[HN Gopher] Historical Tech Tree
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Historical Tech Tree
Author : louisfd94
Score : 214 points
Date : 2025-08-07 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.historicaltechtree.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.historicaltechtree.com)
| jahewson wrote:
| Cool concept. I'd love a vertical version for mobile.
| theSherwood wrote:
| This site is an absolute gem. Thank you.
| dang wrote:
| Discussed once (and I do mean once):
|
| _Historical Tech Tree_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1
| comment)
| throwanem wrote:
| Beautiful! I wonder if Jimmy Maher's heard about this; he wanted
| something like it for _The Analog Antiquarian_ back ages ago
| before he kicked that off, as a way of reflecting the span of
| history in the structure of the index /TOC, but we never could
| figure out really how to get it to go anywhere we liked. It's a
| surprisingly tricky problem, and this is an impressive
| realization!
| Leary wrote:
| Does anyone know which technology on this tree has the most
| descendents?
| croddin wrote:
| I vibe coded with gpt-5 and the source json
| (https://www.historicaltechtree.com/api/inventions) to get this
| list:
|
| Top 10 inventions by number of direct descendants
|
| 1: High-vacuum tube -- 13
|
| 2: Automobile -- 12
|
| 3: Stored-program computer -- 12
|
| 4: Voltaic pile -- 11
|
| 5: High-pressure steam engine -- 11
|
| 6: Glass blowing -- 10
|
| 7: Papermaking -- 10
|
| 8: Bipolar junction transistor -- 10
|
| 9: Writing (Mesopotamia) -- 9
|
| 10: MOSFET -- 8
| croddin wrote:
| Top 10 by total descendants (direct + indirect)
|
| 1: Control of fire -- 585
|
| 2: Charcoal -- 444
|
| 3: Iron -- 422
|
| 4: Iron smelting and wrought iron -- 419
|
| 5: Ceramic -- 404
|
| 6: Pottery -- 402
|
| 7: Induction coil -- 389
|
| 8: Raft -- 365
|
| 9: Boat -- 363
|
| 10: Alcohol fermentation -- 353
|
| Top 10 by total ancestors (direct + indirect)
|
| 1: Robotaxi -- 253
|
| 2: Moon landing -- 242
|
| 3: Space telescope -- 238
|
| 4: Lidar -- 236
|
| 5: Satellite television -- 231
|
| 6: Space station -- 228
|
| 7: Stealth aircraft -- 228
|
| 8: Reusable spacecraft -- 224
|
| 9: Satellite navigation system -- 224
|
| 10: Communications satellite -- 224
| spawarotti wrote:
| And a related page, in the other direction:
| https://www.futuretimeline.net/
| throwanem wrote:
| In what sense related?
| Evidlo wrote:
| This is cool, but I think the execution is off because there's so
| much empty space. I think it would work better if the nodes were
| much smaller and closer together so you can see more of the graph
| in one screen.
| esafak wrote:
| where is the zoom functionality??
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| No fire, and no knot. Hmmm...
| strongpigeon wrote:
| "Control of Fire" is right under 1000000 BC
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Ok, I'm just bad at search.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Yes there is: "control of fire". No knots, but ropes around
| 50000 BCE.
| abeppu wrote:
| It's interesting that prior to the industrial revolution there
| are still some periods where it seems like innovations arrived
| relatively fast, and others where it was comparatively slow. E.g.
| a lot more entries are in the 500 BCE - 200 BCE period than the
| 200 - 500 range.
| Orbital_Armada wrote:
| Although the idea of a "Dark Age" is mostly debunked these
| days, the slow unraveling of the Western Roman Empire led to a
| real and sustained change in material conditions. Notably,
| population density and urbanization both decreased, along with
| the labor specialization that accompanies them. I'd expect most
| 'inventions' to happen when and where people have the most
| hands on time to make them! (I can't really speak to Indian and
| Chinese civilizations, but they have also had integration and
| disintegration periods)
| mikewarot wrote:
| My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears
| that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was
| off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to
| this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was
| fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was
| also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but
| also screw origination, as it could make new screws more
| accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and
| swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it
| doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't a
| general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Making sure you've seen this youtube channel, which is
| excellent: https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| It's funny that there are so many innovations right now the
| recent part of the chart just has to arbitrarily exclude an
| insane amount of stuff innovation that's happening.
