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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I’m no expert on the history of invention but I assume there’s some latency where a technology is discovered and it takes time to make it useful. And then that opens up new technologies to be discovered etc.

Something I’m curious about are what technologies sat around a very very long time with no real blocker for discovery. That it was as simple as “nobody thought to do it that way…”

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Fixed-wing flight is one. I remember that being a point in the aviation exhibit at the London Science Museum. Nothing was stopping people from building hang-gliders in at least the Renaissance, maybe earlier? But everyone was fixated on flapping wings.

I think one of the Assassin’s Creed games plays with the idea, having Leonardo build a hang-glider for the main character.

Unpowered gliders tend to need aerofoils which is a pretty advanced concept that took us a while to get right

And took quite a few lives in the process. Early hanggliders were particularly deadly before we understood how to make and pilot them safely.

One of the Wrights' enabling technologies was the powered fan that allowed them to make a wind tunnel to refine the airfoil from barely-functional to fairly-useful. They used a small gasoline engine, which enabled them to construct their wind tunnel on a small independent budget. I suppose you could have done that on an institutional level as early as 1750 with steam engines (or perhaps earlier with water power) but mines and mills and factories weren't particularly interested in the problem.

Like stirrups.

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