how do engineers create new machines that couldn’t be done before? How do they discover or come up with new technologies?
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Typically; a new physical phenomena is described, or the manufacturing technologies for a given device or machine or whatever is made small enough, cheap enough, or ubiquitous enough to be applied in a new way.
So someone somewhere invents a better wheel, and then everyone else either uses that better wheel or uses the ideas that went into creating that better wheel to create other things.
For a more concrete example; the idea of engine control units is really old, particularly with old mechanical computation systems from the ’40s, but it didn’t really catch on until the ’70s when microprocessors became a thing, and thus a relatively small computational system that you could put in a car became economically and technologically feasible. From there, all sorts of new engine and emissions control technologies were added on, because now you could have a computer controlling all of it.
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