Connections and Discoveries

Back from the dead. I've been pretty much hospitalized for the past week, but I did manage to burn through the Connections series of documentaries about the history of technology. A lot of the presentation rubbed me the wrong way, but the content was useful.

The progress of technology is not linear and inventions are rarely the work of a lone inventive genius. The machines and systems we have today are the result of the oddest coincidences - a spike in the weather, a disease, a fashion trend, the price of corn - which caused people to find a new solution, which then got picked up for an unrelated purpose, redesigned, and after countless dead ends and failed attempts, gained a hold in the marketplace and could then change the world. If one connection had been missed, if one link had not been mad, the invention might never have existed, or might exist in a very different form.

One of the fundamental assumptions of my world is that their technological development happened much in the same way as it did in our world. At least in Peradiga, the western continent. Their technology is similar to mid-1800's Euro-American technology: steam power, interchangeable parts, single-shot rifles, telegraph, simple surgeries and sterilization. I don't want to mess with it too much because pull out one piece and the whole system crumbles; everything is interconnected and interdependent.

The thing is, they only discovered the new continent forty-some years ago. The presents the problem that the Peradigans have Victorian technology and have still not fully explored their world. And it is further complicated by the fact that most real-world inventions from 1500-1850 were in some way influenced by the Columbian Exchange and the economic and political forces attendant to large-scale colonization.

So, the two key questions are:
How did the Peradigans develop Victorian-like technology without their version of a Columbian Exchange?
Why did the Peradigans not fully explore their world until after they had developed higher-than-necessary technology?

To answer these questions, let me explore the history of Columbus and why he discovered America when he did. One of the key causes was that Constantinople fell to the Turks, blocking the flow of trade on the Silk Road. There had been some ventures out into the western ocean before this, but never any attempt to get to the East by going west because there never had been any need. Supposing the Turks had not taken Constantinople, or that trade to the Orient continued unhindered, nobody would have seen any need or sense in traversing the Atlantic, at least not for some time. If the Americas did not exist, and no European before Columbus had any reason to believe that they did, no sane person would have ventured to cross west at least until the invention of the marine chronometer to accurately measure latitude (around 1750) and probably not until the invention of canned food (1809 - almost perfect for my story).

Columbus was not, in the strictest sense, a sane person. Contrary to popular belief, almost everybody knew the Earth is spherical, and most educated people had a pretty good idea of its size. Columbus vastly underestimated the distance across the Atlantic, citing an obscure reference in Maccabees about the ratio of land to water on the Earth's surface, combined with bad estimates of the actual extent of Eurasia, Columbus screwed up the math, making the Earth smaller and Japan nearer than reality. He was simply amazingly lucky that a continent happened to be where his bad geography said the Orient should be.

Even then, most people knew Columbus was nuts and his math was off. Another fortuitous coincidence is that the Spanish finally finished kicking the Moors our of Iberia in 1492, so suddenly a budget was available for insane projects just at the time a madman was there proposing one. With some loss if he was wrong and a huge ROI if he was right, Ferdie and Izzie gave Chris the green light, and the rest, as they say, is history.

My original story called for a group of Moy sailors to have been blown off course by a severe storm and accidentally discover the eastern continent. This never sat well with me, since trans-oceanic voyages at this time were in the three to six week range, and even severe storms wouldn't work for that. My new story is, with this new 'canned food' technology, a group of Moy set out to circumnavigate the world, believing, as would be reasonable, that there was nothing out there. The Moy have a culture of trying to experience as much as possible in life and tend to take risks in stride, so this sort of thrill-seeking expedition is not out of character for them. Because there was never a need to sail east, and there was never a madman like Columbus who sucked at math, nobody ventured out a-colonizing because you just wouldn't do that unless attempting a full circumnavigation over a truly vast ocean. They didn't try earlier because the food storage technology for a 6-9 month (?) voyage was not available.

Another problem solved.