Thanks for the detailed and informative response Breakfast! I think I largely agree with your post.
I find it likely that that the coincidence of the Montgolfier brothers’ and Lenormands’ demonstrations in France in 1873 was no accident. There was something about that place and that time that motivated them. If I had to guess, it was something cultural: the idea of testing things in the real world, familiarity with hundreds of years of parachute designs, a critical mass of competitive and supportive energy in the nascent aeronautics space, increasing cultural familiarity with connecting physical intuitions with practical engineering to design”magical” machines.
(1783* you mean.) A revolution in thought definitely aided the invention of the hot air balloon. Novel philosophical ideas and the scientific revolution inspired a more discerning examination of the invention space. But let me ask you this, do you believe the hot air balloon could not have been invented prior to these cultural ideas and parachute design knowledge? My intuition says no, especially given that the Montgolfiers’ first balloon prototype was just a large sky lantern made of thin wood and taffeta lifted by burning paper.
IMO, the hot air balloon is an invention that had a fair probability of being invented anytime after the invention of the sky lantern but simply failed to materialize until the scientific revolution and aeronautics pushed said probability near 100%.
I think that question needs more precision. We could identify the most efficient series of actions a caveman, Roman, or Leonardo da Vinci could have taken to build a hot air balloon. We could ask how many person-hours would have been required to build a hot air balloon starting with the raw material inputs in each year from 0 AD to 1783.
On a broader level, if we assume that the intellectual ferment of 1783 France was the main cause of both hot air balloon and parachute, we can equally ask whether that ferment could have occurred at an earlier point in time.
If I had to guess, whatever structural factors supported urban agglomeration are the underlying causal factor here. Maybe advancements in agriculture and governance, or technology-centered arms races (Lenormand studied gunpowder and Montgolfier was stimulated by the potential of the hot air balloon to break sieges)?
It vaguely seems to me like human history is a process of slow, self-reinforcing agglomeration and institution-building. The process accelerates itself. The rare things that were build close to the earliest possible moment we take for granted. We don’t ask whether the first stone tools could have been invented 10,000 or 100,000 years earlier. There’s just a few tantalizing inventions, like the hot air balloon, that make us think “maybe.”
Overall, I think structural forces dominate, but I also think that individual humans have perhaps a greater ability with time to individually influence those structural forces in lasting ways.
History is full of kings and emperors whose reigns seem to have amounted to just a lot of meaningless death. These days, even idiots who get elected can quietly make useful improvements in governance, because our planet is full of advisors who actually do consense on some policy issues that are more than partisan point scoring. We have social movements like EA that encourage people even in their teens and twenties to envision the pursuit of positive sum ambitions of world changing scope.
So I don’t know how likely it would be for the hot air balloon to have been built decades or centuries earlier than it was, or whether that would mean very much. I do think that we are narrowing the gap between when things are possible to build and when they do get built with every passing year.
Thanks for the detailed and informative response Breakfast! I think I largely agree with your post.
(1783* you mean.) A revolution in thought definitely aided the invention of the hot air balloon. Novel philosophical ideas and the scientific revolution inspired a more discerning examination of the invention space. But let me ask you this, do you believe the hot air balloon could not have been invented prior to these cultural ideas and parachute design knowledge? My intuition says no, especially given that the Montgolfiers’ first balloon prototype was just a large sky lantern made of thin wood and taffeta lifted by burning paper.
IMO, the hot air balloon is an invention that had a fair probability of being invented anytime after the invention of the sky lantern but simply failed to materialize until the scientific revolution and aeronautics pushed said probability near 100%.
I think that question needs more precision. We could identify the most efficient series of actions a caveman, Roman, or Leonardo da Vinci could have taken to build a hot air balloon. We could ask how many person-hours would have been required to build a hot air balloon starting with the raw material inputs in each year from 0 AD to 1783.
On a broader level, if we assume that the intellectual ferment of 1783 France was the main cause of both hot air balloon and parachute, we can equally ask whether that ferment could have occurred at an earlier point in time.
If I had to guess, whatever structural factors supported urban agglomeration are the underlying causal factor here. Maybe advancements in agriculture and governance, or technology-centered arms races (Lenormand studied gunpowder and Montgolfier was stimulated by the potential of the hot air balloon to break sieges)?
It vaguely seems to me like human history is a process of slow, self-reinforcing agglomeration and institution-building. The process accelerates itself. The rare things that were build close to the earliest possible moment we take for granted. We don’t ask whether the first stone tools could have been invented 10,000 or 100,000 years earlier. There’s just a few tantalizing inventions, like the hot air balloon, that make us think “maybe.”
Overall, I think structural forces dominate, but I also think that individual humans have perhaps a greater ability with time to individually influence those structural forces in lasting ways.
History is full of kings and emperors whose reigns seem to have amounted to just a lot of meaningless death. These days, even idiots who get elected can quietly make useful improvements in governance, because our planet is full of advisors who actually do consense on some policy issues that are more than partisan point scoring. We have social movements like EA that encourage people even in their teens and twenties to envision the pursuit of positive sum ambitions of world changing scope.
So I don’t know how likely it would be for the hot air balloon to have been built decades or centuries earlier than it was, or whether that would mean very much. I do think that we are narrowing the gap between when things are possible to build and when they do get built with every passing year.