In particular, I'm thinking of textiles and agriculture. It's no coincidence that both were prime targets of industrial mechanization, occupying a huge proportion of all human labor.
But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
I think I've seen pictures of this type of thing for use with irrigation channels: like a giant spoon that pivots on a post, with a weight opposite the bowl. Still unclear how the return motion with no water isn't just as hard as lifting water with no counterbalance.
Here it is, the shadoof! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof
Doesn't seem to explain though. "The bucket can be lowered by the operator using their own weight to push it down; the counterweight then raises the full bucket without effort." So then, raise the water using your own weight, don't bother with the counterweight? Oh, I suppose the point is to have a bucket of water conveniently stationary at shoulder height, but held only tenuously in place when it's empty in the depths of a well, rather than the other way round. Right.
Cordage can be a force-multiplier as well, in addition to what others have said about pulleys and slings. One could tie many strings/ropes to a tree or animal and pull with multiples of a singular force.
Had a similar experience with SQL e.g. I finished a 3 hour exam in <45 minutes for a DB class in grad school.
I've always wondered if the "3d modeling" aspect of both skills overlapped and why this was easy for me (I once tested very highly in mental 3d rotation skills on an aptitude test so maybe?)
I discovered a plant near where I live which has really strong, thin, long leaves and I started twisting them together and it makes strong, shiny green twine. I made a 3 meter long twine and then wove it into a tiny basket.
It works with only 2 strands and you can do it by yourself without any tools; just your fingers. Though I found some 3D printed plastic parts online which have a component which looks eerily similar to the one in the article.
> Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from lifting objects into the air to whaling or modern bridges. So how was rope developed and what were the big breakthroughs in its history? On this episode, we speak with Tim Queeney, the author of 'Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization.' He walks us through the history of the technology, and its ongoing evolution, including how it might one day allow us to build elevators into outer space.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JThQIaluXPg
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-the-invention-of-r...
* https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PWgwDb3lHUJFBOUDln5yN
* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-the-invention-of-rope-gav...
Schooner Association interview:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4n92rHkXzA
Interviewee / author:
Spinning Jenny? Yeah, that's complex enough that it couldn't have appeared much sooner. I'm not sure if the cotton gin would have been possible sooner or not.
Suppose someone leads with: "I'm investing in new technological improvements to my farm". Most people are going to think that means robots, GPS tractors, or special pesticides... Rather than a new procedure allows legumes to be planted more-densely and harvested more quickly. So even when the context is literally a farm, somehow "technology" means electronics/genetics/chemistry rather than agronomics.
Give the average person a booklet with an algorithm for toxic-vs-edible mushrooms developed over generations of careful study and experiment. "Is it technology?" Probably only once you port it to a minimally interactive phone-app.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing.
Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.
Technology is generally considered to be something that is invented: there's a debate in whether language is invented/created or whether it is innate to humans (you wouldn't say sight or hearing are technologies).
Also a debate on whether math is created/invented or discovered (IMHO hard to argue that pi (π) is invented).
“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology
> Reputation is a technology. We solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning one-shot games, in which people literally take the money and run, and turn them into repeated games, in which people have an incentive to behave well in this period so that you will trust them next period, and so on, into the future.
* Paul Krugman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s
There's a channel on YouTube where the guy demonstrates how they might have built Stone Henge and the Egyptian pyramids using only technology that they would have at the time
kqr•1d ago
With some sort of pulley, rope allows a single human to excert large amounts of force trough leverage, often in ways more convenient than other forms of mechanical leverage. (Such as actual levers.)
Rope can also be used for 1:1 power transfer.
Honali•22h ago
kqr•20h ago
The wheel is overrated. It isn't that innovative (having been invented many times throughout history by various cultures) and to be properly useful it needs environmental adaptations. Controlled fire is neither under- nor overrated, I think.
lukeify•20h ago
One has to wonder how many times they had to be a conceptual leap too. Rope could've been "invented" hundreds of times over the last 100,000 years, depending on how lossy knowledge was.
dotancohen•19h ago
bjourne•17h ago
sokoloff•16h ago
Surely, if ancient humans could understand and then predict the seasonal movement of the stars to plan agriculture, they'd be able to work out that there is a linkage between sex and pregnancy.
mrguyorama•13h ago
Pottery.
Can't have soup without pottery. (nit: you can use some sort of leaf bowl but like, eh)
MengerSponge•6h ago
Indeed, we've largely missed the point of the "David and Goliath" story. David rolled up to a sword fight with a handgun.