I wonder if something similar could be added here where I say something like "what's the most important descendant of x" and it would bring me to that tech and give me a little explanation of why
Pretty cool though and I learnt a thing or two. Thanks
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
Historical Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1 comment)
Edit: oops!
The Universal Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607 - June 2025 (65 comments)
Also zoom in/out would be super useful!
Great idea though!
Found a minor nit — the entry for “shoe” is at 3500 BCE and links to the Wikipedia article for “sandal”. But the Wikipedia article for “shoe” [1] indicates that the earliest shoes (apparently not sandals) were worn around 7000-8000 BCE.
No HIV vaccine. mRNA vaccine get's a single entry instead of vaccine per disease like prior vaccines. No battery stuff since 1985. Just amazing, fractal improvement is everywhere.
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.
Then eventually that product morphed over time to the point where they realized the oil wasn't actually a necessary component
Even more cool: commercial progress trails tech. It takes a long time for companies to figure out how to turn a new idea or a cheaper input into a new product/industry, and then for related companies to grow into an economic ecosystem.
So one would expect to see some spectacular economics over the next couple of centuries.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp...
Top 10 inventions by number of direct descendants
1: High-vacuum tube — 13
2: Automobile — 12
3: Stored-program computer — 12
4: Voltaic pile — 11
5: High-pressure steam engine — 11
6: Glass blowing — 10
7: Papermaking — 10
8: Bipolar junction transistor — 10
9: Writing (Mesopotamia) — 9
10: MOSFET — 8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
[1] https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-counts-as-a-technology
Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.
The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...
Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.
So alcohol without any grain is easy, but I don't know the answer for beer. On the other hand, why would you domesticate grain unless you already knew you could turn it into beer or bread?
I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the development of melee spears would be, without throwing spears.
The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for almost all of history, any changes to spears would, I guess, make a big difference.
This was then used with oil to make an even better fire starter or means of transferring fire. Eventually someone realises that a rope soaking in oil is easily lit and sustains a flame.
why are they separate?
You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us today. It reduced malnutrition and the economic/social/political effects of disease. The difference I'm trying to highlight is that it probably wasn't understood as such and intentionally done for that purpose. Nixtamalization was culturally encoded as just what you did. Had they had a better understanding of nutrition, they probably would have made more intentional efforts to include the missing vitamins nixtamalization doesn't provide. We often see signs of those missing nutrients in precolumbian skeletons.
This extends to a surprisingly wide variety of ancient technology. Most metallurgy probably wasn't understood in the technical sense we think of it today until quite late. We see that with early glass, where people simply didn't understand what they were doing. Ingredients from specific areas would have specific effects, but sometimes didn't for reasons no one at the time understood. Craft communities would standardize on very specific, ritualized processes that simply couldn't be changed because they didn't have a good mechanistic understanding of the variables involved. One of the downstream effects of this is that poaching craftspeople is a viable strategy (they had the specific "recipe") and also that resources like sand from specific areas in syria and egypt were effectively non-fungible for centuries. You had to trade with whoever controlled that area even if you had the craftspeople.
What "folks at Wikipedia"? Can't you just edit the date yourself?
(A link to an article about how it's made, with 65 comments)
There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for instance).
Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.
1: Control of fire — 585
2: Charcoal — 444
3: Iron — 422
4: Iron smelting and wrought iron — 419
5: Ceramic — 404
6: Pottery — 402
7: Induction coil — 389
8: Raft — 365
9: Boat — 363
10: Alcohol fermentation — 353
Top 10 by total ancestors (direct + indirect)
1: Robotaxi — 253
2: Moon landing — 242
3: Space telescope — 238
4: Lidar — 236
5: Satellite television — 231
6: Space station — 228
7: Stealth aircraft — 228
8: Reusable spacecraft — 224
9: Satellite navigation system — 224
10: Communications satellite — 224
1: For anyone whose Nahuatl is a bit rusty: the English word for nixtmalized corn is “hominy”.
Still, great project and I'd have loved to see it crowdsourced like wikipedia.
If you are doing a large project on the history of science (you have clearly put a ton of work into this) but you aren't communicating with historians of science that's concerning to me.
Researching those reasons requires a lot of work and most people just want to get to the result step without necessarily understanding why you put the oil in the pan before the egg. They're hungry.
See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now that I have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I very much do _not_ want to search for that term. Lol
By implication, this was something that had never been done before.
It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth but it's mostly true.
I'm guessing they had traditional assaying techniques, just with less accuracy than a contemporary chemist.
One example of precision is the Whitworth 3 plate method (invented in the 1830s), with this method, you can make surfaces that approach precision in the micron range, if necessary.
Leonardo Da Vinici's screw cutting lathe sketches show a machine that uses 2 lead screws to generate another, which averages the values of the other two screws, using careful rotations of threads, etc, it should be possible to use this method to work your way up to a uniform precise screw where each new generation is better than the ones before it.
[1] https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...
Another: take a bunch of roughly cast metal balls. Put them on a sieve and let it vibrate until the balls have all passed through the holes in the sieve. Behold: metal spheres, so precise that you probably can't really measure the degree to which they are not spherical without resorting to instruments that you're not supposed to have in this scenario. Then sort by weight (which is a proxy for size). Now you can make ball bearings.
Yet another example: you can cut a lens for a telescope to within ridiculous precision using very primitive methods (https://www.instructables.com/Grind-and-Polish-a-DobsonianNe... ).
Put another way: it is always possible to increase your precision as long as you don't particularly care about absolutes or temperature effects.
This is vastly overstated. This was a widely popularized idea in the west but has largely been debunked by more recent scholarship that is less interested in demonstrating the superiority of the west.
For example, Da Vinci's machine cuts the new screw blank in the centre of the carriage, which is driven by leadscrews on either side. The nuts would have likely been something like a wide strip of leather clamped over the screw thread, so there's enough compliance to average over a few pitches of thread, and the position of the cutter would be close to the average of the position set by each leadscrew thread.
Imagine the rough-cut screw threads have a pitch vs rotation angle described by p1(θ) and p2(θ). Running the machine then creates a new screw which is nearly a duplicate of the drive-screws in the machine but with pitch p3(θ) = (p1(θ) + p2(θ))/2. You can make two of these screws and swap them for the two leadscrews in the machine (it's built to be easy to do this). The random errors from a rough-cut screw gradually average out. But the cleverness doesn't end there. You then flip one of the screws backward end-to-end, so now you're averaging p3(θ) with p4(L-θ). You can also offset θ by any amount for either screw by offsetting the change-gear and re-clamping the carriage nut. Repeating these actions, you gradually can eliminate all systematic thread errors from the initial rough-cut screws and converge towards cutting a screw with nearly-constant pitch.
(It doesn't end there either; there's really a lot of flexibility with Da Vinci's design. Changing the gear ratio lets you create a fine-pitch thread from a coarse-pitch thread, or vise-versa, or cut a multi-start screw by rotating the blank 180 degrees or end-over-end).
Andrew Carnegie discovered that certain "bad" ore was that way because its iron content was much higher than usual. Secure in the knowledge that this ore was actually better than "good" ore, he developed the techniques to use it.
History research is typically published in books rather than papers, so it isn't content I can link to directly.
Any time you let go of a part you're going to have to re-locate it before you start cutting again, and you will lose accuracy in the process.