It still blows my mind that they abandoned the printing press for aesthetic reasons, long before Gutenberg was born.
And bamboo really is a hell of a material. The breadth of vocational materials science they had was staggering.
Re:Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
by marcosdumay on Monday July 15, 2019 @07:56PM
(#20446392)
Well, their printing press wasn't nearly as useful as Gutenberg's. Mostly because of weak materials.
A printing press isn't as useful if you have to manually verify and fix the types ever other print.
Re:Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
by Nasrudith on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @11:47PM
(#20466519)
I had heard another other issue cited as a possible culprit - that their alphabet wasn't very suited to it given their vast number of characters not gaining as much.
It brings to mind one artifact of letter construction being based upon the writing method - cuneiform vs ink pen letters for instance.
Re:Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
by selimthegrim on Monday July 29, 2019 @05:26PM
(#20559626)
In _My Unwritten Books_, George Steiner has a go at Needham for hypocrisy in using his authority on Chinese civilization to make false statements about the Vietnam War
A find of the past few years has been Joseph Needham's truly epic Science and Civilisation in China. Begun in 1954, still in production -- the series is not yet completed, 7 volumes, 27 books. Simon Winchester (also author of The Perfectionists, mentioned in this thread, has an excellent biography, The Man Who Loved China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_Ch...