I think part of the “continuity” comes from the fact that things that were “ahead of their time” tended not to be useful yet and get lost.Or worse, perhaps several people had to independently come up with, and support, and learn about an idea enough to use it for it to be actually adopted, or it just ends up sitting in some tinkerer’s basement or a dusty old tome.
So, you can flip this question: Which discoveries and inventions seem to have occurred after their time (e.g. they were technologically possible, the prerequisite ideas were pretty well known, and they would have been immensely useful practically in that time and place) and why didn’t civilization get at them before?
The safety bicycle (two gears and a chain) came in only 1885, long after trains. But the roller power chain was invented by da Vinci hundreds of years earlier and not adopted.
I think part of the “continuity” comes from the fact that things that were “ahead of their time” tended not to be useful yet and get lost. Or worse, perhaps several people had to independently come up with, and support, and learn about an idea enough to use it for it to be actually adopted, or it just ends up sitting in some tinkerer’s basement or a dusty old tome.
So, you can flip this question: Which discoveries and inventions seem to have occurred after their time (e.g. they were technologically possible, the prerequisite ideas were pretty well known, and they would have been immensely useful practically in that time and place) and why didn’t civilization get at them before?
The safety bicycle (two gears and a chain) came in only 1885, long after trains. But the roller power chain was invented by da Vinci hundreds of years earlier and not adopted.