I will be deleting this post in a short while, but I wanted to be sure that everyone was aware that if it weren’t for the hard work and determination of one:
/u/JohnnyCanuck
-this error in historical accuracy would have been forced upon millions of lemmy users.
So, as a result of their firm belief that all showerthoughts must be historically accurate and factually correct, as mentioned, it will be removed.
One can only shudder to think on the devastation caused by such a glaring oversight…
The consequences would be devastating.
You’re talking about several different technologies when you say “fireworks”. You need a powder that’s safe to handle, a barrel that’s strong enough to contain the explosion, an ignition system, and a projectile that does some kind of damage.
It was an amusing thought. Not a college thesis.
10th century starts at 900 CE, so you’re actually talking about 1100 years from 200 BCE.
However, you’re also using a very loose definition of fireworks. They (the Han dynasty) were throwing bamboo tubes into fire to make them go BANG in 200 BCE. Those weren’t even related (most likely) to the invention of gunpowder. The best theories suggest alchemist were looking for the elixir of life when they stumbled on something pretty flammable.
Gunpowder in a reasonably effective form wasn’t invented until about 800 CE (9th century) by the Tang dynasty. That was refined for the next 100 years to be more effective and around 900CE they got close to what we have today. They (the Song dynasty) used it pretty much immediately to make weapons (fire arrows).
It was an amusing thought. Not a college thesis.
Oh I didn’t realize you had the dates of firework and firearm inventions memorized, I figured you had been looking something up.
In any case, you can consider my comment directed at anyone else who comes along and thinks that people didn’t use gunpowder for killing people for over a millenia after it was invented, based on reading your post.
I’ll tell you what. I’ll go ahead and remove the post.
But with respect to your diligent policing of its glaring historical inaccuracies and your astute correction of the historical timelines of fireworks, I’ll go ahead and leave it up for a little while so everyone can see the fantastic job you’re doing in keeping this little section of lemmy historically accurate.
Do be sure to correct the rest of the posts here and let them know you’re the new badge in town.
Finally, I have nothing to offer in appeasement aside from my most sincerest of apologies. I was not thinking ahead of time when I assumed that a whimsical shower thought was worth sharing with people.
EDIT: updated the original post to commemorate your hard work. Again, I’ll delete it after a short time to ensure everyone can see your efforts weren’t wasted.
Look I’m sorry, i wasn’t meaning to upset you with my original comment. But I also wasn’t the only person to call out the inaccuracies.
I’m not in the least bit upset. I just didn’t know a whimsical thought would end up under such scrutiny- and then used as an example to serve to anyone else foolish enough to believe it.
You got me there, guy! Under the right teacher, most mistakes are only made only once. 😀
Heron of Alexandria invented an ‘almost a steam engine’ in ~40 AD/CE.
He also invented basically early robots, vending machines, and floor pressure activated doors.
They just… did not catch on widely, or were viewed as toys or one-offs.
Again, roughly in the same timeframe ascribed to the life of Christ.
The problem he had is the same problem some scientists face today - forgetting to / being unable to also invent a way to mass produce it.
Pressure doors for example used way more resources and labor than today’s automatic doors.
Vending machines were limited on what they could vend and again, weren’t ready to build.
Not to mention all this type of information back then had to be hand copied, as blueprints &tc didn’t exist either, so any scribe errors would hinder spread further.
Well yes, but, the irony is that, had he gone a bit further with his device, connected it to say, a shaft, and a gear, and then ground millet with it…
Welp, thats how you get an industrial revolution.
Which then lays the ground work for a society to be able to develop mass production.
The aeolipile wasn’t really a stream engine. I’ve played with modern versions, and you can stop the spin with your hand. Not a bare hand mind, because it’s rather hot. But a cloth or a glove is fine.
These toys have zero power to do any useful work.
This is why an actual steam engine uses a reciprocating piston. Because doing it that way builds pressure and thus power.
I’ve enjoyed both sides of the conversation you’ve been having with XeroxCool.
But here, here’s an “alternate tech tree”.
Take aeliopile.
Scale it up a bit, make it out of a bit stronger alloy.
… Fire it with a bellows, or a kiln.
Alexandria? ~40AD?
The Romans were making a crude form of steel for swords.
I think you can fairly easily get that rpm and torque up.
Oh, but the joints, the rotation points will heat up! It will deform!
So have some dudes dousing it with a mixture of olive oil and water fairly regularly.
Shit, set up a plumbing system, do it with the dudes turning Archimedes screws.
… this is the civilization that had construction cranes, invented a self healing form of cement that we literally only figured out the actual recipe for within the last few years.
I think its entirely plausible that if somebody had just managed to nudge this spinning screaming ball just a bit conceptually further, it could have snowballed.
I can stop any household fan with my hand. That doesn’t mean they’re not real machines. Scale of a device has nothing to do with whether it’s design is real or not. Is a mechanical watch not a real machine because Big Ben is so much bigger? Is a motorized bicycle not a real machine because trucks exist? That steam engine is absolutely a steam engine. It uses mechanical principles to induce motion. Being weak doesn’t disqualify it. Alter the jets, raise the temperature, link 10 of them together, whatever and you’ll have something more difficult to stop.
It was a machine, it was not an engine. At no scale could it be used to power anything. And it would actually be dangerous to scale things too much. We know because people tried.
The aeolipile was a toy. And yes, toys can showcase interesting physics. I owned several of them as a child, and own a few today as, arguably, an adult.
Still, the thing about invention is that it isn’t a flash of inspiration and a new thing appears, it’s more of a slog of learning new things and applying old things in new ways.
Most often in history the most striking inventions were new ways of getting the raw resources, or improving the quality of those resources.
You can’t have a steam engine without a way to consistently produce steel.
What’s the minimum torque and power that you use to delineate between toy and machine? What were the specs on the original? Not your desktop toy, but the original.
I just looked it up cause I was curious, and cannons were in-between. Then as industry evolved cannons became smaller and more deadly and eventually turned into personal firearms.
I’d say it wasn’t that long, relatively, to figure out that we could point them at each other. I mean hell, the Chinese used fireworks as weapons like I immediately after inventing them, bringing with them the first flamethrowers.
Stalin’s Organ (Katyusha) ain’t got shit on the Hwach’a:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwacha
I would very much like to know more about Chinese use of ‘fireworks’ as weapons, if you could point me to something on it!
These were fun in Civ III
Korea was fucking broken in Civ3, like, OP broken.
Either that, or their set of civ/leader bonuses or whatever just… really clicked with me.
Fuck.
Got me feeling all: Ancient Drums and Horns
The soundtrack is so good. I listen to it often. I should fire up a new game, might ruin my Christmas holidays though
… one… more… turn…
No but for real, probably actually wait untill XMas is over, haahha!
Bold of you to assume people weren’t stupid enough to aim them at each other for fun before then.
And quickly realizing they could be used for more.
Well, you could have pointed them at people as soon as they were invented 🙃
Then the gun would have been invented in 200 BC. 🤣
Making something that goes boom is easy. Making something that can contain a boom and channel the boom into only one direction is difficult. Quality metallurgy and precision metal work is actually difficult. Making a tube and a projectile that fit each other nicely is very hard to do at scale.
no, you might have a rocket propelled grenade though
True!
No, but rockets were a thing
Now you can kill someone with code…
deploys LLM to convince vulnerable teens to commit suicide
this is percival fredrickstein von musel klossowski de rolo III erasure
