The excellent ‘Roots of Progress’ blog investigates a very interesting question.
Personally, I’ve lately been starting to believe that precision manufacturing is much more difficult and finicky than people generally realize. Even if given precise and comprehensive plans for a high-precision product, it’s very difficult for a new manufacturer to start manufacturing it without hands-on help from someone who’s actually done it. This reaches its apex in semiconductor chip manufacturing, which is so difficult that basically only one company, TSMC, is able to manufacture the high-end wafers.
(this has been of interest to me because it somewhat decreases the risk of human extinction from AI; killing all humans is a losing move for any AI system not yet capable of this level of very-high-precision manufacture, which may require significantly greater-than-human intelligence to be able to reliably spin up from scratch on any reasonable timeframe)
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Yet it was a simple mechanical invention. It would seem to require no brilliant inventive insight, and certainly no scientific background.
Why, then, wasn’t it invented much earlier?