Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The historical figure that strikes me as "most likely to be a time traveller" is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was accidentally killed during the war. The Romans wanted to capture him and use him for their own purposes. It's possible that could have changed history quite a bit.
Heron of Alexandria is another candidate that gets a lot of space in that book. He invented the first steam engine way before his time. But also many other insanely elaborate mechanical devices. Including an entirely mechanical little theater, with mechanical puppets and music.
Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest inventor of our time might be applying his work to video game engines.
John Carmack?
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/12/valve_unified_theory.html
Is that what you had in mind?
http://tellmewhyfacts.com/First-Steam-Engine-James-Watt
That doesn't diminish Heron of Alexandria's accomplishments in any way, I highly doubt it was anything else than either an original invention or an independent re-invention.
Super interesting historical figure, right up there with Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci.
I think it also proves how much everyone (the most boot-strappiest included) rely on society and circumstance to provide a favorable environment.
Peter Thiel born 10 years earlier or later probably ends up as a nobody. Maybe successful, but certainly not a billionaire.
The "hellenocentric" narrative can inadvertently contribute to bias against other very nearby civilizations that communicated with them and contributed to the technologies.
There's an interesting text on parabolas called "On burning mirrors" by Diocles which comes to us only through an Arabic translation:
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1065183.files/Too...
I've spent a fair amount of time in video game development and in enterprise software; without a doubt, my experience reflects that creative developers are drawn to video games, whereas the few that found their way elsewhere have a sense of being exotic caged animals.
I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave/captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?
I also read a great theory once (but I can't find it again through google!) that the industrial revolution really required the invention of the cannon first. Building an efficient steam engine in roman times would have been incredibly expensive and dangerous, because of their primitive metal technology. The cannon created a tech race between nations to develop more/better/cheaper/lighter cannons. Which resulted in better metal working tech. Once you can make big pieces of metal that can withstand and direct the pressure created from explosions, steam engines aren't too far away.
But Heron's invention was still useful, and would have been the fastest moving thing ever built up to that time. Perhaps it could have been adapted to military applications, like flinging tons of rocks really fast at high speed?
See in particular episode 6 in the original 1978 series (just going by the summary on Wikipedia).
Interestingly our roads were built with bicycles in mind:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1...
Many similar sources such as:
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/12/the-secret-history-of...
In fact, Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire for his son's tricycle and they were initially used for bicycles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_Dunlop#Pneumatic_t...)
As of the late 19th century, horses consumed about 25% of the grain production of the US. Much of that was to provide drayage of people and goods to and from railroad stations or train yards.
A horse was a major capital investment. And a donkey can't carry all that much weight -- a light adult, perhaps, but only just.
The US horse population in 1915 was 20 million, contrasting with about 100 million people. Keep in mind that most of those horses were in commercial use -- drayage, farm traction (a large combine would be drawn by 40 horses), etc.
Numbers for England/UK are harder to come by, but a Google Answers thread gives 3.3 million for late Victorian Britain, and 14 million in Europe in 1800, the latter against a human population of 203 million.
The typical person, or family, owned zero horses.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=144565
http://www.geohive.com/earth/his_history1.aspx
Though you raise an interesting question: what was ownership of draught animals throughout time, and how did that compare with bicycle sales in, say, the US, England, France, and Germany from 1880 - 1920 or so. Keeping in mind that mass private automobile ownership wasn't really a thing until the 1950s, even in the US.
Europe's coal belt starts in Scotland, runs through England, into France (and a nubbin in northern Spain / Portugal), Germany, and Silesia.
Oddly enough, the first countries to industrialise were, in order, England (which wasn't busily falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders), then (after they'd stopped falling to pieces and/or fighting off invaders) France and Germany. They remain the heart of the European economy, a century and a half later.
