Interesting but I can't deal with the AI generated prose.
Sentences like "This was not a garment for walking between a carriage and a doorway. It was ..." show me no human has proof read or edited the text.
World War II did what it always does to materials technology: it accelerated it by decades.
is a clunker of a sentence. (NB: didn't say 'clanker')
Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.
The first is that the governments were willing to allocate vast amounts of money and resources for the development of new materials that would give them advantages over the opponents.
During normal market conditions, it would have been impossible to secure so much money for research whose results were uncertain to generate financial profits.
The second reason is that during wars the global commerce routes were perturbed, so many materials that normally were cheap and easily available became expensive or impossible to procure, which could block the production or the usage of certain kinds of weapons and military equipment.
Therefore it became necessary to find substitute materials, which was the origin of many research projects, e.g. nylon instead of silk, synthetic elastomers instead of natural rubber, synthetic gasoline instead of gasoline extracted from fossil oil and so on.
It's not just the prose but article's structure that seems to have an AI-suggestive weirdness. Wikipedia's history of the raincoat [1] gives a sort of reasonable narrative of water resistant garment's through the ages. The main is that the Mackintosh and other innovations weren't the start of raincoats but versions of raincoats that arose with mass production. Mass production often doesn't make better things but it can make adequate things available to more people.
Even more, googling the history of waterproof garments, I found a variety of product catalogues and a museum brochure [2] that gave a "history" similar to the article. My guess is these are shallow histories of products (Mackintosh, Gortex, etc) and they all copied each other (manually) and then AI copied the narrative (automatically).
But more than copying the narrative, the article tries to make this haphazard narrative into something more systematic. But there is where the rhetorical structure actually starts to strain.
And the last paragraph about waxed coats is distinctly bizarre: "The waxed cotton coat was not a technical solution. It was a cultural one, a garment that said something about who you were and how you spent your time, that happened to keep you reasonably dry while you were doing it. " In late 19th century Britain, the class system didn't involve anyone signally that they spent time fishing in an open boat (maybe 2020's US has wealthy MAGA type who want to impersonate rawboned sons of toil but that can't be project view back to the past).
And yes, the prose is more jarring the more closely you read the text.
And jeesh, tearing apart a text that was likely automatically generated in the blink of an eye might show defense beats offense these day (and damn, it's hard to avoid these AIism myself). But at least it gives insight into crazy stuff that can even reach the top of hn.
I don't think it was written by AI but rather edited with help of AI.
There are just a few obvious AI lines in the text.
Not great, not terrible but it immediately caught my eye.
Seriously, people are looking for reasons to get offended. Have you read anything written between 1990 and 2023? Plenty of people talk and write like this. Your post adds nothing to this discussion.
Is it war in general that accelerates material technology, or simply WWII .. which is seemingly something that can be applied many times .. just add a dash of WWII to your tech.