Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Watt had a model steam engine, with a glass cylinder, but couldn't scale it up in iron or steel. When he tried, there was a gap of up to an inch between the piston and cylinder, he had no way of filling the gap. It was when Wilkinson came along and used his new boring machine to make a precision cylinder that Watt was able to complete his engine. There are a lot of things that had to precede Watt's success.

In the same way, there are a lot of details that tend to get ignored in the Gutenberg as Great Man narrative. They did get enumerated, and it's important to keep those details in mind as they were the decisive factor, and Gutenberg was just the hacker who managed to successfully combine them in an effective manner.

If you’ve not watched it, go find James Burke’s “Connections”. It takes this idea writ large; technology is almost always standing on the backs of giants before you and changing one thing which pushes the ball a bit further forward.

Stable diffusion is a great example.

First Nicola Tesla for electricity, then transistors, then programmable microchips, then operating systems, then video games and because of them GPUs came into existance, them machine learning, then GPUs because more programmable because games required more and more freedom in shaders, then eventually deep learning, and now stable diffusion.

"The right man at the right time makes all the difference."

> just a hacker

He did it, while others did not. So Gutenberg gets the credit.

"We stand on the shoulders of all sorts of people of different heights"

And the model Watt had wasn't the first steam engine. He got his start repairing a steam engine of Newcomen, an inventor who died before Watt was born.

Watt invented the steam engine in a similar way to how Bill Gates invented the computer.

I think that a better analogy would be individual germanium transistors vs. a printed circuit of silicon transistors. Similar principle, but a big leap in practicality.

Connecting the dots is a feat in itself. By your measure, nobody can ever claim to have invented anything because they didn't first create the universe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com