Many inventions seem to arrive out of order. That is: considerably ahead of or behind where you’d expect them to show up. One of the best examples of this is the semaphore.

Early Semaphore

The semaphore was a long distance communication system invented in 1792 by the Frenchman Claude Chappe. It takes the form of a series of towers with clear lines of sight between them, with large pivoting arms on top. The arms are moved in a visual code, representing the individual letters, which the next tower in the line then repeats, and so on and so forth.

When it was invented, the semaphore was the fastest method of communication available at the time. There were quite a few limitations, of course: it didn’t work well (or really at all) at night or in bad weather, the towers were expensive to build, several were destroyed by angry mobs, and it required attendants at every tower, which drastically increased operating costs.

You could still send messages faster through the semaphore than by other method, and it saw considerable use for the next 50 years, until the electrical telegraph took its place.

It seems like the semaphore should have been invented much, much earlier. None of the technology was by any means too advanced for, say, the Roman Empire. It’s just swinging arms on a tower, after all, and they had plenty of gears and pulleys and the resources to develop a massive network of them, if they so chose. They had the math necessary to develop codes. There were even a number of Roman experiments in optical telegraphy. So why didn’t they build the semaphore?

The answer is actually pretty simple: telescopes. The Romans lacked the advanced optics necessary to build decent telescopes, which meant that semaphores would’ve been built much, much closer together, to the point where they would no longer be cost effective, even for the mighty Roman Empire.

Technological advancement isn’t conducted in a vacuum. Each new invention requires a network of other advances around it, making new tools, ideas, and techniques available to the inventors. This is not to say there’s a set order in which technology must be invented. Many of our technologies were not an inevitable development but, often, merely choices made for business or cultural reasons, or even out of convenience.

Our technology could have ended up radically different than it did…but it still would have built itself from the ground up.

The history of technology we usually teach kids is a flashy one. They hear about atomic bombs, rocket ships, computers. If it’s big, shiny, explodes, is immensely expensive and difficult to create, we teach them about it. Occasionally, we might mention a really important, yet more boring one, like nitrogen fertilizers. But generally? It’s shiny objects all the way down.

Modern nitrogen fertilizers, are, in my book, the most important invention of the 20th century. Forget computers, forget atom bombs: nitrogen fertilizers are what allow us to maintain our global population levels—and they might get a few sentences in your average grade school history book.

When you look at even less-flashy inventions, they get less and less in the way of attention paid to them. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you never think about one of the categories of devices you use most often. Kitchenware.

The Modern Kitchen

Seriously. Go in your kitchen right now, and pick up…let’s say, a rubber spatula. We’ve had rubber for much, much longer than we’ve had rubber spatulas, so why did we invent them? Well, you probably have a non-stick pan, right? Try scraping it out with a metal spatula, and you’re going to scrape off the non-stick coating. (Which, apparently, is really bad for your health.)

Or take a look at cast iron pans. They’ve got a bit of a reputation for being a little on the tough side to clean, right? Well, they used to be considerably easier to clean, but as they drifted a bit more out of popular use (though never went completely absent), a final step of the production process was dropped. They used to be sand casted, then given a strong polish, but this polishing step was dropped to save on costs, so antique cast iron is actually considerably more non-stick.

Every single pot, pan, knife, item of silverware, or bizarre back-of-the-drawer gizmo in your kitchen has an extensive history all its own. And even a cultural context: five centuries ago, a muffin pan would have been pretty much useless scrap, thanks to the lack of common closed range stoves. These are tools that you use constantly and are personally relevant every day. Atom bombs? They can, really, only be personally relevant once.

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Photo by Todd Ehlers from McGregor, Iowa, a Mississippi River town, U.S. of A. (1937 Kitchen–Not Bad!) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.