On a lighter note (but true, nonetheless)…
This project is unusual in several ways. The most salient of these is the fact that it involves an enabling technology rather than a product. This is rare in today’s world where most advances in technology involve either incremental improvements in already known techniques or large scale industrial efforts such as for instance nuclear fusion. It has been a very long time since a single unknown inventor came up with a truly new, game-changing idea. Still more unusual is that all of the knowledge required for this invention was known at the time of Archimedes. Now it is true that Archimedes would have been unlikely to have thought of it because given the state of technology at the time, an infinitely variable transmission would not have seemed to him to be a useful device. Nonetheless, anybody between then and now could have invented the Rolowitz Drive, yet nobody did.
Perhaps the most unusual aspect, however, is that this is a new technology that replaces an existing technology that is in widespread (indeed universal) use, and improves on its predecessor in every measurable attribute. It is better than what it replaces in all of the following characteristics:
- Size
- Weight
- Complexity
- Ease of manufacture
- Ease of assembly
- Technology level
- Cost
- Robustness
- Scalability
- Ease of control
- Efficiency
- Range of acceptable material
- Range of applications
This is exceedingly rare. Almost all new technologies come with some kind of drawback: they need better materials, or finer tolerances, or are more expensive or high tech to build. In most cases the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, but to find a case where there were really no drawbacks at all we had to reach back to 11thCentury China, where the south pointing chariot was replaced by the magnetic compass.
China and its neighboring countries have large relatively featureless areas, and armies needed a way to determine the correct direction, and in around 500 BCE an engineer came up with a chariot that had an ingenious arrangement of gears and shafts that compensated for every turn the chariot took, and had a statuette on top with a pointing finger that always pointed south. Evidently this was sufficiently accurate to be useful, since records show that many of them were built, and indeed they may have been reinvented or substantially improved later. They were in continuous use until the 11thCentury CE. One can only imagine the complexity, and the maintenance that must have been needed to keep them working properly. Some idea of this can be gained by reading the Wikipedia article. No doubt many efforts were made to improve them, but these efforts always started from the existing technology. Imagine the reaction when someone arrived at the palace with a piece of thread and a magnetized iron bar, and made the south pointing chariot industry entirely redundant.
We live in a world full of hitherto unrecognized south pointing chariots: automotive drivetrains, all kinds of electronic motor speed controls. We have the equivalent to the magnetic compass that will replace them with something stunningly more simple, elegant and practicable.