We’re all familiar with ideas ahead of their time — like da Vinci’s helicopter or Babbage’s analytical engine — and ideas of their time — like calculus and evolution — but, Alex Tabarrok reminds us, there are also ideas behind their time — ideas that could have been discovered much earlier but were not.
As an economist, he notes that experimental economics could have been invented by Smith or Ricardo, but it wasn’t.
You can think of such ideas as time-traveler technologies — technologies that could be implemented by an enterprising time-traveler without building up dozens of ancillary technologies first.
For instance, in Lest Darkness Fall, American archaeologist Martin Padway finds himself transported to Ostrogoth-ruled Rome, where he introduces Arabic numerals and double-entry bookkeeping, which convinces a money-lender to fund his copper brandy-making still. With the profits from that, he goes on to make a printing press.
By contrast, in Poul Anderson’s The Man Who Came Early, an American MP with an engineering degree finds that he can’t apply any of his high-tech knowledge in low-tech Viking Iceland. He destroys the blacksmith’s shop when he tries to use modern high-temperature methods, he suggests impractical ideas, like deep-keeled sailing ships, which you can’t pull ashore, and so on.
Anyway, I would expect most medieval innovations to be behind their time, in the sense that the Romans could have implemented them: stirrups, horse collars, horse shoes, wheelbarrows, stern-mounted rudders, printing presses, Arabic numerals, double-entry bookkeeping, distillation, functional buttons, trebuchets, Gothic arches, etc.
With their engineering and organizational talent, the Romans likely could have implemented a number of 18th- and 19th-century technologies. We tend to think of railroads as depending on steel wheels on steel rails with steam engines to drive them, but early railroads, or wagonways, used wood wheels on cut stone tracks with draft animals to pull them — in ancient Greece and Rome — and modern streetcars started out as horse-drawn trolley cars. Could the Romans have introduced slave-drawn streetcars? Or stage coaches?
I wouldn’t say the gun was an idea behind its time, but the streamlined bullet might be. Up through the era of flintlock smoothbore muskets, the usual bullet was a spherical musket ball. Anyone who has thrown a soccer ball and an American football knows that a round ball is nowhere near as aerodynamic as a pointed bullet shape. In fact, the ancient Greeks and Romans knew this too — their slingers threw lead sling bullets that looked just like tiny American footballs.
Longer bullets aren’t stable without the spin imparted by rifling though, and the tight fit required to take advantage of rifling makes it terribly slow to load a musket — until you introduce the Minié ball, which renders the rifled musket quite deadly:
One of the most famous was the Minié system, invented by French Army Captain Claude Etienne Minié, which relied on a conical bullet (known as a Minié ball) with a hollow skirt at the base of the bullet. When fired, the skirt would expand from the pressure of the exploding charge and grip the rifling as the round was fired. The better seal gave more power, as less gas escaped past the bullet, which combined with the fact that for the same bore (caliber) diameter a long bullet was heavier than a round ball. The extra grip also spun the bullet more consistently, which increased the range from about 50 yards for a smooth bore musket to about 300 yards for a rifle using the Minié system. The expanding skirt of the Minié ball also solved the problem that earlier tight fitting bullets were difficult to load as black powder residue fouled the inside of the barrel. The Minié system allowed conical bullets to be loaded into rifles just as quickly as round balls in smooth bores, which allowed rifle muskets to replace muskets on the battlefield. Minié system rifles, notably the U.S. Springfield and the British Enfield of the early 1860s, featured prominently in the U.S. Civil War, due to their enhanced power and accuracy.
I’m not sure why you couldn’t take that idea back to the American Revolution or the French and Indian War.
