@doctorow (Cory Doctorow) posted a new topic, subject "Great ideas that changed the world, and the people they rode in on". It read:

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So @jhbadger (Jonathan Badger) replied

    > Obviously, it wasn't that human beings had suddenly become smarter, or innately more inclined to think about lightbulbs: it was that an entire network of ideas from seemingly unrelated research -- materials science, electricity, the understanding of vacuums -- had come together to make the lightbulb thinkable for the first time. Each of those ideas originated in a human mind, but the constellation they formed had a kind of life of its own, just as the ideology of social conservatism has a kind of life of its own in American society.
    
    Which is worth thinking about as we enter another Nobel season starting tomorrow. Scientific ideas originate from a large number of contributors and are limited by the available technology to detect phenomena, and yet Nobel Prizes can only be given to at most three people.
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To which @shaddack (Thomas Shaddack) replied

    The idea of a lightbulb must have been obvious to anyone who ever used way too thin wire for way too high current…
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To which @thaumatechnicia (Paul Renault) replied

    shaddack:
    
    > The idea of a lightbulb must have been obvious to anyone who ever used way too thin wire for way too high current…
    
    Ahem: The idea of a lightbulb must have been obvious to any ~~one~~ _smart person_ who ever used way too thin wire for way too high current…
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To which @Willondon (Willondon) replied

    Or if the current was just a bit too high, the toaster.
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So @nixiebunny (David Forbes) replied

    Once an idea is close to realization, there's a mad dash to implement it. Not only have many major inventions been contested in the patent courts for years, but every technologically adept country has its own story of the invention of big items (automobile, telephone, television, computer), involving local players.
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@miasm replied

    Ladies and germs, I give you the ‘Zeitgeist'.
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Then @nixiebunny (David Forbes) said

    Curiously, even a “mad dash” of invention is still only a few dozen groups of people worldwide. They end up defining the Zeitgeist of the following decade.
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So @miasm replied

    Perhaps I should have said ‘nascent' first but I think the concept holds enough water on its own.
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So @shaddack (Thomas Shaddack) replied

    Willondon:
    
    > Or if the current was just a bit too high, the toaster.
    
    That's for thicker wires, too. (Or a space heater.) Lots of power needed for heating, way more than for lighting. A kilowatt space heater is not much, a kilowatt of light even with a lousy lightbulb is close to stop it stop it my eyes.
    
    For thin wires and way much current, it may lead to a photoflash. (Those bulbs with magnesium wire, electrically ignited.)
    
    And for very thin wires and WAY too much current, the EBW.
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After which, @shaddack (Thomas Shaddack) added

    nixiebunny:
    
    > Curiously, even a “mad dash” of invention is still only a few dozen groups of people worldwide.
    
    That's what I consider kind of scary.
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@nixiebunny (David Forbes) replied

    I find interesting the relationship between the invention itself and the Zeitgeist. For example, the invention of rockets to carry bombs between countries during WWII led to a lot of science fiction for the next 20 years of rockets carrying humans to other worlds. Then that became a reality (sorta) with the massively-funded “invention” of human spaceflight and the Apollo moon landings. Then the sci-fi about traveling to the moon changed quite a bit.
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So @nixiebunny (David Forbes) replied

    Another thing about inventions is that when a big powerful country like the USA does NOT invent something, it works very hard to convince its citizens that it DID invent it.
    
    Alan Turing and Conrad Zuse were the people who are considered the primary inventors of the computer… a Brit and a German. ENIAC was not a general-purpose computer, it was an electronic adding machine, designed to run artillery firing calculations. Yet who gets the credit in the USA? Those Eckert and Mauchly guys, who Turing dragged kicking and screaming into the world of symbolic computing.
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After which, @KutulhuMythos (Kutulhu Mythos) added

    “It's steam engines when it's steam engine time.” - Charles Fort
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So @miasm replied

    Does that really happen?  
    Oh, wait. I'm Scottish.
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To which @Brainspore (Tim) replied

    I recently watched the episode of the rebooted “Cosmos” series that discussed Dr. Clair Patterson and his groundbreaking research on lead, which (among other things) made him the first person to learn the age of the earth. There was a nice sequence in the animated dramatization of Patterson making the final adjustments to his equipment after years of painstaking work. As he gathers the final measurements, he whispers humble “thank yous” to the scientists over the centuries whose work made his discovery possible.
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To which @shaddack (Thomas Shaddack) replied

    nixiebunny:
    
    > Another thing about inventions is that when a big powerful country like the USA does NOT invent something, it works very hard to convince its citizens that it DID invent it.
    
    Oh, the Russians-invented-everything jokes during the Soviet Bloc era!
    
    One was along the lines that because there were no wires found in the archaeology digs there, they had wireless communication long ago.
    
    Another was about the inventor of telephone - the great Telefon Telefonovich Telefonov. Who put one end of wire to his ear and the other up his ass and heard shit.
    
    And so on…
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To which @Willondon (Willondon) replied

    There's also the trope that the ancient Chinese invented everything. I'm sure it has its adherents among the Chinese, but I'm familiar with it only in Western culture, which I find curious.
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To which @SmashMartian (Smash Martian) replied

    Tropes that a culture invented everything? Indian.
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@crenquis (Cary) replied

    Ah, but it took generations for a truly enlightened individual to come along and create the Jesus toaster.  
    
    
    The-Jesus-Toaster-Detail.jpg620×620 72.2 KB
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After which, @shaddack (Thomas Shaddack) added

    Greeks, anyone?
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Then @TheRizz (The Rizz) said

    nixiebunny:
    
    > Alan Turing and Conrad Zuse were the people who are considered the primary inventors of the computer… a Brit and a German. […] Yet who gets the credit in the USA? Those Eckert and Mauchly guys, who Turing dragged kicking and screaming into the world of symbolic computing.
    
    I'm from the USA, and Alan Turing was not only mentioned in my classes as one of the creators of the computer, but is the only one of the four names you gave that I even recognize.
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After which, @Glitch (TheGlitchEcliptic) added

    To be fair, most advanced ancient cultures invented things, and often those things were very similar or at least based on the same priniciples as much more modern inventions.
    
    For example, if you hear the phrase “lots of concrete” you might think of modern day Los Angeles or New York City, but it applied just as well to Ancient Rome. And while “ballistics” sounds decidedly modern and conjures up notions of bullets and guns, there was quite a lot of ancient “ballistics” research put into improving the designs of arrows, spears, seige weaponry, and the like.
    
    The Chinese _**did**_ invent a lot of very clever things, and made use of them in ways very similar to our modern technologies. If the trope has a flaw, it's in the fact that it focuses solely on China when pretty much every ancient culture of any substance was about equally as inventive.
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Then @SmashMartian (Smash Martian) said

    shaddack:
    
    > Greeks, anyone?
    
    Plato? Indian. Guru, big beard, wore a dhoti. Indian.
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After which, @jhbadger (Jonathan Badger) added

    Turing's Colossus was technically first, but is kind of irrelevant in the development of computers because it was kept classified by the UK until the 1970s. Modern stored program computers evolved from von Neuman's EDVAC (US; 1946) and Wilke's EDSAC (UK; 1949), which (unlike ENIAC) were in fact general stored program computers.
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@doctorow (Cory Doctorow) replied

    This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
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