Hot answers tagged technology
31
According to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, one of the first steps from a hunter-gatherer society towards civilization is agriculture. While agricultural societies appeared all over the world, the old world had a more suitable environment, especially with regards to the grains and large animals that lived there.
The old world had wheat, which is ...
23
It did exist but no one is sure what it was. The making of such was split between different orders and each only knew how to make the next step in the chain. It was delivered via tubes and could be "thrown" towards the enemy. Some of those were man-portable, other were ship bound. Sometimes, you could find it in jars.
The best guess is that it was a ...
20
Cavalry sabres (a.k.a. Shashkas) were still widely used in the Russian Civil War (1918-1922) and appear in many books on that period. This weapon is primarily associated with Cossacks even though it was standard equipment in the Russian and later Soviet army. The Russian Wikipedia article claims that Shashkas were still used by the cavalry in the Second ...
19
That depends on what you mean by 'socks'.
Hesiod (Greece, ~700 bce) recommends that farmers line their boots with felted wool for extra insulation. That wool layer could be considered the first sock, and it was commonly available to people who weren't particularly rich.
When the Romans invaded northern Europe (ie, Gaul), they started wearing sewn foot ...
12
I believe that the last use of sword in Western military were cavalry sabres used in cavalry charges alongside revolvers. Those were used in the Crimean war and in the USA Civil War. So we are talking mid-19th century. After the USA Civil War automatic rifles made cavalry obsolete (or nearly so) so I do not think you will find any more examples.
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12
Personally, I don't think anything ever went particularly "wrong" with India. They only fell behind the civilizations of Western Europe, not the rest of the world. So the proper question to ask here is what suddenly went right with heretofore backward Europe.
To my mind the answer to this question is clear: The printing press. Nearly overnight Europeans had ...
11
It would be very interesting to see a chart of rate of innovation over time in western civilization.
Of course, this begs the question of what is "innovation". Do you count number of inventions? Do you give more weight to inventions that would have long lasting significance through history? Or ones that may have been less influential but providing a huge ...
11
I'm afraid I know nothing about which pre-Columbian cultures had any metalworking, but I can answer why metallurgy was, in 1492, very rare in the Americas but widespread in Eurasia.
Paraphrasing liberally from Guns, Germs and Steel, which I happen to be reading at the moment, Native American peoples were largely hunter-gatherers. Metalworking, like any ...
11
Quite the contrary as Rodney Stark pointed out in The Victory of Reason - the Catholic church itself promoted most of the societal conditions that allowed the Middle Class to take hold, and in so doing also promote the nurture of science and industry.
Chief among these were personal property rights (stemming from the idea that we were God's stewards) and ...
10
All the mathematical works of Hypatia of Alexandria for example were lost. From the secondary sources we do have, she was an amazing mathematician. Her death could be argued as the end of the classical times and the decent into the Dark Ages...
9
According to wikipedia, Steel has been around since antiquity, but reference to steel weapons can be found in 4th century BC Ibernia, Romans, and in Chinese references during their Warring States era.
The steel that we think of today was originally made East Africa by the Haya people over two eons ago, but wouldn't be rediscovered until the Industrial ...
9
World War One was at the dawn of the modern military age. Military leaders had to adapt to new technologies with new strategies. Near the beginning of the war, soldiers would just stand up out of their trenches and shoot each other. Later, elaborate tactics and new technologies were employed. The battle of Vimy Ridge details the adoption of no less than six ...
9
I'm not an expert but I thought it was a bit uncritical.
Yes it's a popular account but it did have an air of 'here's my theory, here are only examples that support it'
The disease bit works both ways, both sides meeting get exposed to some interesting new diseases. The various medieval plagues came to europe from China, it wasn't only europeans taking ...
8
Computer?
The Antikythera mechanism device for computing eclipses. Nothing much like it appears in history until Charles Babbage created his machines in the 1800's.
The following BBC special further explores the device.
Probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism (Preview)
The Antikythera Mechanism as it is known, is regarded as the ...
8
Printing of images in newspapers use halftones to create the various shades of grey in the photos. The resolution of halftones is given in lines per inch (LPI). For standard newsprint, which is rather porous, the maximum LPI is 85 -- any higher than that, the dots bleed and run together.
This photograph linked to was published in Current Events, the ...
8
Toledo steel is a very good steel, comparable to the best contemporary one. It is based mostly on the content of the material and way of hardening.