The third great set of coal deposits were in the United States, though that was a country that also had tremendous forests, more readily accessed (and frequently local to where energy was needed). Coal consumption didn't exceed wood as a fuel until the 1880s. The US also benefited from oil, and was the world's leading extractor of oil from the 1860s to the 1950s. Having first developed coal, iron, railroads, canals, and steamships, the US could usefully transport that oil from the remote rural regions in which it was found (Titusville, Pennsylvania, Ventura, California, Spindletop, Texas) to the urbanised regions (New York, Philadelphia, Boston) where it was used.
The bootstrapping of technology was itself a really interesting story -- gunpowder, metallurgy, iron, fuels, steel, electricity, and prime movers, most especially diesel and gas turbine engines. See Vaclav Smil (Energy in History) and Manfred Weissenbacher (Sources of Power) for more on this.
(The fourth coal belt is in China.)
Rome and the Mediterranian had a long history of deforestation, going to Egypt and Sumer. The first story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be read as a story of ecological limits and deforestation.
Roman heating systems, hypocausts, had voracious fuel appetites. I'm not finding a solid reference but believe one could consume a ton or more of wood daily. That was imported from distant locations.
Early industrial windmills and water wheels typically produced 10 - 20 kW of power, with perhaps a few thousands throughout Europe, for a total power capacity of a few tens of MW. The power availed by coal and oil is thousands and millions of times this.
U.S. woodfuel consumption wasn't sustainable, and hasn't increased from levels of the late 19th century.
Slave labor is kind of an extreme case of the paradox of thrift. Slaves have no disposable capital and they flood the labor market down to zero. Slavery is like a permanent deflationary spiral. There is just no reason to innovate or invest in anything except conquest and luxuries, which describes most ancient cultures well.
Had the Greeks or Romans abolished slavery and set a minimum wage we might be flying to Proxima Centauri in a fusion rocket starship by now.
It's not so easy to draw firm conclusions from Roman society, because the historical record of that is a little thin. The Nazis employed slave labor, but they had a lot of trouble with sabotage and intentionally shoddy work. Game of Thrones is entirely fiction, and is zero evidence as an "example" of slavery.
From the start of the industrial revolution through about the 1960s, the principle mechanisms were division of labour and application of more energy per worker. There was some automation, but it was largely at a very simple scale -- Jaquard's loom, duplicating patterns on lathes and machining systems, dies (a simple mode for reproducing complex shapes).
But for the most part, what wasn't being substituted for was the worker's skill.
Since the 1960s or so, that's begun changing. Soup-to-nuts factories produce goods with little or no worker intervention. CAD-CAM systems translate design directly to machining.
Automation, in short, replaces the mind of the worker, rather than the muscle.
This also calls to mind the question of just what it is that labour is. I'd consider it a compound factor of production:
1. A prime mover.
2. A complex manipulation system.
3. Skill and processing knowledge.
4. A control system through sensing, processing, feedback, and resulting process management inputs.
Labour-as-muscle has been subject to replacing since the time of draught animals, water, and wind power, though at a vastly greater rate with steam, electrical, and internal-combustion power. The result has largely been an amplification of labour via energy inputs.
Substituting for the information-processing capabilities of labour is another matter. It does mean, however, that increasing amounts of skilled work might be replaceable with a much less-skilled technician. I've seen this trend in the IT world over the past several decades, though there remain points at which greater skills are still in demand.
This makes the viability of coerced labour, including the coerced labour of sweatshops and workhouses, as well as actual prison slave labour, for complex goods, far more viable.
Let that spin your moral compass for a bit.
Not to mention that the parent said "generally".
ps: This is something that distort my perception of the world. Somehow similar to the comma.ai birth, the owner believed the others were caught into a limited view of the world. It's possible that a lot of stuff that we dismiss because we believed in others are "limiting" our existence. But the brownian motion seems unavoidable for now.
It was begun in 1954, and now runs 27 separate volumes, with several more still planned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilization_in_...
Articles like this make me appreciate even more how little difference there is between us and humans thousands of years ago. I wouldn't have figured out how to make a working wheel, and I've seen one. I have no idea where I picked up the idea that "ancient civilizations were dumb", but the more I read, the more I appreciate how little difference there was.
BTW, if you haven't, you should definitely check the "Primitive technology" channel on Youtube.
