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Older Than They Think/Technology: Difference between revisions
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* According to ''The Book Of General Ignorance'' by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, the technological use of the term "bug" existed long before the famous incident in which a moth shorted out a Harvard supercomputer in 1947. The word was used to mean a fault in a piece of machinery as early as the 1800s, and it appeared with that definition in Webster's dictionary in 1934. The moth incident was merely an ironic coincidence that brought the metaphor to life.
* A lot of technological devices are subject to this trope. Possibly the best example is the [[Cell Phone|mobile telephone]]: devices that a modern observer would recognize as such have been in limited use since the 1950s, and the basic idea is much older than that. New tech appearing on the market is less often the result of a new idea and more often a new way to make an old idea economically feasible. Mobile phones hit the general consumer market in the 1980s and 1990s, but the first true mass-market phone that launched the device into the ubiquity it enjoys today was the Nokia 5110 (nicknamed the "brick") launched in 1999. The term "mobile phone" itself was first attested in 1945.
** A wealthy character uses a car phone in a 1960 episode of ''The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour''. (The episode in question concerns Lucy accidentally giving the man an exploding cigar, and then desperately trying to retrieve it before he smokes it.)
** There's a British newspaper cartoon from the 1920s based on the fact that people were predicting mobile phones to become commonplace. Rather incredibly, it accurately predicts the social faux pas of mobile phones going off in awkward moments such as "at the theatre" and "at your wedding"!
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* This happens all the time with computer hardware and software. The mainstream company gets praise for "new ideas" that slightly less known companies came up with. Tabbed browsing in IE7 or Firefox? The very first web browser with a tabbed interface was NetCaptor, which implemented it in 1998. Intel's idea for a dual-core processor? Thank Sun Microsystems for that one. This also has a history of going back to the early days of Microsoft and Apple. The general public has no idea that Douglas Engelbart invented half the things all computers use now (GUI and mice, etc.) back in the 1960s, nor that the Internet began in 1969.
** The first virus that spread via modem was called Creeper and spread over ARPANET (the internet's predecessor) in 1971.
* Though credit for inventing movable-type printing goes to Gutenberg, a German, he probably got the idea from reports coming to him from China. The system caught on better in Europe because of a more manageable alphabet size, as opposed to thousands of glyphs for Chinese.
** The Koreans essentially perfected the system long time before Gutenberg, and used it for the exactly same purpose, while the Chinese usually preferred to carve entire pages for printing.
* Most people aren't aware that the air to air guided missile was first used by the German Luftwaffe in [[WW 2]].
** The first [[wikipedia:Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane|cruise]] [[wikipedia:Kettering Bug|missiles]] were developed by the Americans during [[World War
* The first aircraft carriers saw combat in [[World War
* Everybody knows that the German Me-262 was the first jet fighter to see combat, during [[World War II]]. Fewer people know that Allied jet fighters, British Gloster Meteors, also saw combat, being used to intercept the V-1s. The first American jetfighter, the Bell Airacomet, first flew in 1943, but did not prove fit to see combat.
* The first electrically driven train was first used in the late 1800's.
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** It does take some time with 300 bauds, but it would take even five times longer with the 56-baud protocol that had been in use in telegraphy prior to that. [[wikipedia:Émile Baudot|Émile Baudot]] (from whose name the term "baud" comes from) patented his 56-baud multiplexing teletypewriter in 1874.
* An episode of ''Columbo'' from the 1970s shows a murderer using a VCR as part of his fake alibi. (He's a wealthy technology buff, and one of the few to own such technology at the time. Columbo only figures it out because the guy is arrogant enough to show off his VCR to the detective.)
* The Antikythera Mechanism, an artifact variously described as the world's first clockwork mechanism, first calculator, and first analog computer, was built sometime around 150-100 ''B.C.''.
* M.P.-3 players have been around since 1998, and iPods have been around since 2001, but the [[wikipedia:Kane Kramer|IXI Digital Audio Player]] goes back even further, to 1979.
* Speaking of Apple, their first handheld computer was released in ''1993''. It was a tablet, no less; Apple also coined the phrase "Personal Digital Assistant" in 1992.
* The first submarine was built in 1620 by [[wikipedia:Cornelius Drebbel|Cornelius Drebbel]]. The first use in warfare was in [[The American Revolution]].
** Cornelius' submarine was based on the work of the mathematician [[wikipedia:William Bourne chr(28)mathematicianchr(29)|William Bourne]]. Also, the Turtle (the name of the submarine 'supposedly' used during the Revolutionary War) was a total dud, and never actually did anything, and it was left up to the [[wikipedia:H.L. Hunley|Hunley]] to be the first successful military submarine, albeit at the cost of itself and its crew.
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* Those cool looking machine guns in [[Modern Warfare]] must be pretty high tech, right? Well, The first truly automatic weapon, the Maxim gun, was invented in 1884, and even the most advanced 21st century assault rifle basically works the same way as the Maxim gun. There have been improvements in material, but the method in which they load and fire hasn't changed in 120+ years. Oh, and electrical gun sights? Patented in the year 1900, and used on military aircraft as early as 1918.
** Many gun operations can be attributed to John Moses Browning. For example, the current machine guns (M2, M240, and M249) used in the US military? They stemmed from Browning's designs.
** An assault rifle needs selective fire and a proper cartridge, though. Which was done during WWI and immediately after - Fedorov, 1911, Ribeyrolles M1918, Winchester-Burton. [http://world.guns.ru/assault-e.html Here]'s an overview of the attempts and why full-auto carbines didn't really took until much later.
* Ford is often misattributed as having introduced mass production to automobile manufacture. The company was simply the first to use an assembly line, which it borrowed from meat packing plants; The first mass produced car was the curved dash Olds, which was introduced six years before the formation of Ford Motor Company.
* Multi-stage rockets fitted with explosive warheads, shaped exhausts and delta wing stabilizers? Look no further than Conrad Haas's ''Wie du solt machen gar schöne Rakette, die da von im selber oben hinauff in die hoch faren'' (How can you make very nice Rocket that can travel high and far) written around 1550. Same rockets with chemical, biological and incendiary warheads? See Kazimierz Siemienowicz's ''Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima'' (Great Art of Artillery, part one), published in 1650. The concept was also by no mean obscure, as the latter has been a most popular European artillery handbook for the next two centuries.
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