From stone tools to iPhones, the stuff we’ve invented has shaped our lives for as long as humans have been human. But lots of the inventions that we think of as modern have much older… and sometimes much sketchier… beginnings. Today we will look at six inventions that were ahead of their time.
We’ll see what our modern inventions share with these older versions, and what aspects of them we can be happy to have left in the past. [ OUTRO ] If I told you to conjure up an image of the first steam engines, your brain might be jumping to something chugging across America during the Industrial Revolution. An engine invented by the likes of James Watt.
But the real first steam engine was a couple millennia older than that. In the late first century, the engineer, mathematician, and physicist named Heron of Alexandria was inventing all sorts of gadgets, from automatic doors for a temple, to a trumpet that sounded when a door opened, to a vending machine that dispensed holy water. But he is also credited with inventing the world’s first steam turbine… a machine that could turn heat into motion.
Now technically, there are some mixed accounts about whether or not he was the genuine, original inventor of this technology. But in any case, the device we’re talking about was called an aeolipile, meaning “wind ball. ” And that’s a pretty decent description.
The central piece was a hollow sphere suspended over a cauldron by some L-shaped tubes, and it had another pair of L-shaped tubes sticking out of it. To get the engine going, you put some water into the cauldron and heated it from below. As the water boiled, steam would get shot up these two tubes into the sphere, and then out of the other pair of tubes.
And as the steam rushed out each tube in one direction, the turbine began spinning in the other direction. Just like a lawn sprinkler that spins as the water comes out. It’s all because of Newton’s third law: For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
Now as far as we know, the aeolipile was never used to power anything. But if Heron ever tried to, he’d have found his steam engine was wildly inefficient. But it’s a cool little demo of both a basic law of physics and a handy way to turn energy into motion.
So eventually, this simple concept would be the basis of engines that would power machines so well they completely altered the course of human history. Take the one developed in 1769 by the Scottish engineer James Watt. While his invention wasn’t even the first “modern” steam engine, it worked so much better that it basically ushered in the Industrial Revolution.
Now, Watt’s engine wasn’t based on the aeolipile at all, and it was more complex. But like Heron’s engine, it took advantage of the same principle: It harnessed steam power to create continuous motion. And steampunk fans around the world rejoiced.
I don’t think there were steampunk fans then, I think there were just… people The 19th century was full of inventions and experiments involving new modes of transportation, including the horseless carriage … the early ancestor of the automobile But the first horseless carriage was actually invented a century earlier, by French engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. In 1769, Cugnot built a prototype of a three-wheeled vehicle that he called a fardier à vapeur, which roughly translates to “steam cart. ” I know I’m bad at french and yeah, we are still talking about steam.
People who want to revive the steam-powered car, hit us up in the comments. At the time, the French army was using horse-drawn fardiers to carry around cannons and other heavy military equipment. And Cugnot’s fardier was supposed to accomplish the same thing, except, without the horse.
So it looked a lot like a regular horse-drawn cart, but with a big boiler at the front that drove a steam engine. Oh, and by the way, this steam engine was different from both Heron’s and Watts’s. In Cugnot’s version, the steam moved two pistons on either side of the front wheel that, through their movement, could turn that wheel and slowly move the cart forward.
Emphasis on slowly. In 1770, Cugnot built and modeled a full-size version of his machine and things … did not go quite to plan. I mean, the thing did move.
But it was supposed to carry four tons’ worth of stuff while traveling over 7 kilometers an hour … and it only got about half that fast. It also needed to refuel every 15 minutes. And it was super unstable.
So it wasn’t a smashing success. But speaking of smashing, there are reports that one of his fardiers managed to hit and knock down part of a wall. So Cugnot may have also been responsible for the world’s first automobile accident.
Obviously we’ve come a long way since then! But even though modern cars are designed completely differently from Cugnot’s steam cart, the basic idea of using an engine to turn a turbine and power a vehicle stuck around … so much so that it’s hard to imagine a world without the automobile. And the same goes for the next item on our list: the ice-making refrigerator.
Almost every U. S. household has a fridge these days, and a bunch of them don’t just make their own ice.
They dispense it, sometimes when you don’t even want them to! This kind of fridge-and-freezer combo is less than a century old. But the original ice-making refrigerators may date as far back as the fourth century BCE.
I’m talking about cone-shaped ice houses called yakhchals, which were used to store ice in the Persian desert. And based on much younger models from the 17th Century, we know that some yakhchals were also capable of making their own ice. Yes, making ice in the middle of a desert.
It is easier than you might think. These ice-making yakhchals typically had a shallow pond outside that was shaded by a brick or adobe wall, and a channel that supplied water to that pond. The ice-making process would take place in the winter.
Water from the canal would flow into the pond until it was several centimeters deep. With the Sun staying lower in the sky, and the temperatures staying cool throughout the day, the water in this shaded pond could lose heat fairly easily. Most of its heat was radiated into the atmosphere, but thanks to the dry desert air, the pond also lost heat through evaporation.
Just like how you cool down as your sweat dries. And each morning, the people who managed the yakhchal would harvest whatever ice had formed and then place it inside the ice house, where it stayed frozen. Now unlike modern refrigerators, which use a lot of electricity to keep temperatures low, these ancient ice makers used what’s called passive cooling.
They didn’t need any external energy source to work. To keep out the desert heat, yakhchals were built with extremely thick walls, often around two meters thick at the base. Meanwhile, the dome’s height allowed for warmer air to rise and stay away from the stuff you just spent all that effort getting cold.
