What's the coolest technology that was made pointless by something else more efficient? E.g. blimps when planes are invented, or pneumatic mail tubes made pointless by email.
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In a similar vein, castles.
As soon as artillery came along, spending huge resources on building a massive static fortification became merely an exercise in vanity.
Hatpins. Once used to fasten a lady’s dignity and defend it. Now replaced by passive aggressive Instagram captions and self-defense keychains shaped like cats. Progress is a bore. Bring back the blade.
Broadcast TV
Only 3 channels plus PBS but all free and it created a sort of societal touchstone
Plus broadcasted our presence to the Universe for 30-40 years
Mechanical watches. A fabulously complex - and beautiful - set of mechanisms that evolved over centuries, replaced overnight by the discovery quartz crystals pulsate at a constant rate when you run a bit of current through them. Tougher, more accurate, and vastly cheaper.
I was looking at an old mechanical lawn mower the other day. It seemed like it must have been the neatest thing in the world when it was invented, and the most hated thing in the world as soon as gas powered lawn mowers were invented.
People have already mentioned mimeographs, card catalogs, and the sextant - so how about the slide rule? Very clever, very easy to use, and killed overnight by electronic calculators.
Large sailboats, definitely. Ancient technology refined over thousands of years to an incredible sophistication and beauty, able to sail faster than the wind that's driving them, and just utterly abandoned when we found a way to make burning stuff make boats go.
They used to use bubble chambers to see the tracks of particle collisions. They'd fill this giant chamber full of superheated oil, and as the atoms smashed the particles would leave behind these beautiful trails of bubbles. The technology was replaced with "cloud" chambers and now it's all digital.
I used to work at an engineering firm that started back in the days of drawing by hand on vellum. In the back warehouse, they had a file cabinet full of Presstype brand letters & symbols and catalogs for ordering more.
For what it's worth - pneumatic tubes are still useful, just not for mail. For example, many hospitals use pneumatic tubes for delivering medications to its rooms. Source: I used to work for the company which writes the software used to track medications in hospitals
My vote is for the ball-and-disk integrators that were used in Kelvin's harmonic analyser to compute the tides, and in US naval vessels during WWII to compute distance traveled over variable velocities. Absolutely ingenious design.
It's still essential to a lot of electricity generation! It's just not directly used for locomotion much anymore. In part because it was prone to catastrophic and destructive failure.
LED watches, which had only like a couple of years between being affordable by normal people and being completely eclipsed by LCDs. (Not trying to be clever, that's just what time it is)
K, whose neighborhood should we redline to rip up and blaze the tracks through? Because the trains are only useful if they’re in the middle of town, but that’s where people already live. We’ve inherited 80+ years of car-based suburban planning. “Just make more thing” is not actionable.
I don't know if light rail will work for sprawl, or even for an economy where jobs disappear one place and appear another this fast. Internal combustion engine cars are as obsolete as steam locomotives, though, and will leave as big a hole in our psyches.
Nearly every other civilization in history has got by with fewer cars, or no cars at all, compared to the US. Rails are more energy-efficient, cheaper, faster, and easier to maintain than asphalt highway networks and flotillas of private vehicles.
The car-driven urban sprawl here has been in place for 80+ years. Half the US now lives in suburbs and works in the scattered shops/schools/etc that adjoin them. With that setup, how does rail support taking 2 kids under 10 to diff. schools across town before work, and doing the weekly grocery run?
I'm saying the US fucked up by investing in that system. In civilized countries kids can walk to school or take public transit there, and your local grocery story is in walking or biking distance, too.
It's not urban sprawl. It's anti-urban rural cosplay. And it's very very expensive to maintain.
Well congratulations, you’ve identified where my grandparents and great-grandparents made bad decisions. Any thoughtful *solutions* to contribute that aren’t just not-making choices I wasn’t alive for?
Well, yes, but there the system is. It is expensive to run, but it would be even more expensive to change. Also, a whole bunch of people grew up in suburbs, like them, and think city centers dangerous and dirty.