On another note, I've heard that the first thing you need to fabricate (beyond basic hand tools) is a lathe. Once you have that, you can make a better lathe, which can make various other machine shop tools, etc. until you have a whole workshop created. Although this probably assumes that you still have access to modern (as in the last couple hundred years) materials to work with.
It is information like this that makes you realize how incredibly fragile our civilization's tech stack is. Most of our physical tech stack is read-only executable code: there isn't a civilizational "source code" that shows from first principles how to build up to our current technology layer. For that matter, not even from first principles to turn of the 20th century technology level. We take a most of our tech stack for granted. This would matter if we had a civilization-wide energy crash, so if the catastrophic-scale climate change or oil crash predictions come true then this would be more than a passing interest for just the recreational primitive tech hobbyists.
With a fertility rate of 1.3 among the intelligent (read: technologically capable) peoples of the world, we are far more likely to run out of people to maintain the technology than we are to run out of the energy to power it.
Indeed, if you walk into any utility company or similar, who do you see doing all the work? Middle-aged-to-old working-class white men. What happens when those men retire? Who is going to hold the infrastructure together?
Unlike a civilization-wide energy crash, this is not merely a rhetorical question.
Are you using the number of 1.3 from people with university education in the rich world? It seems a very narrow window through which to view humanity'a 'capable' people, who exist in all shapes and forms, all colours, on all continents, and often arise from deep poverty without any formal education, my grandfather for instance
IQ is substantially heritable. A child's IQ is (more or less) the average of his four grandparents. The IQ of his four grandparents is largely the result of cognitive assortment within a breeding population with a certain mean IQ.
If a population's mean IQ is 70, the percentage of people with an IQ above 130 is 0 (out to four decimal places).
If 85, 0.1%.
If 100, 2.2%.
If 115, 15.9%.
The mean IQ of the white race is about 100. The mean IQ of SS Africans is about 70. The mean IQ of Arabs is about 85. The mean IQ of Chinese is 105 or so. The mean IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 110-115, depending on how you measure it (they are a special case).
There are probably more people possessing IQs of 130 or above in Israel than in all of Africa.
The number 1.3 comes from a rough average of the fertility of the white nations and of the high-end Asian countries, namely Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and to a somewhat lesser extent mainland China.
Unfortunately during a collapse of society you very rarely find hospitable environments. By the time society itself recovers and has the resources to spare everyone who knew of the old world is dead and a lot of the artifacts are ruined or destroyed.
Seed vaults, storing equipment and books in salt mines, etc should prove extremely helpful if such a dire situation arises. It might take a lot longer to rebuild though because there won't be any cheap, easy oil to burn.
The winning strategy so far seems to be duplication, so it's about time we get some colonies on other planets to help ensure continuation of the metaspecies.
Apart from being hilarious and great fun, it's also a suprisingly serious study of just how much technology, and I'm not talking about the modern stuff, is based on a huge pyramid of other skills and technologies which you simply can't leapfrog.
Mild spoilers follow:
Our hero, after being flung back in time to Rome in the year 535, is trying to prevent the fall of the late Roman Empire when it gets conquered by the Byzantines (actually the story's a lot more complex than that, so that's simplified). He tries to reinvent all sort of different pieces of military technology, and fails utterly --- turns out reliable gunpowder is really hard to make. His clocks won't keep time, his lenses aren't round, and he doesn't even both with electricity.
The innovations he eventually ends up successfully introducing? Distilled spirits (a great money-maker!), Arabic notation, double-entry notekeeping, and semaphores.
Sure this is just one example, but it is what comes to mind given TFA's subject matter. Without access to iron-working, I suppose a less durable rim material like e.g. hemp could be used, which would introduce some more complications involved in tightening. If solid rather than spoked wheels were acceptable, an out-of-round wheel on an axle can be marked with a piece of chalk-rock held in place while spinning the wheel, and then abrasive stones can be used to true the wheel to the chalk mark.
That is a rudimentary lathe.
