Thread by @jasoncrawford

I have asked before why certain inventions weren't created earlier. The cotton gin, the bicycle. @antonhowes has mentioned the flying shuttle.

@ATabarrok calls these “ideas behind their time.”

What if some of these *were* invented before—but kept private, or even secret?

I thought of this today reading @ATabarrok's piece on innovation in prosthetic limbs. James Hanger was an amputee himself who was unhappy with a peg leg, and whittled a new one for himself, with hinges.

marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolu…

This being the 19th century, Hanger created a company and marketed his invention, and his company is still a major player in prosthetics today.

But what if this happened in the 16th century?

You can certainly imagine some enterprising amputee soldier, with a knack for woodworking, making himself a new wooden leg in that era.

But it's much harder to imagine him starting a company or marketing it. Corporations didn't exist, the patent system wasn't in place, etc.

The cotton gin is similar. Maybe some cotton farmer thought of a similar idea, and made one in his shed—it would have been easy enough, plenty of farmers made bootleg copies of Eli Whitney's invention.

But instead of marketing it, they might have kept it to themselves, a trade secret. Why share with competitors?

I doubt this actually happened, it seems the word would have gotten out and there'd be some record of it. But you can imagine this in other areas.

Blacksmithing, for example. We know that blacksmiths, and craftsmen in general, guarded their secrets jealously, passing them on only to their descendants or trusted apprentices.

It was a competitive advantage, why give it up?

There was no IP, you couldn't patent it or license it. You could only lose it and lose control of it. The most sensible course was to keep it to yourself.

What if inventions have cropped up all the time throughout history, and stayed as personal devices of the inventors, never making it into the world or into the history books? We wouldn't necessarily know. It's part of the dark matter of history.

What if what changed around the Industrial Revolution wasn't a higher rate of invention, but a higher rate of inventions getting marketed and sold? (For any number of reasons, including but not limited to patents, corporations, etc.)

I don't believe this 100%, I think there must have been a higher rate of invention too. But it's a piece of the puzzle and worth considering.

Here's where I asked this of the cotton gin, BTW: rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wai…

And here's where I discussed the bicycle (one of my most popular posts): rootsofprogress.org/why-did-we-wai…

Here's where @antonhowes says similar things about the flying shuttle: medium.com/@antonhowes/is…

And finally, my piece on iron, steel and blacksmithing: rootsofprogress.org/iron-from-myth…

PS: I briefly suggested corporations and patents as two factors that could have affected this. @NickSzabo4 countered that this doesn't check out (see replies).

But those specific factors are not really the point. Maybe it was lack of machine tools. Lack of a market. Etc.

My point is really that lack of *invention* itself doesn't have to be the *only* factor. It's possible that things got invented and were only used by their creators—never marketed, sold, or mass-manufactured, possibly even deliberately kept secret—and then lost to history.

Again I'm also not saying that I actually think that happened a *lot*. Probably it was rare. I suspect that inventiveness itself increased significantly as part of the Industrial Revolution.

Just saying it might not have been *as* rare as it seems from history.