There is a category of historical evidence that is systematically misleading in a way nobody notices, and early photographs are the clearest case.
A photograph feels like direct evidence. It…
Source: Wikipedia
There is an assumption that pre-modern financial systems were crude, and it is worth testing against an example.
The English Exchequer — the department handling royal revenue — kept…
The technical term for this is path dependence: an early decision constrains everything afterwards, not because it was right but because too much was built on top of it. Here…
Weaving was invented independently in every inhabited part of the world, which is a strong indication that the problem has a limited number of solutions. Here are eleven of the…
Before printing, every copy of every text was made by hand and therefore differed from every other copy. Almost everything below follows from that changing. Here are sixteen.
1. Paper…
Source: Wikipedia
None of these vanished dramatically. They thinned out over a decade or two, until the last practitioners were curiosities rather than colleagues. Here are fifteen.
1. Switchboard Operator
Source:…