For bonus points I'd give them the decimal number system.
Telescopes and semaphores would get you very far at a fraction of the cost.
Runners, horses, ships moved communications fast enough. Even if you knew ceaser was coming to Rome, transport speed meant you couldnt do much with that. And yes we with hindsight cab cherry pick situations where it would help. But it was not worth cost to create, train and maintain such a system for hundreds if years for the fee.tumes it provided marginal benefit.
In other words most technology is synergistic. It really isn't awesome unless bunch other tech is at sufficient level to exploitmkit
The difference between steam engines is that steam engines were very difficult to build. Semaphore is very simple and a trial system wouldn't be expensive to set up.
The Romans did use crude fire signals, so I think that proves that they would find it useful.
The local HFT community would probably pay for a semaphore system. A lot of money could be made on knowing the outcome of events earlier than others.
On the other hand, "trees are plentiful" probably meant that sight lines were awful. Maybe, a semaphore only becomes feasible after one has cut down most of the trees.
How do you think that held us back? Do you think heliocentrism, which is similarly wrong, has/is holding us back?
As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?
Has a fact been discovered if one person learns of it? Or is it only discovered if the news spreads to all of society? If the latter, then science is a social process, not an individual one.
The historian Fernand Braudel points out that an Italian engineer, wanting to show off his skills, built an automated saw mill in Italy, back during the 1200s. The logs were slotted automatically and run through the mill automatically. This engineer had created an important part of the Industrial Revolution, 500 years early!!! Did it matter? No. The project was merely a demonstration. The abundance of wood was never used. How could it be? There was no system of transportation for the abundance of wood, there was no finance to cover operating expenses, nor any finance to support a building boom that might use the wood, nor any modern labor market from which the mill owner could hire more workers to do the initial cutting of trees, nor was there the modern strictness regarding contracts, nor were commoners allowed to bring civil suits against the nobility (in case of default, supposing a nobleman contracted to have a manor built), nor was the judiciary independent, nor... In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a social process, involving the creation of dozens of important modern institutions, and the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of those institutions. No single engineer, however brilliant, could jump start the process.
Likewise an interest free loan would be permissible, though there wouldn't be great incentives to offer them except to family members, for example.
(It works up to a point, but it's hard to scale. You can emulate a loan contract between two parties, but you can't have a bond market because the "loans" aren't tradeable)
From their perspective the map looks like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples
From their perspective North America is simply yet another settled area.
1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying "achievement unlocked: new continent!" And then run around telling everyone about it.
Yes, European mapmakers did not known about such crossings, but being a very remote area in 1400's they probably never asked. And from an oral history perspective it would not be anything unusual because a 50 mile ocean crossing is just a regular thing to sea going populations.
Also, DNA evidence is going to be sketchy because it's really hard to say if someone migrated 400 years ago vs 600 years ago.
PS: I am not saying this 100% happened, but it seems very likely.
"1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying 'achievement unlocked: new continent!'"
Yes, that is the point that I made above. The people had no idea.
People deeply overestimate the value of any single insight, and largely forget about the dozens of mundane but non-trivial details a successful implementation relies on. Great entrepreneurs understand this and know how to solve enough of those "little problems" to enable a big idea to thrive, and that's the magic of it. Bad ones obsess over the idea itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_Corneliszoon_van_Uitg...
Slightly relevant, what information would you send to the past if you had a phone that could communicate backwards in time? But there's a catch, any idea you send is converted to the closest analogue in ancient times. So if you tell them about the scientific method, they will just think about religion. http://lesswrong.com/lw/h5/archimedess_chronophone/
All that being said, assuming the chronophone will let me, I'd bring their attention to the idea of the printing press. It's easily made, the benefit is obvious, and the effect is dramatic. Kind of amazing it wasn't invented earlier.
As for manufacturing lenses, you can get by without many tools with cunning techniques. Molten glass naturally forms curved shapes and can be polished by fire. Leeuwenhoek made tiny lenses in the 1600s, although no one knows for sure exactly how (he made a point of not sharing) - one technique that's known to work is drawing the glass into a fine thread, snapping the thread, and heating the end so it forms a tiny ball.
