Oil was an annoying sticky substance until the liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine was invented in 1876. This invention turned it into the most valuable resource in the world for the next 150 years.
That invention turned useless goo into gazillions of wealth.
One simple example is the invention of styrofoam, which was accidentally created [1] when the inventor was looking to produce a flexible electrical insulator.
This reminds me of James Burke Connections. That show often showed how many different and surprising dependencies there are on the path to any given invention. My favorite example is how the internal combustion engine needed an invention from perfume bottles to spray a good mist of fuel/air-mixture into the cylinder. Might have taken longer to invent ICE if that wasn't already readily available.
I really hope that someone remakes a modern version of Connections.
My favorite example is the hydrogen fuel cell. It was invented before the lead acid battery back in the 1800s. PEM gave it a boost around the Apollo era, but that wasn't enough to make it widespread either. Lead-Acid went through its whole 100+ year character arc and hydrogen fuel cells still haven't found product market fit. Sometimes that's how it is.
I mean, your point is a good one but those are bad examples.
The printing press was made to print bibles in bulk.
The internet was made by the DOD and universities, not to transfer large files/images but for small text documents.
Solar came from LEDs which were discovered by accident by scientists working on other semiconductors (trying to find something useful), but to your credit probably explored because it was interesting. 99% of the work done on solar now is to do something useful.
There were, in the distant past, more inventions with immediate uses than today, but most of them also had some pretty horrendous effects that took generations to refine.
I wouldn't be surprised if the transition to farming and the use of fire and all the rest had lots of things we would prefer to avoid if we had present day values and information.
Some things had some immediate use but nowhere near what they have now. The internet was an amazing innovation. But it would just be some military research lab experiments without users, and most webmasters just followed a "How to set up apache" tutorial. Some created something new via their content. Others told stories grounded in heavy academic research.
Drugs and medical products have killed amazing numbers of people, and require massive amounts of tests and calculations to show safety. We even STILL get it wrong sometimes, which means we probably need even more boring tedious data analysis, and probably eventually AI support for doctors.
My favorite example is the industrial revolution. It hurt a lot of people, made a lot of pollution, and there's not much from that era I'd want to use. But over time, the things they invented were refined and recombined, along with some new stuff too, into things that are hundreds of times cheaper, lighter, and smaller.
Light bulbs had a lot of uses. They also were used to mess with work schedules and add more hours. They used a ton of energy. We fixed that with automation and a better understanding of benefits of shorter hours, along with tech like LEDs.
So many inventions seem to initially be used to create new needs that didn't exist before, and add new demands on people, and to make use of new resources that were originally idle for things that we were mostly fine without. Eventually they get refined into something that doesn't really impose any extra burden, and then finally they can be refined to something that minimizes pollution. Eventually we can even replace them entirely with newer tech that has the same benefits.
I can't argue with the problem of people not really reading the article though. Sometimes it seema like 99% of threads on all sites are tangentially related philosophy discussions that only loosely referenced the original article.
Not exactly what you are asking, but the thing that immediately jumped into my mind was: post-it notes. A 3M scientist, trying to improve adhesiveness, came across a property that caused stickiness with poor adhesiveness. Not exactly what he was tasked to invent.
Years passed. Until another 3M scientist, who was struggling with the bookmarks he put in the choir hymnals continuously falling out, thought about his colleague's odd sticky non-adhesive thingamajig. And voila! Post-its were born.
My favorite example is the Roomba. Cool new vacuum cleaner invented, ridiculously broad/abstract patents filed... result, near zero progress for 20 years.
Accidentally discovered items/things include: vulcanised rubber and nylon. Vulcanised rubber came as a result of research being done into developing non-perishable rubber, for which vulcanisation was a solution. In contrast... nylon was discovered during research done into developing a new kind of refrigerant!
Moral of the story... dunno. Maybe solutions can come before problems?
Wasn't the first internal combustion truly new? And the first computer? And the telegraph, etc? If they are just examples of a better something, what was the something?
A good one is the invention of the modern billiard ball. Balls were made from ivory and were very expensive, which prevented the mass popularity of the game.
Michael Phelan put in an ad in the paper offering $10,000 (the equivalent of millions today) to anyone that could develop a substitute for ivory. The result was cellulose, which later begat Bakelite, a perfect substitute.
Oil was an annoying sticky substance until the liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine was invented in 1876. This invention turned it into the most valuable resource in the world for the next 150 years.
That invention turned useless goo into gazillions of wealth.
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