The engineering solution is not light rail, but small, lightly built electric cars.
Even with sprawl it's more efficient to have light rail networks accessed via local bus routes that take people from their homes to their nearest rail hub.
I've seen a proposal for dirigible-based drone bases. Blimps that host dozens or hundreds of battery-powered drones that can be released at will and recharged upon return to the blimp.
For almost a 100 years there was a shared hydralic power network running in London to power rigs instead of coal or electricity - was a giant piece of infrastructure that sprawled north of the Thames.
But my vote is for signal boxes, for controlling rail switches and signals. At small junctions they can look pretty simple, but at a large station they're kind of amazing.
Honorable mention to polaroid cameras. They still exist but were made pretty pointless as soon as we were able to look at the picture we just took on screen (and later print it with a printer).
Man I think you took the best already. It’s a shame there isn’t still an operating dirigible line for relaxed pace luxury travel. But pre-digital electronics run a close second for me. Watch @techconnectify.bsky.social show off the guts of a purely electromechanical pinball machine.
Exactly, CD partly killed MD due to how entrenched CD already was, making it extra-difficult for MD to catch on. Digital coming along killed whatever hope was left for MD.
The complexity that consumer electronics used to have back when stuff moved, like the workings of a cassette player, the weird ways to build a CD player, … (yes, I've been watching too much Techmoan)
Also steam locomotives. Deceptively simple yet surprisingly complicated in their execution.
Old school model makers at places like foundries. Those dudes (and most were dudes) did magic with wood. I got to see a shop back in the 90's; a bunch of older guys with leather aprons and woodwork that was beyond amazing.
So when you're doing metal casting, you have to have something that is the shape of the thing you want to cast. In lost wax, you sculpt the wax into the shape, put it into a medium, melt the wax out, and cast into the void. Not very good if you're manufacturing bunches of things/day.
So, these guys build wooden models of , put that into sand, put sand on top, pound the hell out of the sand, open up the mold, pull out the wooden form, put the mold together, and cast the actual production positive mold form. The wooden mold goes on a shelf in case you need it again.
Those things were just beautiful. Perfectly made by hand, sanded, polished, no CNC, just rasps, saws, and sandpaper. Such skill and such lovely parts, made my heart ache. Nobody does that any more. Those guys were at the end of an era. (Think Gibbs in his basement building a boat).
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As soon as artillery came along, spending huge resources on building a massive static fortification became merely an exercise in vanity.
Only 3 channels plus PBS but all free and it created a sort of societal touchstone
Plus broadcasted our presence to the Universe for 30-40 years
(Example from my friend's Etsy, check their stuff out:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/FireEcologyPress )
Which seemed weird when I'd only seen LCD watches.
But now that we're in the era of mobile phones (and smartwatches) it makes sense again!
It's not urban sprawl. It's anti-urban rural cosplay. And it's very very expensive to maintain.
The engineering solution is not light rail, but small, lightly built electric cars.
Oh, you said coolest...
That would be the calculator watch.
But my vote is for signal boxes, for controlling rail switches and signals. At small junctions they can look pretty simple, but at a large station they're kind of amazing.
https://youtu.be/3T8cyPkzDmo?si=JlG9koHa8B7x_FK-
When my brother was in the navy, 50 years ago, they had to calibrate the chronometer every day. His Casio wrist watch was more accurate.
China couldn't make ballpoint pens for themselves until 2017.
A shame rewritable, enclosed, optical media kind of died altogether.
Being able to enter text with a single thumb, even without looking was slick as fuck.
But I do miss physical keys, in plenty of cases. I think the Sidekick phones were fantastic
The indexes and indexing vocabularies aren't less efficient, but free-text searching is much, much cheaper.
Also steam locomotives. Deceptively simple yet surprisingly complicated in their execution.
https://bsky.app/profile/lerouxb.bsky.social/post/3lowcmwcy3k2x
Also, are planes more efficient than airships? They are faster, certainly. But I'm not sure about resource usage per kg transported.