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Comment by verbify | Hacker News Reader

> some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development

Platus lived 254 – 184 BC. Sundials are from 1500BC. While it's a great quote, it certainly wasn't a new invention when he wrote it.

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Electric cars were invented in 1881 a full 4 years before the first internal combustion car.

Kinda interesting to ask what would have gone different if the infrastructure was in place to make electric cars 'good enough' as far as charging infrastructure.

As I understand it, the core problem back then was the batteries would mass half the car and lose a third of their maximum capacity in just 500 charging cycles.

Back when cars were new, there was no infrastructure for petrol either, that was something you got in tiny quantities from a pharmacy. (The diesel engine can run on vegetable oil, but I don't think Mr Rudolf Diesel himself ever did that?)

Diesel did use peanut oil, though only after someone else showed that it was possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Diesel#Use_of_vegetable...

Nice find, I missed that.

The batteries of the time were far less energy-dense and charged slowly. Lead-acid was the norm for EVs.

Infrastructure requires demand, and energy density and convenience of a contemporary battery versus gas engine means that no one was going to demand batteries when ICE was an option. We only figured the downside much later.

We figured out the effects of carbon dioxide on the atmosphere not a decade after the first working car prototype was build: https://www.rsc.org/images/arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

False equivalence to the white courtesy phone...

Being invented doesn't mean that they became commonly used. Many ancient inventions took thousands of years to rollout and be adopted by the vast majority of humans.

Perhaps, but the quote also doesn't read to me like someone ranting about a new invention, just one that he wished had never been invented. Just like I might find myself occasionally cursing whoever invented the idea of an office building, even though it predates me.

Sure, but is there anything in that quote that suggests it's a reaction to new technology rather than just a rumination on existing technology?

Yep, they definitely could have bought it from Amazon.

The Mediterranean was a tightly connected civilizational region, so if a certain invention was in use anywhere, it would spread at the speed of a sailing ship to the rest of the coast.

Already prior to the rise of the Roman Empire, there was a massive network of Phoenician and Greek colonies that would trade with one another constantly, from Cadiz to the Levant. The sea was a highway to them.

Amazon did not exist, but cunning merchants absolutely did, and they knew how to make money by selling attractive goods.

I don’t really get what this comment is suggesting. It is seemingly sarcastic, because obviously Amazon didn’t exist at the time. But Amazon didn’t invent the concept of long distance trade…

Using a vertical stick to track the sun's position goes back much, much further.

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