I write historically-inspired fantasy as a hobby, and so enjoy speculating about these things.
For instance.
Photography. We knew about the camera obscura for thousands of years, and Albertus Magnus played with photochemical materials like silver nitrate hundreds of years before Thomas Wedgewood made his proto-photographs.
I genuinely subscribe to the hunch that the shroud of turin was an example of photochemistry that was covered up for the sake of preserving faith-based culture.
https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/orvieto.pdf
>great read
IMPORTANT:
Before this thread derails into wild alt/his/, When I say something "could've been invented earlier" what I generally mean is that the prerequisite technology/fabricated materials were available, and what was lacking were a few small insights and/or the gathering of the prefabricated tech. in one location to be assembled into the new tech.
I think rudimentary photography, with weeks of exposure, like the very earliest photograph, could've been done as early as the middle ages.
>>922170
Don't you have stupid vampire books to write?
>>920641
>Things that could've been invented earlier but weren't
The written word?
>>920641
I think Greeks could have made steam engines. The problem was, for the longest time, clockwork mechanisms all required hand work, because no one wanted to make a precision machine to make precision machines and standard parts to specification, like a milling machine. Instead, parts were made, modified by hand until they fit each other.
>>920641
Flight - gliding at least. Hot air balloons maybe. Granted, maybe they were - I sometimes think that maybe that's the explanation for the Nazca Lines. There wouldn't be any archeological evidence left of balloons made up of treated cloth and wicker.
Of course, there's also the classic, "invented, but not applied" - such as the ever-popular Roman steam engine and Chinese gunpowder.
>>922211
Aren't there hills or something near the Nazca lines from which they could be vaguely surveyed?
Or maybe the Nazca lines were drawn on a flat surface first, subdivided into many smaller pictures, and those smaller pictures marked off and drawn by groups of people on the actual land.
The fuel systems for hot air balloons is too complicated for them to have been invented much earlier, it seems to me, though I will grant that DaVinci's parachutes have had working models made and so probably could've been built pretty early in history.
Imagine the Nazca lines being flown over and surveyed for accuracy with DaVinci parachutes, hahaha.
>>923105
> drawn on a flat surface
I meant drawn on a small, *flat* surface.
While we're at it. I think tabletop RPGs could've been invented at any point in history, especially by the academics and/or leisure class. All it took was the abstract conclusion that entities can be represented with stats and parameters, and pit against each other in an abstract navigable space, given a supplied narrative.
>>922191
Certainly. A lot of it comes down to free time and survival. Humans need free time to invent things, Which is why we walked around in behavioral modernity for ~40.000 years and in anatomical modernity for ~90,000 years, just picking berries and fucking, before it ever occurred to us to encode large ideas into small symbols, so as to shout at those separated from us not in space, but in time.
>>920641
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria
Some things actually were, it was just so far advanced no-one could see a widespread practical use for them
>Steam engine
>Automatic doors
>Programmable automata
>Fire hose
>Windmill
>Vending machine
>Syringe
Not bad for one guy, huh?
>>923149
Yeah, Hero of Alexandria was a badass. I largely started this thread because of stories such as his.
Fire Hose, huh? I didn't know about that one. I brought up the steam engine to another guy in this thread, and I love how he used automatic doors to feign divine influence at temple doors. (even though it's pretty immoral use of tech.)
Here's another one, not much of an invention, but more of a conceptual leap: Scientific disciplines could've been established a lot earlier if Greek philosophers had only taken the time to refine their methodology. A lot of them hit on some really modern insights (Anaximander's flawed theory of evolution and to a lesser extent Democritus's flawed idea of atoms, with some documented research and criticism, could've been refined into something a lot more reasonable and close to reality. Especially the evolutionary theories of Anaximander. Darwin's observations were originally unaided by any insight into genetics or fossil records. He simply traveled and observed animals. Anaximander could have done the same. Not with the same mobility, but you get the point).
