[sacrosancty]

I have a feeling that a huge amount of common engineering ideas that we all see as common sense, like gears, linkages, pistons, even the wheel, would have been beyond the imagination of most people before they were invented. I'd say we only know them because we've seen them. This other stuff might be common knowledge among specialists in that field, or not.

[akira2501]

That's where I really love James Burke's "Connections" TV series, it somewhat dispels this idea by showing just how interconnected discoveries and inventions were even in a far earlier age. One invention makes a new way of making money possible, this new way of making money comes with entirely new challenges and the capital to solve them. Unsurprisingly people naturally align themselves to solve these problems and capture some of that capital.

The idea of the "lone inventor" is a lovely one.. but I submit that they have not been the majority of force behind much of the invention our world now enjoys. Humanity itself is an iterative process.

[sacrosancty]

Oh, I agree. I'm not saying nobody else would have invented them, but I think you'd have to put some expensive work into inventing even a wheel, not just causally imagine it whenever the need came up like we would do today. A lot of technology is really ingenious but it would surely have been invented by somebody the moment it became economically valuable to do so.

[XorNot]

The Road Not Taken[1] short story tends to stick in my mind because of that. There's a lot of ideas that are extremely obvious once you see them, but without the prompt you might never get there.

[1] https://eyeofmidas.com/scifi/Turtledove_RoadNotTaken.pdf

[ramraj07]

That’s the beauty of technology though. Once someone figures out something, no matter how inexplicable, the mere suggestion of the possibility is enough to propagate a new normal where everyone assumes it’s pedestrianness.

The atom bomb, nuclear power, iPhones , the list is endless indeed.