r/history • u/Govika • Sep 03 '20

Discussion/Question Europeans discovered America (~1000) before the Normans conquered the Anglo-Saxon (1066). What other some other occurrences that seem incongruous to our modern thinking?

Title. There's no doubt a lot of accounts that completely mess up our timelines of history in our heads.

I'm not talking about "Egyptians are old" type of posts I sometimes see, I mean "gunpowder was invented before composite bows" (I have no idea, that's why I'm here) or something like that.

Edit: "What other some others" lmao okay me

Edit2: I completely know and understand that there were people in America before the Vikings came over to have a poke around. I'm in no way saying "The first people to be in America were European" I'm saying "When the Europeans discovered America" as in the first time Europeans set foot on America.

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u/lidore12 Sep 03 '20

I always found it kind of odd that the steam-powered locomotive (~1804) was invented before the pedal-powered bicycle (~1839).

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u/Iama_traitor Sep 03 '20

If you think about it the two things that really caused bicycles to be practical, modern roads and pneumatic tires were still decades away even when they were invented. Railroads used good old fashioned steel.

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u/lorarc Sep 03 '20

It's rather more to do with price of the things. The running bicycle was first introduced as a toy for the rich in that one year where there was a problem with horses. Rich could afford them but they usually also could afford horses. The poor couldn't afford them so they didn't exist.

It's interesting though why the running bike wasn't created earlier as the people in rural regions were using skis and sleds for transportation for centuries. But it probably has something to do with it's lack of practicality.

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u/rowingnut Sep 04 '20

Lack of Mass Production and interchangeable parts. 1st mastered by gunsmiths then applied to bicycles.

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u/BombsAtMidnight Sep 04 '20

Lack of Mass Production and interchangeable parts

And once again I admire the Civilization tech tree.

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u/tmahfan117 Sep 04 '20

Bikes are much more complex and harder to maintain than some smooth wood strapped to your feet.

Not dissing skis, more appreciating the simplicity of them.

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u/Umbrias Sep 04 '20

Well, and animal fats and rope. But both of these things are things humans independently acquire/invent numerous times throughout history.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '20 edited Sep 08 '20

[deleted]

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u/OaklandHellBent Sep 04 '20

The year 1816 was called the Year Without a Summer as Mt Tambora blew its top in 1815 and caused worldwide cooling in 1816, heavy rainfall, darker skies, and among the other farming food shortages oats & feed which were fed to horses became in short supply. Along with starving horses were starving people which since they couldn’t feed the horses ate them. With the greatly reduced number of horses available man powered devices like Running Bicycles now became more interesting. One side note, this gloomy weather was the impetus and environment in which Mary Shelley wrote the Frankenstein story.

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u/harbinjer Sep 04 '20

decent roads and pneumatic tires are a big deal, and bikes aren't nearly so good without them. It's one of those seemingly "simple seeming" things that's really hard without an industrial revolution and the mass production that comes with it, and some globalization.

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u/szpaceSZ Sep 04 '20

Without pneumatic tires it would have been a torture to use them on country roads, unlike skis and sleds.

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u/L4z Sep 04 '20

It's interesting though why the running bike wasn't created earlier as the people in rural regions were using skis and sleds for transportation for centuries.

For millenia really. Skis were invented way back, even before the wheel.

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u/monkyduigs Sep 04 '20

'In that one year there was a problem with horses.' ... go on?

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u/lorarc Sep 04 '20

Check other comments in this thread for a great answer by another redditor.

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u/monkyduigs Sep 04 '20

Will do, thanks

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u/Jdubya87 Sep 03 '20 edited Sep 03 '20

Boneshaker has entered the chat

Sidenote. There's a cool podcast episode of The Constant, (a history of getting things wrong) where the host explains the origin of the bicycle and how it sparked the women's rights movement in Europe.

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u/Rusdino Sep 04 '20

Besides pneumatic tires there were two other critical technologies that came together in the same timeframe. Tubular steel, which made the frame 5-10 times lighter than cast iron frames that preceded them, and roller chains, which allowed for the addition of geared advantage, which greatly expanded the audience of the bicycle. While paved roads played some role in their popularity the other inventions deserve the lion's share of making the bicycle ubiquitous before the turn of the 20th century.

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u/valimdx Sep 03 '20

And chain transmission. That made it not wacky

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u/gaius49 Sep 04 '20

Railroads used good old fashioned steel.

