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this documentary just said it took until the renaissance for handles on pots and pans to get long enough to not burn the cook's hands lmfao european cooking technology absolute bullshit
every single time i watch a history documentary my main takeaway is that very basic, seemingly-obvious labor-saving gadgets took obscene amounts of time to be developed. obviously this was mostly a result of peasant labor and time being of almost-zero value, but...
it still baffles me that, for example, at no point did anyone apparently think to use foot power instead of human hand power or, later, little dogs in hamster wheels, to turn a cooking spit. spit technology went hand crank => dog => smoke-powered flywheel. no foot pedaling
i saw a foot-powered spit once and it was an eccentric victorian invention using a bicycle, and of course by that point the entire procedure was basically on the way out anyway. very weird
it took a long time for people to figure out they should clean chimneys or else the chimneys wouldnt work well and then eventually explode. like it took hundreds of years following the invention of the chimney to discover this. hundreds of people died from chimney fires first
stirrups on saddles? thousands of years between the invention of 'riding a horse' until anyone figured out stirrups. i can never figure out if im just a modern chauvinist to wonder why, or there's an additional explanation
dont ask me for citations on any of this, it's just factoids gleaned from watching thousands of "Absolute History" docs, time team, worst jobs in history, etc on youtube
the infamous reign of Kaiser Bohnenvater I https://twitter.com/ThaumPenguin/status/1359087462820302848
AT THE SAME TIME a lot of paleo- and pre-modern technology Just Worked. pre-chimney for example, the smoke from indoor fires building up at the ceiling and seeping out through thatched roof kept the straw bone dry and free of bugs and snow. so who can say etc
incredibly good example i hadnt even thought of. fucking lol https://twitter.com/chudsommeleir/status/1359089259668332546
this stuff is one reason why army of darkness is so good. its completely plausible that a modern doofus could travel back in time and just rube goldberg a bunch of semi-functional simple machinery based on foundational mechanical principles from his everyday life
drowning was a leading cause of death for working class women into the tudor period because doing DAILY laundry in the freezing cold rivers meant if you tripped and got your incredibly heavy woolen clothes wet you would go into hypothermic shock, gasp a lungful of water, and sink
there are so many solutions to this issue it boggles the mind: take off your incredibly heavy woolen clothes for a few minutes, build a dock or boat, use simple rope safety lines, cork or wood emergency floatation devices, and on and on and on. none of which happened afaik
it's possible that peasants did have various local solutions to these problems but they werent important enough to the literati to be recorded, and im sure that was the case in some locations. but there was no widespread technology. it was just death laundry every day
we have a LOT of eyewitness illustrations of daily life of peasants recorded by monks and artists in illuminations and woodcuts, and i believe they really would have noted down those kinds of devices, but no evidence of them exists
these people were not stupid! its just really confusing looking back and seeing the holes where very obvious mechanical devices took centuries to be invented and applied
anyway watching these docs always makes me so hungry for an entire roast chicken, stew, bread and butter, candied pears, etc etc etc. man there was some good food
i remeber this kind of stuff every single time i see someone hollering about havin to wear masks https://twitter.com/acgodliman/status/1359097281849548805
the pandemic has made people truly mentally ill. theres a man leaving ten replies about luggage wheels in my mentions rn and he is legitimately upset
he is rebuking me for not doing a "materialist analysis" and thinks wheels on suitcases were literally impossible to implement prior to the 1970s because we didnt have the "manufacturing technology" to make little wheels. ok man
every day is another great aunt cat tetanus thread
some of these types of arguments are sort of legit, for example the one about NASA zero-gee pen vs russian space program pencil. it was pointed out to me that pencils tend to splinter and break off little bits of graphite that could really fuck up a spacecraft. fair enough