|
| No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of
| vaccine per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since
| 1985. Just amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.
| FredPret wrote:
| Great phrase - fractal improvement. It's kind of the idea of
| this book [0]
|
| Even more cool: commercial progress trails tech. It takes a
| long time for companies to figure out how to turn a new idea or
| a cheaper input into a new product/industry, and then for
| related companies to grow into an economic ecosystem.
|
| So one would expect to see some spectacular economics over the
| next couple of centuries.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-
| Think/dp...
| sizediterable wrote:
| Highly recommend the Dr. Stone anime if you're interested in a
| story with the premise of starting civilization from scratch but
| armed with the sum total of modern human knowledge about science
| and engineering.
| emeraldd wrote:
| I'd also recommend the "How to Make Everything" YouTube
| channel.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic
| premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to
| another planet of humans at a much lower technological level,
| and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue.
|
| I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like
| the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good
| one.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > "competence porn"
|
| See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now
| that I have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I
| very much do _not_ want to search for that term. Lol
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think a similar genre is "humanity fuck yeah" - HFY - so
| you can search for that as well.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I watch this with my daughter and we love it. I love shows with
| "narration", talking about the context/details of things, and
| Dr Stone really nails that (I know the main character isn't
| really a narrator.. but it accomplishes the same thing).
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I second this. It's the only show I've seen making a semi-
| realistic attempt at this (ignoring the absurdity of the
| initial petrification in the first place and Dr. Stone having
| superhuman knowledge of all human inventions)
| vunderba wrote:
| Also, if you want even further back precedent for this kind of
| plot device, I highly recommend reading a Connecticut Yankee in
| King Arthur's court by Mark Twain.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
| andrewmutz wrote:
| These paradox games are getting out of control
| dawnofdusk wrote:
| Pretty cool. Makes me think if we're overdue for another 1960s
| era tech boom?
| Difwif wrote:
| Looking forward to the new Civilization mod that uses this.
| sampton wrote:
| 1760000 BC: StoreTool 3. This is our greatest model yet. You are
| going to love it.
| macote wrote:
| Source code found here : https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-
| tree
| kristopolous wrote:
| https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree/blob/main/src/scr...
| this is kind of how I expected it. Honestly I would have done
| https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ and then parsed it.
|
| Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the
| timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states,
| Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways
| people innovatively organize make things possible that
| otherwise wouldn't be.
|
| The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been
| possible without the complex international institutions that
| orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet
| ... the iphone ...
| mwkaufma wrote:
| I'd expect something things like Chinese Writing to be a big
| upstream dependency, but here it's a terminus. Detecting a
| western-bias in the sourcing.
| ljsprague wrote:
| Such as?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This
| tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances
| in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what
| you might call "basic science".
|
| This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere,
| not depending on any previous technology
| drivers99 wrote:
| They are expecting suggestions for this work in progress.
|
| https://www.historicaltechtree.com/about#contributing
| Akronymus wrote:
| A lot of those things are incremental improvements that build
| onto each other, like refining an alloy by a few % many times
| over to end up with something entirely different.
|
| How would one determine what is sufficiently different to
| deserve a node?
|
| But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority
| of advances.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they
| seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it
| consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-
| practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the
| list.
|
| The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to
| a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to
| textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P.,
| even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very
| different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly
| strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably
| because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to
| represent as technology.
|
| [1] https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-counts-as-a-technology
| fudged71 wrote:
| Its a great start! Bound to have bias and blindspots. It would be
| cool to run an agent that could incrementally enrich this
| knowledge graph. Take some modern day technologies and backtrace
| the components and their development.
| Nition wrote:
| This is really cool but hard to view well on a PC. I'd love to
| have a simplified version of this on a big A2 poster.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I dunno man. Surely this is the sort of thing that it makes sense
| for a _historian_ to do (they don 't tend to like this sort of
| approach).
| justinzollars wrote:
| Reminds me of the tech tree featured in the game Civilization.
| Pretty cool stuff
| fersarr wrote:
| Very cool! Will explore it a bit :)
| narcraft wrote:
| Related: _The Universal Tech Tree_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607
| sloww_turtle3 wrote:
| have always wanted something like this! awesome!!
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This version of Sid Meier's Civilization would take ages to play.
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