This says much more about how we dismiss ancient civilizations as inferior than it does about ancient civilizations themselves.
The fact is, the geocentric model was an excellent one, able to explain all observations at the time in a sensible and straightforward way. Admittedly, more data helped to develop the heliocentric model, but there were valid scientific criticisms against that model at the time. In particular, it took Kepler to provide truly sensible and strong arguments in favor of heliocentrism.
The geocentric model is so good that even today it is often the sensible model to use when thinking about some astronomical problems. I hate to hear it being dismissed as 'wrong' - because from a physical perspective the two are simply geometrical transformations of one another, they are both 'right'. It's simply that one of them is simpler than the other for most problems.
But most of all, I hate hearing people say it 'held back thinking', because I assure you that the people doing the thinking back then were just as capable of doing good, logical, rational thinking as we are today, and didn't need anyone to claim they were too stupid to think critically for themselves about the scientific understanding of the time.
Not really, at least if you want to keep simplicity of Newton's laws which are formulated for inertial reference frames. The reference frame in the heliocentric model is inertial, while in the geocentric one it is not.
Roman legions mounted in bikes could be everywhere. Their roads already were a force multiplier. Combined with being able to feed them and have them not die of disease simple wounds. We'd all be speaking Latin.
We all know, Rome is center of the universe. :)
The Romans had wheels and carts that seemed to work. It doesn't seem like a huge leap to put a human on them.
I wonder the same. If I was suddenly teleported to the middle of a forest, without anything, not even my shoes and clothes, and no chance of any contact with civilization again, what SHOULD my first few tasks even be??
Imagine a modern human, ideal in health and strength and faculties, and immune to disease or aging, teleported butt-naked to a copy of the planet Earth where there never had been any humans — so no chance of radio, or rescue choppers seeing your smoke signals, or finding any technology that you didn't make yourself.
The only thing that person has is a version of Wikipedia in their brain, so they know how everything is built and how nature works.
How long will it take for them to resch current levels of technology, and be able to construct a device like the one you're reading this on? Would two people make a significant difference?
How would you fare in that situation?
Transporting a man and a woman doesn't help much either because there probably wouldn't be sufficient genetic variety to produce a viable species. I think I read you need thousands of humans to do that, and then there's enough spare capacity beyond mere survival to ensure that knowledge gets passed on.
There is a book about all this (a rather depressing book actually): https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/03/knowledge-how-...
Of course the daily grind there is probably food production and medical issues.
1. What are the chances of any us surviving outside of human civilization if all technology was stripped from us, even if we had memorized all of humanity's combined knowledge?
2. How long would it take to replicate current technology from scratch, if all the research was already done for you, and you were basically immortal?
By "from scratch" I mean skipping the creating-the-universe part, just starting without any preexisting tools other than what you may find in nature.
Maintenance is a killer. There comes a point, fairly early in technological development, where it's simply impossible for any single person to keep everything working and still have time to improve on the situation.
That's true for even the most benign of environments. Hana, unfortunately, was stuck in a rather damp jungle.
(And to preempt the possibly inevitable question, find it at https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/song-in-the-fo.... Read if you feel like; I like to think it's cute.)
(In that setting, you can build a very simple machine --- powered by a potato, which actually makes sense in context --- which can take you to a parallel Earth. You can take what you can carry with you; but not iron, which stays behind. Turns out that setting up a society from scratch using only hand tools and brain power is kinda hard.)
It would be an effort, but I think we could retool to bootstrap industry mainly using aluminium and copper alloys (engineering bronzes particularly are great materials). Some titanium and nickel alloys in the mix.
I'm still not sure I want to read the last two. I swore of solo Baxter books after getting burnt by Titan.
Also, I would highly recommend "The Cross Time Engineer" series as it's this same scenario but works through how he's able to apply his modern knowledge as leverage to work up from a boatman earning pennies to running the country.
1 - https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Time-Engineer-Adventures-Conrad...
