<story><title>Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)</title><url>http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-it-took-so-long-to-inv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Houshalter</author><text>One of the most fascinating books I ever picked up from the library was &lt;i&gt;Ancient Inventions&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;0345401026&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;034...&lt;/a&gt;), which goes over the details of stuff like this.&lt;p&gt;The historical figure that strikes me as &amp;quot;most likely to be a time traveller&amp;quot; is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was accidentally killed during the war. The Romans wanted to capture him and use him for their own purposes. It&amp;#x27;s possible that could have changed history quite a bit.&lt;p&gt;Heron of Alexandria is another candidate that gets a lot of space in that book. He invented the first steam engine &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; before his time. But also many other insanely elaborate mechanical devices. Including an entirely mechanical little theater, with mechanical puppets and music.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest inventor of our time might be applying his work to video game engines.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kartan</author><text>&amp;gt; Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only.&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere that one of the problems in antiquity to develop useful machines was the abundance of slave&amp;#x2F;captive labor. Why do you want to create a complicated inefficient first version of a machine when you have cheap humans being to do the task?</text></comment>
<story><title>Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel (2012)</title><url>http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-it-took-so-long-to-inv/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Houshalter</author><text>One of the most fascinating books I ever picked up from the library was &lt;i&gt;Ancient Inventions&lt;/i&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;0345401026&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.amazon.com&amp;#x2F;Ancient-Inventions-Peter-James&amp;#x2F;dp&amp;#x2F;034...&lt;/a&gt;), which goes over the details of stuff like this.&lt;p&gt;The historical figure that strikes me as &amp;quot;most likely to be a time traveller&amp;quot; is Archimedes, who designed incredibly advanced machines that destroyed the Roman fleet and protected his home city. Sadly he was accidentally killed during the war. The Romans wanted to capture him and use him for their own purposes. It&amp;#x27;s possible that could have changed history quite a bit.&lt;p&gt;Heron of Alexandria is another candidate that gets a lot of space in that book. He invented the first steam engine &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; before his time. But also many other insanely elaborate mechanical devices. Including an entirely mechanical little theater, with mechanical puppets and music.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately almost all his inventions were for entertainment value only. Sometimes I wonder if the greatest inventor of our time might be applying his work to video game engines.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dleslie</author><text>Entertainment is fertile soil for creative invention; it is often an environment which eschews rigid, pattern-based development in favor of creative expression.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve spent a fair amount of time in video game development and in enterprise software; without a doubt, my experience reflects that creative developers are drawn to video games, whereas the few that found their way elsewhere have a sense of being exotic caged animals.</text></comment>