Damascus is much better, it is based mostly on the way of smithing - folding, beating, folding again,.. repeat a year every day many times a day. With addings during smithing. The precise receipts are not ...
7
The Wikipedia entry on the book is pretty thorough. Guns, Germs, and Steel is definitely controversial, because Diamond is writing from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, and essentially is arguing that history is if not wholly determined by geography, at least heavily influenced by it.
From the Wikipedia entry:
Guns, Germs and Steel met with ...
7
Greek fire was used by the Byzantines, often on their war boats, as an incendiary to enemy vessels. The formula likely consisted of some mixture of naptha, sulfur, and niter among other compounds. This was basically a Byzantine napalm and was effective at sea because the fire could continue to burn (due to the underlying subtances being highly flammable and ...
7
The Allies never did make a real breakthrough in the West. At the end of the war, they were pushing the German Army back, but never breaking through.
The Germans did, against the Allies, but it's a matter of question whether German offensive practices were better than Allied, or Allied defensive practices were worse than German. Given that the British and ...
7
According to a BBC article, the traffic lights exploded sometime in the evening:
But a month into the project disaster struck. One evening a leaky gas mains resulted in one of the traffic lights exploding in the face of the policeman who was operating them. He was badly burnt.
The project, so enthusiastically greeted, was immediately dropped.
6
The first recorded battle using what is believed to be gunpowder is the siege of Di'an in 1132. Although the weapons are not guns, it is well attested that the Chinese at this time had perfected gunpowder, so it can be assumed that this is what is being used.
Guns appear in China during the 12th and 13th century, the oldest preserved one is from around ...
6
Depends on what you mean by advanced. If you mean in terms of metalworking, the lack of easily exploited tin deposits in the Americas means that a bronze age never took off. There was a copper-working culture surrounding the Great Lakes, and it pre-dated the chalcolithic in the old world by a few thousand years, but this lasted only as long as the accessible ...
6
Well one way to answer would be to just show you some Roman maps. While they are not a perfect as modern maps, I would say that, for Europe at least, they are not bad. Remember that until recent times It was not possible to gauge longitude accurately. So for example, on this map copied in the 15th century from Ptolemy's 150AD work, you can see allot of east ...
6
As all the other answers indicate, there are thousands of such examples. Here are a few more.
The Aeolipile was essentially a steam engine invented at the latest around 1st century CE which was when Hero of Alexandria described it. It has also been mentioned in works possibly dating back to 200 BCE.
The aeolipile consists of a vessel, usually a "simple" ...
6
I've searched the web, and as far as I can see, Heron designed the first steam engine, Savery, a British military engineer received the first patent, Newcoman created it, and Watt improved it. There is nothing about China on the web. (except for the conspiracy websites) Based on the lack of information, I'd say that China didn't invent it.
(I'm going to do ...
6
The premise of your question is false. Here's a brief (and incomplete) list of current jet engine manufacturers:
MTU Aero Engines (Germany)
Jet engines are their main product, usually in conjuction with other manufacturers and/or manufacturing consortiums. They hold 33% of the development share and 30% of the production share of EUROJET Turbo GmbH, 40% of ...
6
While it is difficult to understand what the monks themselves thought on this matter, there is some material on whether they enjoyed their work, were actually put out of work and if there were protests against the printing press due to this.
From: From Gutenberg to the Internet: A Sourcebook on the History of Information Technology, Volume 2 by Jeffrey M. ...
6
Why do the British use rifled barrels? From wikipedia:
"Uniquely among NATO main battle tank armament, the L30A1 is rifled, because the British Army continues to place a premium on the use of high explosive squash head (HESH) rounds in addition to APFSDS armour-piercing rounds. HESH rounds have a longer range (up to 8 kilometres / 5 miles) than APFSDS, and ...
6
There is version he rebuilt himself on display at the German Museum of Technology.
According to mrob.com, he used a base-2 system with 24 bits of data (I'm not sure why the discrepency with those who claim 22. Perhaps its an inadvertent paste from the Z3 line?) with 7 bits for the exponent and 16 for the mantissa (and presumably one bit for sign), which ...
5
Hypatia was killed by order of the Church for being a scientist who dared to believe things that were contrary to Holy Scripture... and so was Giordano Bruno. In between, there were a lot of people killed and documents declared heretic.
Then there is the Index Liborum Prohibitorum - an Index of Prohibited Books - that made scientific texts like Kepeler's ...
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