And vice versa.
We spend most of our time either learning to be a cog in society's machine, or being that cog.
Most of today's cogs are useless in ancient times. "What is this 'full stack' you speak of, stranger?"
Most of the past's cogs are useless today. "So you're good with sticks on wet clay? Cool story bro."
Either stranger could adapt to the times, but they'd be very inefficient because they'd never be fully integrated to the larger machine, having to relearn every interaction that a native just takes for "the way things are."
Strong plastics, probably made such mass production cheap enough.
People rich enough to have wheeled luggage in the past would have just used servants, it's seemingly economics rather than technology that prevented such "inventions" as attaching wheels to things permanently instead of temporarily.
A modicum of googling suggests Templar Knights had wheeled trunks in the 12th Century though.
and a man or boy you paid to push the trolley. Much more civilised.
1) The wheel
2) smooth hard-ish surfaces that are large enough to be worth going anywhere
Without either, the wheel on its own isn't worth much. It turns out roads are a much older, more useful invention without which the wheel doesn't make much sense.
Wheels are good, eg wheelbarrows, on hardened earth of a footpath.
There's also still lots of relatively major roads in undeveloped countries that are not smooth or hardish. http://www.flickriver.com/photos/globalizepeace/3832727846/
I mean, didn't "streets" emerge really from commonly-travelled paths carved by feet and horse hooves and time, and really most non-paved paths are quite fine for most wheels? Perhaps they last longer on pavement, but other than that..
The Roman empire made good use for it with their armies (of course, also for trade) and Roman soldiers were mostly on foot and a few on horses.
The first one will be much bumpier and tiresome than the second for any given speed, and you'll be at a higher risk of injury due to careless step. And the benefit of having a flat surface is greater the more rugged is the terrain that must be crossed. This is why, though the Incas didn't use the wheel, they had roads nonetheless. And the Romans, too, built their own roads mainly for the speedier movement of their armies while on the march.
http://mentalfloss.com/article/62357/who-actually-invented-w...
(A casual Google check will reveal other examples as well)
Also parent article mentions metal tools being needed to bore holes for the shaft. Other methods could do this also... people worked intricately with wood long before metal was used (although metal would certainly speed up mass production.)
As far as roads, you don't really need roads for a wheel to be useful. You just need a flat semi hard surface. People crossed the US in horse drawn wagons without roads. Not sure where the "roads" argument comes from other than, sure, better roads means more wheeled vehicles.
i disagree with this premise based on kevin kelly's simultaneous discovery phenomenon.
The fact that pretty well every invention and discovery you mention has occurred to two different people at possibly the same time. Possibly three. Possibly four. My favorite example of this is the light bulb, which in my part of the world a man named Joseph Swan gets the credit for inventing the light bulb and a terrible fraud called Thomas Edison came along and ripped him off. Well, if I live in Russia, I give the credit to Lodygin, and I'm equally cross with Edison. But actually if you drill down into history, in the 18th century there are 23 people in that decade alone who deserve independent credit for coming up with the idea of the incandescent light bulb. It was an idea ripe to be discovered. It was inevitable that it would be discovered in that decade. And that's true of almost everything. And then of course famously evolution itself, the idea of natural selection occurs to Wallace and Darwin at the same time, and Darwin has to rush into print to prevent himself being preempted. Even relativity--we tend to think of Einstein as unique in coming up with this idea that nobody else, that it took the world by surprise and nobody believed him. Well, that's true, but if you look at what Hendrik Lorentz was doing at the same time, he was well on the trail. He would have got there if Einstein had been run over by a tram. The double helix of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), incredibly important discovery--big race going on to find it. That, the technology had reached the point where we're going to find the genetic code around that time. So, there's a sort of complete dispensability of scientists and inventors that really surprises people when you think about it.
[0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/02/matt_ridley_on_1.ht...
It's something I've been musing on to incorporate into some fiction, inspired by all the recent news and discussions about self-driving cars and the prospect of shared fleets.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_transport
Without wheels or axles, there would be little to no electricity, or maybe it wouldn't have been invented at all.