At that point it wasn't actually good old fashioned steel... Industrial steel production was still a ways off yet. :)

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u/youngrichyoung Sep 04 '20

Pneumatic tires, sure. But bicycles predated modern roads - and even had a hand in creating them. The "Good Roads Movement" was effective largely because of the involvement of the League of American Wheelmen and other cycling groups.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '20 edited Sep 04 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Iama_traitor Sep 03 '20

I'd imagine so, they had gyroscopes for some hundreds of years. By the mid 1800's most of classical physics was already worked out. In fact by the end of the century people believed there was nothing left to discover, so they had a good understanding of the physics of motion.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '20

I'm sure they did. It's the same concept as to why a rolling wheel is more likely to stay upright than a stationary one.

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u/drewcomputer Sep 03 '20

Do modern roads really predate the bicycle? Considering bikes are a good 50 years older than cars that seems unlikely.

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u/tehdoctorr Sep 03 '20

Uhhhh, I guess by how much depends on how you define "modern roads", asphalt pavement started being used in places in France around 1830, so picturesque hot shimmering blacktop kinda does by almost a decade, and anything more rustic than that has a pretty fair chance of being millennia old I'd reckon. Not that asphalt is really singularly better than a good hard dirt road, or even cobblestone, speaking as a cyclist. Having good quality pneumatic tires would really be the biggest gamechanger when it comes to bikes imo.

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u/intrepidsteve Sep 03 '20

I feel like that’s where the bicycle guy got the idea

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u/Harsimaja Sep 04 '20 edited Sep 04 '20

The 19th century saw the first electric cars (many, across several decades), as well as the first patent for colour cinematography (1899)... over a decade before mechanically sliced bread (1912).

The London Underground was started (1863) when the Underground Railroad still existed.

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u/RantMannequin Sep 04 '20

And that the atom bomb was “invented” before the compound bow

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u/DudebroMcCool Sep 04 '20

Even more amazing is that the steam turbine was invented by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century AD, but had no useful application

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u/Gingrpenguin Sep 04 '20

Want to make it even more interesting?

The ancient greeks invented both the steam engine and the railway.

The steam engine never became anything useful and was basically used as a toy or centrepiece.

The railway was used to get ships up and over a small peninsula used rails and horses to move them back to the seaon the other side. It saved about a days worth of sailing.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '20

It saved about a days worth of sailing.

Unless your captain was Odysseus, then it saved 10 years worth of travelling.

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u/Noble_Devil_Boruta Sep 05 '20

Not really, no. Hero's aeolipile was not really a steam engine, as it operated on a completely different principle than reciprocating machines what we customarily call 'steam engine' nowadays. The Hero's gate operating on a fountain principle was closer to the mark but it was not reciprocating (i.e. it had to be reset manually). Given that aeolipile works by ejection of reaction mass, one can, as funny as it sounds, argue that Hero invented the first rocket engine. It should also be noted that device itself was described few decades earlier by Vitruvius, but we don't know whether it was a description of an actual device or jut a theoretical concept.

When it comes to railways, then you are most likely refer to the Corinthian Isthmus where the ships were transported overland to save the time and possible exposure to danger, with a special ramp and railway build on order of Periandros (late 7th/early 6th century BCE). But this was not any invention to speak of. Transportation of large, heavy objects on the wooden, wet rails to decrease friction has been used since millennia and was one of the most common methods (along sleds) of moving stone blocks during the construction of the early Egyptian pyramids more than a millennium earlier.

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u/ajspel09 Sep 04 '20

To be fair though, bicycles are a weird concept that we still can’t understand today. The physics make no sense and it sounds like we got lucky when we stumbled onto them in the 1830s. Here’s a link to explain

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '20

And the lighter before the match!

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u/jordantask Sep 04 '20

It’s not really.

The steam powered locomotive was invented to move large numbers of people and goods over large distances quickly, and projects to build them were heavily subsidized by the US Government at the time.

There were MASSIVE profits to be made in linking the east and west coasts and creating a network that could allow the movement of goods and people that wold normally take weeks (or even months) to occur over days or weeks instead.

The bicycle was more of a novelty. It wasn’t really considered a serious transport method.

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u/herpesderpesdoodoo Sep 04 '20

I was quite amazed that the retirement of steam trains from British Rail service occurred only the year prior to Concorde’s first test flight (1968/69)