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by jongjong
373 days ago
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Yeah. TBH I highly doubt the mainstream, condensed narrative of history. The focus is always on individuals; each invention conveniently having just one inventor, one hero... Whereas in reality, it's almost always a group of people sharing ideas and each making progress until one person stumbles upon the incremental improvement which makes the invention finally useful; that person gets all the credit, everyone else is a footnote, you have to dig into the history to actually learn about those other people. When I read serious history books or articles, I'm often shocked to learn about the contributions made by people I'd never heard of previously. When it comes to mainstream narratives, it's 'early bird gets the worm', there is little regard for contribution quality or even quantity. Someone could be doing most of the work, then some random person who's been quietly following that person's work comes along and delivers just the last missing piece; the frosting on the cake, so to speak, and they get the credit for the entire thing. There are only a few cases I can think of where people seem to have a semi-realistic view on invention. Children often ask "who invented the computer?" and they are often disappointed by the answer because, it was so drawn-out (multiple generations), so granular, that you can't even make up an approximate answer. People grasping really hard will utter names like Charles Babbage but then acknowledge that there are a huge number of mathematicians, physicists and engineers behind it. Literally anyone who invented anything related to electricity and material science made a contribution too. It's the reality for most inventions that they materialized quickly within a single generation; this created a race situation and simple people basically agreed on some relatable finish line and then named a winner on that basis. The summary of history is written for simpletons; it's a caricature, it characterizes it in some way but it's also comical. |
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