To wonder how some things were invented?

[malificent7]

I love knitting and crochet but who looked at a sheep and thought to spin the wool into yarn and then use hooks/ needles to create clothes?! I know the process evolved rather than being the brainchild of a single person but still.

Also tv/ internet. How do pictures end of on thesescreens seemingly out of nowhere?!

Care to add any more?

@neverknowinglyunreasonable hmmmm, I wonder whether it might be worth questioning tall family tales a bit more? Knitting is more than a few hundred years old. Logic tells me that's true at the very least!

It's often what is easiest to understand when two languages but up together and people try to communicate.

But getting everyone in the country to agree, that doesn't happen now. That's why generally in English we add an 's' to make a plural. But we didn't always and odd words have the 'en' ending instead, children, women.

What is a teacake?

Does it have raisins on not?

Is it the same as a bread roll, a bap, barm cake? Is a batch the same as a butty?

Try this

Reading French without knowing French.

Most of the things on this thread aren't sudden moments of brilliance, they are tiny improvements on processes.

Animals eat other animals' eggs. We are descended from other hominid animals. There would never have been a time when homo sapiens didn't eat birds'eggs. Can you still eat an egg if it's been in a fire or hot water? Turns out you can. You can do it on purpose once you can make fire.

The simplest bridge is a naturally fallen tree over a stream. If I move a tree trunk to do that on purpose I've built a bridge. If I anchor it with boulders it's a better bridge. Once I have stone, then iron, tools to shape wood I can create ever more elaborate bridges.

Incremental steps.

Spinning came first - really early. Twisting bundles of fiber (originally plant fibers) to make string/ rope. Then knitting them into useful things like bags and baskets and nets, then weaving. Using wool yarn developed in early bronze age, knitting likely about 800 AD in Egypt area. Knitting is weird and non-obvious. Crotchet even later!

I often think this about capers. Who looked at tiny flower buds and thought, I bet they’d be nice pickled!

Knitting is just knotting using tools, really. Seems a predictable step from gathering wool for warmth to twisting to tying to all the rest of it.

Love to hear more about this great great great grandmother though

Also, on the subject of knitting. Wild sheep aren't that wooly so, first, someone (in reality disparate groups of people in different places) thought about breeding the wooliest ones to get what we think of as sheep today (or llamas etc)

Getting fabric from plants seems a much bigger leap to me

Yes, agree it’s lightning. Watch the film Sweet Home Alabama as this is one of the plot points!

Mayonnaise has always baffled me. Egg yolks and oil and vinegar. Bleugh on paper - an unlikely combo - but heavenly when all put together.

When I watch 'Inside the Factory' I always wonder how people/engineers design the machines that will wrap the biscuits or sort out different flavours for boxes of chocolates.

I think you underestimate how hungry and cold people were and how much free time they had.

People ate lots of non food just in the hope it'd keep them alive.

Sometimes those things worked so they kept doing them.

Olives - I can understand the oil extraction. But who on earth found out that if you pierce the skin and place in brine, regularly changing the brine, makes them yummy?

Who found out that you can eat rhubarb stalks but not the leaves?

And the fact that someone, somewhere, was the first person to taste chocolate ice cream ……. Mind blowing!

I often wonder about these types of things too - I guess we all do, therefore shows like 'How did they do that'!
Interesting that while knitting can be replicated by machines, crochet can't, yet lace can.

😂😂😂

But often things aren't just invented in a whim, they develop over time. Concrete is a good example of this.

Build a structure using stones that stays up but has gaps, fill those gaps with mud, try other things - come up with 'wattle and daub', need something better etc etc .....

Feeling cold, put an animal skin in, playing around with the fibres rubbing them in your hands, forms a long thin string, make a few, put them together, realise you can make lots of 'covers' out of one skin .....

If you look at nature lots of things have been invented from it. I would love to invent something, sadly I don't think I'm imaginative or clever enough.

Great post.

It's completely random I think. Some might be genuine innovation but a lot of accidents yield solutions.

It'd be interesting to know for sure but warp and weft may have started out with twigs for primitive shelter before the principles were applied to fabric. I'm going to Google as I sometimes work with carbon fibre for aircraft/spacecraft and that is sometimes woven fabric.

I don't know much about TV but the internet is all zeros and ones (binary). Something virtually everything is reduced to nowadays for sound, pictures, video and the text we see on our screens. It's transmitted via carrier waves in the air or as light pulses in glass fibre cables. But to get it into space and back again, all those zeros and ones need to travel by air to a satellite to then sent to wherever it needs to go. Sometimes we need a dish or antenna to pick it up but it also travel down the telephone network or cable.

Gas.
How did someone think...hmm, wonder what will happen if I put my lighted flaming stick to this?
And how many heads were blown off finding out?
Plus, did man sit up against a tree chewing a leaf thinking...hmm, I wonder if I saw the leg off that cow, what it will taste like?

Threads like this remind me of a recent thread where someone was deliberately being " ditzy" in the office to garner attention.

Modern inventions, you can look it up.

Ancient stuff like why we eat meat, eggs ,milk are because we are omnivores and very hungry omnivores will eat anything.

Sometimes we found we liked these things.

Cooking, smelting, making glass were accidental discoveries due to our ability to control fire.

I am aware this will not go down well.

Yeah thanks for the lead balloon 😂

Who invented coke and thought 'even better up the nose'

I'm not saying it was aliens..... but......

🤣

Sorry, had to be done.

But premise of the thread is fascinating and I also enjoy speculating and marvelling at the order that has been created from apparent random chaos....

Late DP was a piercer, who researched the anthropological aspect of it. But right back in the beginning, who the heck thought "I know, I'll make a hole in myself and stick something pretty in it. And maybe later I'll stick hooks in my back and swing from a tree because it'll give me a rush"

Who saw the cow's udders dripping fluid and thought, 'i know, I'm going to squeeze one/pull one and drink what comes out'.

Language baffles me. Like the fact that we call France 'France' but German people call in Frankreich, Spanish people call it Francia etc. So one country can have hundreds of different names.

Also the fact that people in different countries were inventing things concurrently despite being thousands of miles apart and never meeting.

Mushrooms. It might taste nice, it might kill me excruciatingly.