[HN Gopher] Historical Tech Tree
___________________________________________________________________
Historical Tech Tree
Author : louisfd94
Score : 495 points
Date : 2025-08-07 19:24 UTC (1 days 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)
|
| Edit: oops!
|
| _The Universal Tech Tree_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607 - June 2025 (65
| comments)
| matsemann wrote:
| Someone else found
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607
|
| (A link to an article about how it's made, with 65 comments)
| dang wrote:
| Oh wow, thanks for letting me know! Added above.
| 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.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| having no experience in precision manufacturing and
| metrology... how does one become more precise than input
| tools?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Just some examples: take a string, don't bother to measure
| it, just any length between 1 and two meters or so would
| do. Take a pencil (or a piece of charcoal if you really
| want to go native) and a smooth branch. Stick the branch in
| the ground, tie the string around it so that it can slide
| with little friction and put the pencil in a loop of string
| on the other side. Now use this to create a circle. You
| started off with very rough elements not specifically sized
| for any purpose and ended up with a high precision
| representation of a mathematical concept.
|
| Another: take a bunch of roughly cast metal balls. Put them
| on a sieve and let it vibrate until the balls have all
| passed through the holes in the sieve. Behold: metal
| spheres, so precise that you probably can't really measure
| the degree to which they are not spherical without
| resorting to instruments that you're not supposed to have
| in this scenario. Then sort by weight (which is a proxy for
| size). Now you can make ball bearings.
|
| Yet another example: you can cut a lens for a telescope to
| within ridiculous precision using very primitive methods
| (https://www.instructables.com/Grind-and-Polish-a-
| DobsonianNe... ).
|
| Put another way: it is _always_ possible to increase your
| precision as long as you don 't particularly care about
| absolutes or temperature effects.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The ultimate reference for this is the Foundations of
| Mechanical Accuracy, which is available as a PDF[1], the
| print versions aren't cheap.
|
| One example of precision is the Whitworth 3 plate method
| (invented in the 1830s), with this method, you can make
| surfaces that approach precision in the micron range, if
| necessary.
|
| Leonardo Da Vinici's screw cutting lathe sketches show a
| machine that uses 2 lead screws to generate another, which
| averages the values of the other two screws, using careful
| rotations of threads, etc, it should be possible to use
| this method to work your way up to a uniform precise screw
| where each new generation is better than the ones before
| it.
|
| [1] https://pearl-
| hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| The main way is by averaging error terms toward zero.
|
| For example, Da Vinci's machine cuts the new screw blank in
| the centre of the carriage, which is driven by leadscrews
| on either side. The nuts would have likely been something
| like a wide strip of leather clamped over the screw thread,
| so there's enough compliance to average over a few pitches
| of thread, and the position of the cutter would be close to
| the average of the position set by each leadscrew thread.
|
| Imagine the rough-cut screw threads have a pitch vs
| rotation angle described by p1(th) and p2(th). Running the
| machine then creates a new screw which is nearly a
| duplicate of the drive-screws in the machine but with pitch
| p3(th) = (p1(th) + p2(th))/2. You can make two of these
| screws and swap them for the two leadscrews in the machine
| (it's built to be easy to do this). The random errors from
| a rough-cut screw gradually average out. But the cleverness
| doesn't end there. You then flip one of the screws backward
| end-to-end, so now you're averaging p3(th) with p4(L-th).
| You can also offset th by any amount for either screw by
| offsetting the change-gear and re-clamping the carriage
| nut. Repeating these actions, you gradually can eliminate
| all systematic thread errors from the initial rough-cut
| screws and converge towards cutting a screw with nearly-
| constant pitch.
|
| (It doesn't end there either; there's really a lot of
| flexibility with Da Vinci's design. Changing the gear ratio
| lets you create a fine-pitch thread from a coarse-pitch
| thread, or vise-versa, or cut a multi-start screw by
| rotating the blank 180 degrees or end-over-end).
| mikewarot wrote:
| The traditional way of making a multi-start screw is to
| use a dividing head and rotate the part an appropriate
| angle. If you're working with change gears, choosing a
| gear that's a multiple of the number of starts could
| provide alternate way to do this.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Oh yes, flipping the screw blank end-over-end would be an
| awkward way to do it unless you wanted to make a screw
| with two starts each having opposite errors. Once the
| screws have gotten good enough you wouldn't need to
| bother with things like that.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| Making sure you've seen this youtube channel, which is
| excellent: https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking
| anitil wrote:
| I find this video of theirs the most relevant [0] where they
| go through how to start on a desert island and build a flat
| reference plate using the three plate method and the build up
| from there
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
| geor9e wrote:
| Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably
| invent screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a
| "human thing", but what else would serve the rotational wedging
| purpose in this universe's elements and physics?
