Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Or it would be like the SR-71 Blackbird being developed in a time when
all mainstream flight engineers still believed faster than sound flight
was impossible.
Or it would be like someone building a working digital computer and
computing pi to 1000 places on it, *before* Edison announced the
invention of a practical lightbulb.
That's my gut feeling. There have been some mechanical devices that
seem temporally out of sequence, such as the Antikythera device and
Babbage's computer designs. But I can't think of any full-scale
devices based on new physical principles.
The closest I can think of offhand is ancient Iraqi batteries, from
around 2000 years ago, which were probably used for medical purposes.
Of course ancient people did not understand electricity. The
batteries were clay jars with an iron rod surrounded by a copper
cylinder. The electrolyte was probably vinegar, and it produced ~1.1
V. You wonder how they ever discovered it, but that can be said for
countless other ancient discoveries such as steel.
- Jed
