Slashdot Mirror
Pre-20th Century Gadgetery
The Byelorussian Hatter writes "Wired, presumably bored to death of Cellphones, Zunes, MairBook Nacs and what-have-you, looks back at the elegant inventions of a less civilized age. 'The Turk was a chess player concealed in a table packed with cogs and gears, contrived to give the appearance of a mighty chess-playing machine. Atop the table, an articulated automaton would be seen to make the moves determined by the master within. One of the 18th and 19th century's many illustrious hoaxes, the Turk is perhaps the greatest gadget that wasn't.'"
What the heck is this in a list of the greatest gadgets for? Push a button and out comes God (to melt faces)?
After all, I still have yet to welcome our matter to energy and back converting overlords...
Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay about The Turk in 1836 titled "Maelzel's Chess Player".
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
...haven't we seen our fair share of articles and such things mentioning the Turk and Antikythera mechanism already? I propose that this article wins in the dull department--or perhaps it is merely an unidentified form of blog spam disguised as a popular tech magazine!
what era had the most inhuman weapons, the worst of all wars, businesses controlling governments to wage war for resources, the worst dictators with the largest body count and count of maimed for life?
More specifically, from about 600 AD - 1300 AD. Nasty, nasty stuff. No centralized government, nothing like the Red Cross, no medical treatment worthy of the name, travelers slaughtered for their food, the worst plague in history, untold destruction of knowledge and people... all and all, it's not a time I'd like to visit should I ever get a time machine.
In case anyone hasn't put two and two together*, Amazon's Mechanical Turk is named in reference to the chess playing Turk from the article. Amazon's FAQ has more info.
* 5, for large values of two.
It didn't make the list, but was vapourware at the time:
Duke Nukem Forever
How about that one couple thousand year old computer/clock/astronomical/big gear thing that I read about on slashdot like a year ago. That thing was pretty bad ass lol. Did they ever find out what that thing did? Was it compatible with the Divx codec?
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
but i do know what it is not
and what it is not is an hour spent clicking wikipedia links and writing a 6th grade level report
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm surprised they didn't include the Japanese automaton dolls from the Edo period, the karakuri ningyo.
Kinda like Vista.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
s/relize/realise
s/seemless/seamless
s/Its all/It's all
s/simplier/simpler
s/eletronics/electronics
s/eletricity/electricity
s/mediums/media
s/matter. Etc../matter, etc.
s/rememeber/remember
s/were but a step/we're but a step
Recast cliché
> Makes you relize how far man has NOT come.
Amen, brother.
>> I'm surprised they didn't include the Japanese automaton dolls from the Edo period
I'm more surprised that the Droz automata are not listed. If 'The Turk is perhaps the greatest gadget that wasn't', then the Droz androids are the gratest gadgets that actually were. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ypKJWXFj48&feature=related
"I've learned too much about history to hold any romantic notions about it."
I think you have your 'ages' mixed up, for example stone henge was built with stone age tech and the people who built it lived in thatched roundhouses, some up to 60' in diameter, they had pens for domesticated animals. Indoor heating and light came from a central fire and the roof had no hole since smoke passed straight thru the thatch.
There is no denying life was brutally uncomfortable (particularly in cold climates like the UK), but stone age man was intellectually no different to modern man. Even Neanderthals were more advanced than the picture you paint and they were a different species. Stone age people simply thought religion and science were the same thing, and a large chunk of humanity still thinks exactly the same way.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Hunter-gatherers (still present today in various locations around the world, btw) spend approximately 1/3 of their day looking for food--just surviving.
Modern office workers (still present today in various locations around the world) spend approximately 1/3 of their day working so they can pay for their food--just surviving.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
of course there were nerds in the stone age, who do you think invented stone axes, and spears? not to mention bows and arrows and spear throwers. It may not seem impressive now but when some cave nerd tyed some animal guts to a bendy stick and used it to catapult tiny spears at animals, must have seemed like a uber dork to his pointy stick waving friends. And don't think it was a simple case of putting together, some cave nerd probably spent many long hours searching for bendy enough wood and trying to get arrows to fly straight, while the other cave men laughed at him. And imagine how much worse it was for ancient Australian nerds, imagine how much the other aborigines laughed at the guy who after hours of careful carving presented a bent stick as the ultimate hunting weapon?
Prehistory is even categorised by the achievements of nerds, only when some geek decided to find out what happen when you stuck funny looking rocks in a very hot fire did the stone age become the bronze age. Sure being a prehistoric nerd would have been hard work, but rest assured, there were plenty of them, and its thanks to those uber nerds who decided they could represent spoken words using little squiggles on paper that prehistory finally ended.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
TFA appears to be biased somewhat towards technological dead ends.
One thing that for instance popped up in my mind thinking of a pre-20th century gadget is the early 17th century gearbox of the mechanical fireplace spit fork in a castle near Amsterdam. At that time it was inhabited by a friend of scientist Christiaan Huygens (who invented a number of things involving the principle of transmission, including of course the pendulum clock). I have no idea whether it is unique or just rare for that era, and whether Huygens was personally involved, but I can imagine it was definitely considered an unusually clever piece of technology in those times. Differential transmissions only became a mainstream technology during the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.
The mechanical calculator and the computer are basically a development from location-based calculi that were mainstream in the middle ages but later, in educated circles, replaced by pen reckoning with arabic numerals which is completely different. The historical importance of jeton-based arithmetic to modern computer science is unfortunately underappreciated. On a logical level the operation of a computer is probably more obvious to a medieval clerk who was used to mechanically moving jetons around all day than to the modern computer illiterate person. On the other hand the mechanics of the calculator were obviously much more amazing then than now.
For shame that this article does not mention the father of enginering. He made robots, automatons that were highly complex. I wonder why non of his inventions is mentioned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Jazari
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
Sources? I'm a "modern office worker", and I know I only spend a few (2 to 2.5) hours a week earning money for food. That's 6.25% of my working hours (assuming a 40-hour week), and just 2.23% of my waking hours (taking a "day" as 16 hours, with eight hours for sleep). Even at minimum wage -- less than a typical office worker can expect to get -- the cost of essential food should only be about 20% (1/5) of waking hours. Also, a lot more emphasis is placed on attributes -- preservation, individual taste preferences, variety -- which are mostly unavailable in those hunter-gatherer societies at any price.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Apples and oranges. Modern office workers spend 1/3 of their day working so they can enjoy material benefits far beyond what the hunter-gatherers can. Thanks to excess productivity, modern people can do things like write books, create and build machines, teach, learn, and many other things that hunter-gatherer societies just don't have time for. Tell me, what are the hunter-gatherer's children doing while the modern office worker's children are spending 1/3 of their day getting an education (class time + homework)? Hunting and gathering, perhaps?
I'm sure that any who wish to have a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the modern world could accomplish it with far less than a 40 hour work week.