• Zahille7@lemmy.world
    4 months

    I just looked it up cause I was curious, and cannons were in-between. Then as industry evolved cannons became smaller and more deadly and eventually turned into personal firearms.

    I’d say it wasn’t that long, relatively, to figure out that we could point them at each other. I mean hell, the Chinese used fireworks as weapons like I immediately after inventing them, bringing with them the first flamethrowers.

  • Broadfern@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4 months

    Bold of you to assume people weren’t stupid enough to aim them at each other for fun before then.

  • Mihies@programming.dev
    4 months

    Well, you could have pointed them at people as soon as they were invented 🙃

    • Lumisal@lemmy.world
      4 months

      The problem he had is the same problem some scientists face today - forgetting to / being unable to also invent a way to mass produce it.

      Pressure doors for example used way more resources and labor than today’s automatic doors.

      Vending machines were limited on what they could vend and again, weren’t ready to build.

      Not to mention all this type of information back then had to be hand copied, as blueprints &tc didn’t exist either, so any scribe errors would hinder spread further.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4 months

        Well yes, but, the irony is that, had he gone a bit further with his device, connected it to say, a shaft, and a gear, and then ground millet with it…

        Welp, thats how you get an industrial revolution.

        Which then lays the ground work for a society to be able to develop mass production.

        • chaogomu@lemmy.world
          4 months

          The aeolipile wasn’t really a stream engine. I’ve played with modern versions, and you can stop the spin with your hand. Not a bare hand mind, because it’s rather hot. But a cloth or a glove is fine.

          These toys have zero power to do any useful work.

          This is why an actual steam engine uses a reciprocating piston. Because doing it that way builds pressure and thus power.

          • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
            4 months

            I can stop any household fan with my hand. That doesn’t mean they’re not real machines. Scale of a device has nothing to do with whether it’s design is real or not. Is a mechanical watch not a real machine because Big Ben is so much bigger? Is a motorized bicycle not a real machine because trucks exist? That steam engine is absolutely a steam engine. It uses mechanical principles to induce motion. Being weak doesn’t disqualify it. Alter the jets, raise the temperature, link 10 of them together, whatever and you’ll have something more difficult to stop.

            • chaogomu@lemmy.world
              4 months

              It was a machine, it was not an engine. At no scale could it be used to power anything. And it would actually be dangerous to scale things too much. We know because people tried.

              The aeolipile was a toy. And yes, toys can showcase interesting physics. I owned several of them as a child, and own a few today as, arguably, an adult.

              Still, the thing about invention is that it isn’t a flash of inspiration and a new thing appears, it’s more of a slog of learning new things and applying old things in new ways.

              Most often in history the most striking inventions were new ways of getting the raw resources, or improving the quality of those resources.

              You can’t have a steam engine without a way to consistently produce steel.

              • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
                4 months

                What’s the minimum torque and power that you use to delineate between toy and machine? What were the specs on the original? Not your desktop toy, but the original.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            4 months

            I’ve enjoyed both sides of the conversation you’ve been having with XeroxCool.

            But here, here’s an “alternate tech tree”.

            Take aeliopile.

            Scale it up a bit, make it out of a bit stronger alloy.

            … Fire it with a bellows, or a kiln.

            Alexandria? ~40AD?

            The Romans were making a crude form of steel for swords.

            I think you can fairly easily get that rpm and torque up.

            Oh, but the joints, the rotation points will heat up! It will deform!

            So have some dudes dousing it with a mixture of olive oil and water fairly regularly.

            Shit, set up a plumbing system, do it with the dudes turning Archimedes screws.

            … this is the civilization that had construction cranes, invented a self healing form of cement that we literally only figured out the actual recipe for within the last few years.

            I think its entirely plausible that if somebody had just managed to nudge this spinning screaming ball just a bit conceptually further, it could have snowballed.

  • JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca
    4 months

    10th century starts at 900 CE, so you’re actually talking about 1100 years from 200 BCE.

    However, you’re also using a very loose definition of fireworks. They (the Han dynasty) were throwing bamboo tubes into fire to make them go BANG in 200 BCE. Those weren’t even related (most likely) to the invention of gunpowder. The best theories suggest alchemist were looking for the elixir of life when they stumbled on something pretty flammable.

    Gunpowder in a reasonably effective form wasn’t invented until about 800 CE (9th century) by the Tang dynasty. That was refined for the next 100 years to be more effective and around 900CE they got close to what we have today. They (the Song dynasty) used it pretty much immediately to make weapons (fire arrows).

      • JohnnyCanuck@lemmy.ca
        4 months

        Oh I didn’t realize you had the dates of firework and firearm inventions memorized, I figured you had been looking something up.

        In any case, you can consider my comment directed at anyone else who comes along and thinks that people didn’t use gunpowder for killing people for over a millenia after it was invented, based on reading your post.

  • yesman@lemmy.world
    4 months

    You’re talking about several different technologies when you say “fireworks”. You need a powder that’s safe to handle, a barrel that’s strong enough to contain the explosion, an ignition system, and a projectile that does some kind of damage.