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Ten Ancient Inventions That Flunked The Future

(4 minute read)

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In my forthcoming novel Return to the Galaxy humans find the tech of zero gravity which transforms society.

In my last article I looked at a near future invention – nanobots. In this article I thought I would look back at some astonishing near misses. Technology the ancients had and didn’t develop fully.

If you've ever yelled at a sci-fi character for missing the obvious, don’t be too quick to judge. Real history is full of missed opportunities. Civilizations that touched the future, then shrugged and turned away.
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Here are seven astonishing near-misses and three tragic absences. Together, they make you wonder how close we’ve come, more than once, to living in a very different world.

1. The Roman Steam Engine ​
Hero of Alexandria built a working steam turbine in the first century. It spun and hissed with pressure. The Romans admired it, then used it to power novelty toys for wealthy children. The idea of replacing labor with machines? That never caught on. Why automate when you have slaves?

2. The Baghdad Battery​
Found in modern-day Iraq, this 2,000-year-old clay jar may have been used for electroplating. It contained a copper tube, an iron rod, and acidic liquid. In short, a battery. But no lights, no motors, no spark of an electrical age. Just a forgotten experiment in a museum.

3. The Antikythera Mechanism​
Salvaged from a Greek shipwreck, this astonishing device could predict eclipses and track planetary movements with mechanical gears. A computer, built in 100 BC, centuries before computers. Then the knowledge vanished, lost to history, only to be rediscovered when Charles Babbage designed the first true computer, the Difference Engine, in London in 1822 AD.

4. Greek Atomic Theory​
Democritus proposed that everything was made of indivisible particles. He called them atoms. But in the absence of a scientific method, the idea was treated as elegant philosophy, not testable truth. Two thousand years later, it finally became science.

5. Viking Settlements in the Americas​
Norse explorers reached Newfoundland around the year 1000, five hundred years before Columbus. They built houses, made tools, and traded with locals. Then they left. No sustained colonization. No exchange of knowledge. One of history’s greatest journeys, abandoned before it had time to matter.

6. The Egyptian Surgical Toolkit​
Medical papyri from 1600 BCE show advanced understanding of anatomy, antiseptics, and even brain surgery. They splinted limbs, stitched wounds, and drained abscesses. But their knowledge remained isolated. If that knowledge had spread, global populations would have boomed. History would be very different.

7. Chinese Rocketry, Seismographs, and Navigation​
By the 10th century, China had developed navigational compasses, multi-stage rockets, and even seismographs to detect earthquakes. But after the Ming dynasty turned inward, innovation slowed. Europe took their ideas, crossed oceans, and changed the map.
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Now for the epic misses. Times when a civilization had everything. Except the one thing that could have changed the world.

8. No Wheel in the Inca Empire​
The Inca engineered mountaintop cities, stone roads, and vast agricultural systems. They even made wheeled wooden carts as children’s toys. But they never used the wheel for transport. Without it, carts and wagons never rolled. And the idea of harnessing it for animals or machines never came.

9. The Islamic World and the Printing Press​
When Gutenberg’s press began spreading knowledge across Europe, many Islamic leaders saw it as a potential way to spread heresy. For centuries, printing was banned or heavily restricted. A single invention that could have triggered a second golden age was left unused.

10. The Romans Never Industrialized Water Power​
The Romans used aqueducts and watermills but never scaled them beyond local utility. They could have mechanized cloth or grain production but didn’t. They left the steam engine in toy form. 1,500 years later the British used both to start the industrial revolution. History could have been very different.

Final Thought​
Progress is never guaranteed. Sometimes, a great leap forward arrives early, gets ignored, and vanishes.

What breakthroughs might we be overlooking right now?

P.S. If you enjoyed this glimpse at alternate history, imagine what happens when Ewan Scott and his crew discover a data base of advanced alien tech in Return to the Galaxy. My debut novel launches on Amazon on June 17th.

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Keep Dreaming,

BA Gillies, Author​
(I call myself an author because bleary-eyed lunatic who obsesses over imaginary friends isn’t an official job title!)

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