The ice itself was stored in a pit that was several meters deep, and it was also sometimes covered by a material like straw to help insulate it. Thanks to this combination of strategies, temperatures inside the yakhchal would stay so low Persians could enjoy ice all summer long! Thanks to Brilliant for supporting this SciShow video!
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Plus you’ll get your first 30 days for free! Humans have been animating for a long time. In the 1830s, way before we had animated films, we covered disks with drawings that… when you spun them really fast… seemed to come alive.
But animation may go back much much further in time. I’m talking tens of thousands of years back, in the Paleolithic Age. If you visit some caves in southern France, and venture far enough in where no sunlight can reach, you’d see carvings and paintings left behind by the hunter-gatherers who used to live there.
And I don’t just mean they doodled on the walls. They did it to flat stones, too. But if you’ve got a half-decent flashlight to check out this art, you might also notice something funny about some of these images.
Like, many of the animals have extra legs or heads. Or they depict the same creature in different positions at once. Some researchers suspect these superimposed or juxtaposed images were meant to depict movement.
I mean, think about a flip book. Each page looks just a little bit different, so that as you quickly flip through them all, the separate drawings combine to form a single animation. It’s basically an optical illusion that’s created because our brains are wired to see movement whenever we see a sequence of images back to back.
But this cave art is far from flippable. And while there’s no way to know for sure how much of this animation was intentional, our Paleolithic ancestors appear to have figured out how to do it using an entirely different trick. Because they wouldn’t have been using flashlights.
They viewed their artwork by firelight. And the flickering fire would have lit up different parts of the image at different moments, bringing it to life. Now, I’m not currently up to date on the Ice Age franchise, but if they are making a new one and want to have a character who’s like the ice ageWalt Disney, I’m suggesting they do that, because it would not be entirely historically inaccurate So humans have been interested in visual illusions since prehistoric times.
But sometimes, manipulating our vision isn’t just fun. It can also be useful. Enter, the contact lens.
We’ve been putting lenses in front of our eyes to sharpen our vision for centuries. I’m talking like, as early as the 12th Century. But a few hundred years after that, scientists started to think about putting lenses directly onto the eye.
In the 1630s, René Descartes hypothesized that you could put a tube of water in front of your eye and it would change the focus of the light entering your eye. There was absolutely nothing practical about his idea, but it was a start. Then finally, in 1801, a polymath named Thomas Young used this idea to craft the first-ever contact lenses.
To make them, he extracted a double-lens from a small microscope, filled it with some water, then stuck it directly onto his eye. Like Descartes’ hypothetical water tube, this did change the way his eye focused light. But it also made it impossible to blink.
So, still far from practical. It wasn’t until the 1880s that a German ophthalmologist named Adolf Fick invented a corrective contact lens that was actually viable… sort of. Fick’s lenses were all glass, and they fit over the whole front of the eye.
They could not have been comfortable, and people could only wear them for a couple hours at a time. Basically, unless you had some very specific eye disease that this massive glass lens could help you manage, it wasn’t worth it. But eventually, lenses started getting smaller and made out of plastic.
The two upgrades came together in 1947, and contact lenses finally took off. We’ve come a long way, but the principle behind each of these lenses is fundamentally the same: to intercept light and adjust the way it is focused into the eye. But the development of the contact lens is a great example for how sometimes the principle is there super early, the technology just needs to catch up before it can work.
And our final invention is a great example of that, too. Depending who you bank with, you might be able to sign into your account using just your voice to verify your identity. But while this technology is fairly new to banks, the basic technology for voice authentication has been around for over a century.
In 1908, the New York artist Eliot Keen submitted a patent application for a machine called the countersign lock. Although weirdly, there was a correction issued in 1909, replacing Keen’s name with that of a Denver-based safe manufacturer named George Charpiot. So, it’s not clear who really deserves the credit for this invention.
But I bet they had a big fight about it But either way, the countersign lock was invented in the early 1900s. And it worked a little bit like Ali Baba commanding a magical door to “Open, sesame! ”.
. . except that, unlike Ali Baba’s door, the countersign lock wouldn’t open for just anyone who knew the password.
It would only respond to the voice of its owner. The whole contraption was built around a phonograph cylinder where a recording of the owner saying a key phrase had been physically etched into it. Because that’s how analog audio recordings used to work… or still work if you’re one of those people who are into vinyl.
Meanwhile, on the outside, there was a telephone mouthpiece that someone trying to get past the lock could speak into. The vibrations from their voice would travel into the machine, and vibrate a needle that rested on the cylinder. If the vibrations of the incoming voice perfectly matched the pattern of the recording, the needle could re-trace the existing grooves, and create an electrical contact that activated the lock and opened it.
It’s kind of like if you record a voice memo on your phone, it’ll make a certain waveform. Then, if you say the same thing again, the second waveform will look pretty much the exact same. The countersign lock basically checked that the spoken phrase fit snugly in the grooves created by the recorded phrase.
Today, of course, voice authentication isn’t so analog. And the software that banks use is capable of analyzing dozens of different aspects of a person’s voice, so it’s harder to get locked out when you’ve got a stuffy nose. The simple phonograph recording in the countersign lock likely only captured a few pieces of basic information, like the pitch and intensity of a person’s voice.
So it wouldn’t have been nearly as precise as the software banks use today, but the basic concept isn’t all that different than it was in 1908. The bottom line is that lots of our modern-seeming inventions have surprisingly deep roots. There are so many examples we could have covered, but just didn’t have time to.
But lucky for you, we’ve already got another video about yet another technology that’s older than you think it is.
