how do engineers create new machines that couldn’t be done before? How do they discover or come up with new technologies?
In: 2
One factor is technologies are interdependent.
Horse riding wasn’t invented before horse breeding because riding a horse that is pony size into a battle was just ridiculous. And horse breeding was slown down by the low horse request of the era.
Wheelbarrows are pretty simple, but if you have no roads, they are useless. And to make a road you need road tech and so on, and a reason to make a road.
Civil drones are a very recent thing, not because sticking 4 fans to a light body was any difficult. Battery weight, electric motor digital control, and optical gyroscope weren’t there before. In year 2000 the same drone electronics would have been a good 5 kg in weight and 50k or more dollars worth. And good luck fly that with a lead battery. If you tried that back then you would have been described as a lunatic.
So the main duty of an engineer that invents something is basically do 2+2 when finally there are enough tech bits to make a concept work. He concept itself may be there and proved failed for a long time.
There are countless failed invention that re-emerged once the accessory tech bits were ready. Take DaVinci works, he basically wrote an enciclopedia of things that couldn’t ever work at that time but they were all pretty good ideas.
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