Well the very nature of the wheel itself probably helped with that - I wonder if that holds true for all transportation-related inventions?
The rig seems to be among the technologies lost during the middle ages.
The big hitch, as noted in James Burke's Connections, was how ships and sailing voyages were financed. A ship was a sufficiently sizeable investment, and financing sufficiently difficult to arrange, that conservative financiers opposed any radical explorations of such tomfoolery as them thar lateen-rigged newfangled boats.
As for other transportation innovations ... there mostly weren't any until quite modern times.
Once introduced, though, their advantages were immediately obvious, and they were adopted quickly throughout Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen
Yes, you saw further advances in ships and navigation. Especially navigation -- position-taking and timekeeping were critical, and several innovations followed catastrophic losses of entire fleets run aground and shipwrecked into the 20th century -- see the Honda Point disaster in which seven US destroyers sailed at full speed into rocks just offshore the Santa Barbara coast in 1923.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Point_disaster
After the Lateen rig and excepting other ship designs, the major transport innovations were canals (major construction from the 1500s onward in Europe, though much earlier in China, and some earlier European/Mediterranean instances), the railroad (1825), steamship (1810s), safety bicycle (1870s), automobile (and truck and bus -- 1880s), and airplane (1900s). These all spread essentially instantly throughout the world wherever industrial capacity (and fuel) capable of producing such vehicles existed.
Just to give a sense for the significance of this (and later steam): ships could spend weeks, or even months, awaiting favourable winds to enter harbour. Improved sailing capabilities were directly beneficial to all aspects of the shipping business.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sail-plan#/media/File%3AShip...
The case raises the question olueand risk of standardisation and institutions. It's one thing to establish proven norms for acting, but if you don't also incorporate some means for trialing new concepts, ventures, ideas, etc., these also make you hidebound. That's part of the problem that seems to have faced China, getting to the question of innovation and the Industrial Revolution (and another HN post).
In the case of industrialisation, lathes, machining tools, standardised fasteners and couplings, all helped bring about mass manufacture. At the same time, they're probably making it harder for some improvements to get out -- say, arguably, Linux as a mass operating system (desktop), or alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard.
Choices where there's not an obviously superior choice, but you have to choose one are even more captivating -- what side of the road do you drive on? Clearly, that's a case where you cannot leave it up to individual volition, where you must determine at the very least a regional or roadway standard, and where simultaneously choosing both options doesn't work.
I really ought to collect a set of standards-of-convention which operate similarly -- instances where a choice must be made but the initial option is arbitrary. Downstream, you end up with path-dependencies, lock-in, sunk-cost, familiarty, network effects, and more.
Hrm....
(Thanks for the offhand question :)
Spinning, water, and grinding wheels all postdate the wheel-and-axel in transportation. It is thought that the transport wheel may have evolved from the potter's wheel.
One of the sources I've been reading (probably Smil or Weissenbacher) looks at the regions in which wheeled vehicles might have originated.
They're generally suspected to have come out of the middle east (or present-day Ukraine / southern Russia), quite possibly being developed from potter's wheels.
Wheeled vehicles don't work in sandy ground because there's too much resistance. Pack animals (horses, camels, donkeys) are far more efficient. The wheel was lost in much of Arabia for a considerable period due to this, and even today, sand tracked and blown across highways is a problem for cars.
On grassy plains, you have the problems of both vegetation and mud / soft soil. On the American prairie, you can still find, a century and a half after their passage, the ruts left by wagon trains rolling across the soil.
Hilly or mountainous country, such as that of the Aztecs and Inca, isn't suitable for wheeled vehicles, especially if your roads have stairs (as Incan roads did). Again, human porters and animals can traverse these.
Even with suitable roads, overland travel was exceptionally slow and expensive in terms of animal power, drovers, and feed required. Ships and canals were vastly more efficient, and remained the best option until the advent of the railroad. Even that required high-quality Bessemer steel (1860s) to provide rails which could handle high loads and were resistant to splitting.