>Certainly one doesn't think Watt was the
> only person in the world working on steam.
No, probably not....kind of like the Japanese used submarines in their
war(s) with Korea in like the 1400s. Oops! There goes another one! Or
was it the KOREANS with the submarines? In any case, the top of the
"sub" was actually at the surface. Kind of making it like the Monitor,
which was almost a submarine. Well, the CONFEDERATES had a REAL
submarine....the Hunley!* And don't get me going on the Confederate
missile with the cryogenic first stage using LOX technology gleaned
from James Clerk Maxwell...besides, I'm pretty sure that's just a
legend! Even though I used to have a nice "Confederate Rocket" page on
an ex-Geocities website of mine.
* Oh! And the American sub in the Revolution! Almost forgot about that
one, though I did a paper on it in eighth grade American History.
Anyway, there's a whole field of study, I think called OOPS, Out Of
Place Artifacts. That acronym doesn't fit very well, does it? I do a
lot of stuff off the top of my head, yet I think it's usually pretty
accurate...just missing details. We all have Google and other sources
available, but the point is that a lot of stuff existed in ancient
times that simply did not go anywhere, when it COULD have...ancient
Greek electric batteries and such. Whew! The Greeks could have pitted
electric vs. steam boats to see what got the next defense contract!
Guess steam would have won. Either way, the Romans would have been
dead meat!
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