| bee_rider wrote:
| It would be funny to think of what might actually be a human
| thing. Like, our arms are quite weird, right? So potentially
| another intelligent species even on a rocky planet might not
| invent throwing spears, right? Even our close relatives, the
| chimpanzees, can't use them well at all. Even fairly flighty
| animals seem to barely have the idea that a creature
| standing, like, tens of feet away from them might be "in
| range."
|
| I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the
| development of melee spears would be, without throwing
| spears.
|
| The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for
| almost all of history, any changes to spears would, I guess,
| make a big difference.
| flexagoon wrote:
| > I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
|
| What "folks at Wikipedia"? Can't you just edit the date
| yourself?
| mikewarot wrote:
| I could, but I just put a note on the "Talk" page, and let
| someone better at editing do it at some future date.
| 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?
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| what's the technological difference between Chinese Writing and
| Western Writing?
|
| why are they separate?
| Qwertious wrote:
| (Not an expert but) Chinese writing is hieroglyphic, wheres
| 'western writing' is phonetic. Western writing has a very
| small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing
| press, whereas hieroglyphics have thousands of characters
| (for thousands of concepts) but aren't fundamentally linked
| to the language like western characters are.
| Nicook wrote:
| this is why Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing are upstream
| of so much.
| Nicook wrote:
| upstream of what? Did you not look for mesopotamian or egyptian
| writing, which predate chinese writing by thousands of years.
| This sounds more like a chinese bias lol.
| 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
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded
| certain cultural-practice-based technologies like
| nixtamalization that made the list.
|
| This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very
| important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to
| contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you
| have to do to corn before eating it.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of
| technology is extremely expansive.
|
| You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally
| edible without and most americans today don't eat
| nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make
| it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally
| complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role
| similar to things like vaccination do for us today. It
| reduced malnutrition and the economic/social/political
| effects of disease. The difference I'm trying to highlight
| is that it probably wasn't _understood_ as such and
| intentionally done for that purpose. Nixtamalization was
| culturally encoded as just what you did. Had they had a
| better understanding of nutrition, they probably would have
| made more intentional efforts to include the missing
| vitamins nixtamalization doesn 't provide. We often see
| signs of those missing nutrients in precolumbian skeletons.
|
| This extends to a surprisingly wide variety of ancient
| technology. Most metallurgy probably wasn't understood in
| the technical sense we think of it today until quite late.
| We see that with early glass, where people simply didn't
| understand what they were doing. Ingredients from specific
| areas would have specific effects, but sometimes didn't for
| reasons no one at the time understood. Craft communities
| would standardize on very specific, ritualized processes
| that simply couldn't be changed because they didn't have a
| good mechanistic understanding of the variables involved.
| One of the downstream effects of this is that poaching
| craftspeople is a viable strategy (they had the specific
| "recipe") and also that resources like sand from specific
| areas in syria and egypt were effectively non-fungible for
| centuries. You had to trade with whoever controlled that
| area even if you had the craftspeople.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Andrew Carnegie wrote that one of the things that gave
| him an advantage over other steel manufacturers was that
| he hired a chemist to test ore for iron content.
|
| By implication, this was something that had never been
| done before.
| Cordiali wrote:
| I just looked it up, and he was born the year after
| Mendeleev, who'd go on to design/arrange the periodic
| table of elements.
|
| I'm guessing they had traditional assaying techniques,
| just with less accuracy than a contemporary chemist.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| I don't think you're right about that. They judged ore,
| as the comment above mentions, by the location it came
| from. They tried standard techniques to process whatever
| ore they had, and if those techniques led to a bad
| result, they considered the ore bad.
|
| Andrew Carnegie discovered that certain "bad" ore was
| that way because its iron content was much higher than
| usual. Secure in the knowledge that this ore was actually
| _better_ than "good" ore, he developed the techniques to
| use it.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Craftsmen having secret recipes isn't quite restricted to
| the past. According to my drummer friends, nobody knew
| how to make cymbals as good as Zildjian's until very,
| very recently.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A lot of tradecraft is in the most literal sense
| tradition, passed from one person to another with no
| other context than 'it works' and 'this is the way it is
| done'. The analogies in the software world are probably
| libraries, design patterns and languages. Each of these
| embody a lot of knowledge without being - usually - very
| explicit about the reasons why they are the way they are.
