The Romans had mobile artillery, but faced few worthwhile targets for it.

The Greeks before them invented things like taxi meter and steam turbine. But without units and measures worked out, more complex things like steam turbines could not easily become more than expensive-to-maintain toys, and that’s not even starting on cheap slave labor.

The measures are a separate story. Mostly only the empires like Roman or Chinese were able and willing to establish a consistent system of standards & measures at all — creating, enforcing, and keeping up long enough to make it stick.

Obviously, whatever the Romans established as a matter of consistent policy was doomed to go down soon after them. In the conditions when feudal organization became necessary because nobody could pay taxes in money, measures swiftly degraded via petty fraud.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-like-a-state/

On the other end, «The whole Confucian sea-board had standardized the lee-board. And hauled it up or dropped it as they choosed». But anything less immediately useful…

More importantly, let’s all take a moment to reflect on how Absolutely Fucking Insane that a computer can now respond like this.