya and then Osaka in one hour (Chūō Shinkansen) was originally planned for completion in 2027 and 2037 respectively but the date is now unknown.

You would think 450+ km/h trains would attract more competition and investment, but I guess there must be a paradox there that also explains why we do not fly in supersonic airliners. Concorde planes are now found on display, as if in a museum.

Supersonic planes were gas guzzlers and never profitable.

like there is no way nobody played the riff to smoke on the water til 1971, we've had pipe organs for thousands of years

Yes but it's Ian Paice's drumming that makes the riff, so we had to wait for him to be invented before we could enjoy it.

Astrud Gilberto sang over the Smoke on the Water riff in 1966:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL3woL9D3Xg

re MTG, I'd skimmed over bits of the David Graeber books and there was definitely some kind of meaning attached to shells, trinkets that got traded in pre-colonial/pre-collectible card boom America, with super complex rules of how offended you should be if you got the wrong kind of thing in exchange.

Didn't realize acronyms as an invention were very recent!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHX4HnhffQc

western civilization

gandhismirking.jpg

Gregorian chant existed for a solid thousand years before Enigma realised it would sound better with that Soul II Soul beat underneath it

I’m always astonished at how long ring pulls on drinks cans were invented and until I saw MASH on TV as a kid, had just assumed they’d always been on there. You see the guys opening beer with a ‘church key’.

Tin/can opener - circa 80 years between invention of canning and the invention of the opener.

surely bicycles must have been possible before the industrial revolution! difficult to manufacture, but possible. I'm always hoping archaeologists will unearth an ancient bike

What amazes me about the built-in can opener is that whoever invented the ring pull didn't think to have a small portion of the tab unscored so the pushed-in tab would stay on the can. As a result, for about two decades, there was an incredible amount of litter caused by people throwing their pop-top ring tabs on the ground. I recall as a little kid, having to be careful walking on the concrete grounds surrounding the swimming pool, as otherwise I'd step on a pull tab and cut my feet. Non-removable can tabs are one of the all-time great inventions IMO, and one of those things that seems so obvious it's remarkable how long it took to be invented and to go into production.

It took Jimmy Buffett complaining about that in “Margaritaville” for the problem to be addressed.

(xp) Yes but you could flick the ring pull part with the tab part and potentially have someone's eye out. Why does no-one think of the children?

You would think 450+ km/h trains would attract more competition and investment, but I guess there must be a paradox there that also explains why we do not fly in supersonic airliners. Concorde planes are now found on display, as if in a museum.

― Nabozo, Thursday, October 26, 2023 11:23 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

Part of the reason is diminishing returns to speed.

Let’s say you have a 200km stretch of railway - at 100km/h it takes you two hours to cover it, jump to 200km/h (typical for higher speed rail like the acela in the us or fast trains in the uk) and it now takes an hour.

Move to 300km/h (TGV, bullet trains, proper high speed rail) and it only takes 40 minutes so only a 20 minute saving on your higher speed offering.

At 400km/h it takes half an hour, only saving 10 minutes over high speed rail and 450km/h only gets you another 3mins20s on top of that.

Then you have to deal with physics - air resistant is proportional to the cube of velocity so it takes a lot more energy to go faster. The faster you go the straighter you want your track so that means new infrastructure and technology ( like maglev) and then you have something that is incompatible and isolated from your existing infrastructure.

Increasingly small increments of time gained cost more and more to achieve.

Astrud Gilberto sang over the Smoke on the Water riff in 1966

which is a cover of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xokONwQUa6M

I'm always fascinated by the idea that steam turbines were being conceived in some form as far back as 30 BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

Me too - there's a fantastic multipart article starting here: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-why-wasnt-the-steam - one major point is that effective steam engines use the condensing power of steam, not the expansive power that those very early engines demonstrate.

"Do you reckon [the hot air balloon] would have been made of some kind of cloth, or animal bladders? That would be one smelly balloon!"

If I had been alive ten thousand years ago I would have dismissed the concept of hot air balloons, because cows are full of gas, and they have multiple stomachs, but they don't fly. They're far too heavy.

In fact methane is naturally lighter than air. And it's heated to the body temperature of the cow. So it's doubly lifty. But cows don't blow away when there's a breeze. They are rock solid.

Which raises the question of whether there's a planet in the universe, slightly smaller than Earth, with thinner, lighter cows that have proportionally larger stomachs, and those stomachs are under pressure, and they contain pressurised heated methane... and those cows float through the air. And on that planet people don't ride horses, they fly cows. That planet's equivalent of Thor Heyerdahl bypassed rafts entirely in favour of gaseous cows.

On a more sensible level this is the kind of thing James Burke - he's still alive! - might know about. I was going to suggest the printing press, but movable type didn't succeed just because it was a clever idea, it took off because it was economically sustainable, because there was a market for books. There are probably lots of things that were invented a long time ago, but there was no mass market for them, and they died off until they were re-invented.

man, imagine if they had bicycles in the roman empire. All these huge armies on bicycles.

like there is no way nobody played the riff to smoke on the water til 1971, we've had pipe organs for thousands of years

I am loving the responses to this. I didn't know about them. Post more originals of well-known riffs!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLUaQwhZ8NE