|
| Researching those reasons requires a lot of work and most
| people just want to get to the result step without
| necessarily understanding why you put the oil in the pan
| before the egg. They're hungry.
| umanwizard wrote:
| On the other hand, it's basically impossible to have large
| organized civilization in Mesoamerica without hominy[1]. So
| should hominy be upstream of anything Mesoamericans
| invented?
|
| 1: For anyone whose Nahuatl is a bit rusty: the English
| word for nixtmalized corn is "hominy".
| rtpg wrote:
| Feel like if you're doing something like this you should just
| basically maximalize your definition. The fun here is seeing
| all the nodes, obviously!
|
| Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the
| dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less
| resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than
| the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
| jacquesm wrote:
| You will end up writing a technology focused complete
| history of the world. That tapestry would be absolutely
| fascinating to be able to navigate and it would also be
| always out of date.
| Balgair wrote:
| Yes it feels very 'male' centric in a way. Like with
| clothing, the various stitches that you need to make
| textiles, each individual stitch method is it's own
| technology. Like, every knot that gets invented, that's a
| technology. Knots and stitches and warp and weft, they can
| only come out of a human mind, they are inventions. But
| trying to find out the dates there, that's nearly impossible
| if the data were recorded even. And then most of those
| textile inventions were done by women who are then again
| historical dark matter even in the best circumstances.
|
| Still, great project and I'd have loved to see it
| crowdsourced like wikipedia.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Metallurgy is by far _the_ most important human technology.
| That 's why "copper", "bronze" and "iron" are used to classify
| ages.
| arethuza wrote:
| Even more than agriculture?
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is no 'most important' human technology. All of it
| interlocks, and usually the prerequisite steps all need to be
| followed before you can progress to the next level. I wonder
| how long it would take given a paper copy of wikipedia
| (hopefully printed on acid free paper) to get back to a
| functional technology society. I'm sure it would go faster
| than the first time around, but I'm not so sure it would be
| less than a few hundred years.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Metal has the fortunate process of durability over
| millenia... we are biased by what we find.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Almost all science is tightly bound with advances in material
| science, often the driving each other in alternating steps like
| interlocking gears. One engine driving those gears is war,
| another is population growth and education.
|
| There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert
| all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing
| progress in materials science as a component now (computer
| derived proofs for instance).
|
| Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem.
| I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I
| realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a
| lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are
| more immediately useful.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even aside from the big advances, look at things like
| clothing in the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has
| changed enormously but so have so many other day-to-day
| things--a lot of which are about electronics but that's
| materials-related as well.
|
| It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have
| invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There
| are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of
| disease and so forth but it's mostly true.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Any post about tech trees sooner or later mentions 'I,
| pencil', so let's get it over with:
|
| https://fee.org/ebooks/i-pencil/
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Unfortunately, a lot of the reasoning behind omissions is that
| we have lost the majority of information; what we learned was
| from luck, inference, and unfortunately (because it produces
| misleading results), selective durability of some items over
| others.
| 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
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Added to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44829170
| now.
| sloww_turtle3 wrote:
| have always wanted something like this! awesome!!
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This version of Sid Meier's Civilization would take ages to play.
| msikora wrote:
| Super Easy Improvement: add thousands separator. It's easy to
| mistake 1,500,000 BC with 150,000 BC.
|
| Also zoom in/out would be super useful!
|
| Great idea though!
| taeric wrote:
| To add to this, anywhere you are showing numbers on a website,
| I'd recommend getting `Intl.NumberFormat` in use as soon as you
| can.
| milst wrote:
| This is awesome. I worked on a 'conversational historical
| timeline generator' a little bit ago: https://timeline-of-
| everything.milst.dev/
|
| I wonder if something similar could be added here where I say
| something like "what's the most important descendant of x" and it
| would bring me to that tech and give me a little explanation of
| why
| anotherpaulg wrote:
| If you like this then you will probably enjoy the book How to
| Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time
| Traveler by cartoonist and computer-scientist Ryan North.
|
| https://www.howtoinventeverything.com/
| jeff_lee wrote:
| A tech tree without metallurgy roots is like building a spaceship
| with no screwdriver--looks cool, but it's gonna fall apart fast.
| geor9e wrote:
| This 2D map is hard to explore since it's so sparse. I have to
| follow lines to find each thing, since it's 99% empty void. Is
| there a snap to next item hotkey? Am I just doing it wrong?
| benzayb wrote:
| Cool. So when was the nail cutter/clipper invented?
| umanwizard wrote:
| Genuine question: how does it make sense that both bread and
| alcohol fermentation were invented before the domestication of
| any grain? Were people making bread (and beer!) with gathered
| seeds?
| dmurray wrote:
| Wine is much easier than beer, because ripe fruit will ferment
| on it's own. Even wild animals get drunk sometimes; it's
| sometimes said that wine was discovered but beer was invented.
|
| So alcohol without any grain is easy, but I don't know the
| answer for beer. On the other hand, why would you domesticate
| grain unless you already knew you could turn it into beer or
| bread?
| Qwertious wrote:
| Grain can be turned into porridge (so basically just soaked)
| and eaten, bread and beer is optional. In fact, IIRC
| classical-era armies would eat their grain as porridge
| instead of spending hours in camp baking it into bread. For
| obvious reasons.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Somewhat tangential, but can anyone explain or give any insight
| into how candles were invented? This has always puzzled me. The
| idea that if you put a piece of string in some wax, and light it
| on fire, the string will get hot enough to melt wax, and the
| molten wax will be sucked into it by capillary action, and burn,
| before the string itself burns, seems _very_ counterintuitive and
| hard to come up with before a modern understanding of chemistry
| and physics. And yet, candles have apparently existed since 700
| BC. How?
| drcode wrote:
| Pure speculation, but I would guess people first mixed wax and
| lamp oil in different ways to still get the burning effect of
| oil, with less of the cost of the oil, then added a wick to
| help light the oil/wax.
|
| Then eventually that product morphed over time to the point
| where they realized the oil wasn't actually a necessary
| component
| umanwizard wrote:
| Good idea, it sounds plausible! But it still leaves open the
| question of how oil lamps were invented. How did someone
| figure out that a wick would be helpful?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Rope was around long before the wick. It seems conceivable
| that rope shavings or pieces or old rope were an easy way
| to start a fire.
|
| This was then used with oil to make an even better fire
| starter or means of transferring fire. Eventually someone
| realises that a rope soaking in oil is easily lit and
| sustains a flame.
| dmurray wrote:
| Before wicks, how do you burn oil? It's not easy to just
| ignite a bucket of lamp oil (putting aside what you might
| make the bucket out of). Probably you soak other fuel like
| wood or rags in the oil and burn the result. It's not a
| huge step from there to accidentally find out that you can
| make do with one piece of wood or cloth or string for a lot
| of oil, assuming you have something to put the oil in.
| Qwertious wrote:
| 1. Someone dips a rope in flammable oil before lighting it,
| and sees that it's quite flammable. 2. Some other time,
| someone tries to use a rope dipped in flammable oil as a
| fuse to trigger the lighting of the oil once it burns back
| to the oil 3. They notice that the fuse keeps burning but
| doesn't burn back - in other words, the wicking effect 4.
| They shorten the rope and reshape the pot, and that's an
| oil lamp.
| slightwinder wrote:
| The first oil-lamps were basically a bowl with animal-fat
| and plant parts as wick. It's not hard to imagine how ten
| thousands years ago a hunting tribe could discover such a
| device by accident or on purpose.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Because the people from 700 BC were just as smart as we are.
| Observing the world around you is one of the best sources for
| ideas and there are predecessors to 'real' candles that must
| have fertilized the ground for the discovery. For instance, a
| stick dipped in rendered fat could serve as a torch. Not quite
| a candle but a significant step on the way there.
| cocodill wrote:
| So, when's the flight to Alpha Centauri?
| kubanczyk wrote:
| I'd prefer we only ever produced chariots and set tax to 90%.
| mattlondon wrote:
| A way to zoom in and out would be very handy. On mobile it is
| pretty difficult to use as you need to scroll past vast empty
| spaces.
|
| Pretty cool though and I learnt a thing or two. Thanks
| fHr wrote:
| Very cool, cheers!
| boltzmann_ wrote:
| Most comments here seems to be historical complaints. But I love
| this!)
| cluckindan wrote:
| Tobacco and alcohol are included, but there is no mention of
| other botanical or mycological developments outside food
| production. Those would be an interesting addition.
| cobbzilla wrote:
| This is truly amazing. I love it!
|
| Found a minor nit -- the entry for "shoe" is at 3500 BCE and
| links to the Wikipedia article for "sandal". But the Wikipedia
| article for "shoe" [1] indicates that the earliest shoes
| (apparently not sandals) were worn around 7000-8000 BCE.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe
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