Some inventions are gated by scientific discovery, particularly in materials.
For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron, causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium. But it wasn't invented until 1948. No one had done the experiment and seen that effect.
Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride. It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn't until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.
Basic research. There are a lot of combinations to try. It makes sense to try them methodically and share the results, to avoid duplication of effort.
(The experiment of course can certainly be retried, in case there was an error, but the published result has value). There was a good interview of Doron Aurbach on this, but sadly it appears to have disappeared from Soundcloud. https://www.electrochem.org/ecs-blog/doron-aurbach-commercia...
Chemistry and materials research is an especially bad fit for the startup solution model where everybody's repeating the same things, often even in secret.
The startups instead build on top of that basic research. Like electric scooters or cars were built on top of the technology of cheap energy-dense lithium batteries.
What a startup can do is focus on a technique, rather than a specific discovery, and use that technique to make discoveries. The example I'm thinking of is Siluria, an MIT spinoff (or, at least, involving people from MIT; they were based in the bay area), which used phage display templating to make catalysts. They came up with the first practical catalyst for the oxidative coupling of methane to produce ethane. I believe they've since been bought by a larger petrochemical company.
That might be good. I guess one problem with that is that if the technique is not published or even sold, then others can't use it to make discoveries.
Discovery is half the battle. Theory plays a role.
Currently there is some research into "high-entropy alloys" which are just mixtures of metals we've known about for a while with certain special crystal properties. It's a foregone conclusion that many of the known HEAs could have been prepared in the 1930s, but would it make sense to do so? What epiphany could possibly tell you to prepare Cr19.75Mn20.10Fe20.25Co20.48Ni19.42 (Science 345 (6201) 1153-8) without having a theory of crystal deformation in metals?
Radio comes to mind. All the physical pieces to make a working, if extremely limited and inefficient, radio communications system were there since forever. People knew how to make electric current since ancient times. An antenna is just a piece of twisted metal (and in a pinch, almost anything can work as an antenna). But to get from that to a wireless telegraph, you'd either need a lot of dumb luck, or some understanding of how electricity and magnetism behave.
Computer Forensics is an area that can totally get some love. The hardware and software is designed to be used by large agencies, pricing out the consumer space (for data recovery) and the small business (for data recovery)
There are some decent open source forensics projects out there, such as The Sleuth Kit / Autopsy. I'm not sure how well they compare to the more pricey alternatives like EnCase, but they seem popular enough among law enforcement.
Research into what... I think that is part of the problem.
I was recently reading a click bait article about how some craft person knew something an archeologist didn't... The Portuguese is no one knows everything. Also look at a lot of our technological marvels ah were accidents.
More resesrch won't necessarily help, if you are already going down the wrong path
Ductile iron could have been invented before 1808 if Davy had produced magnesium sooner. So this is a 'turtles all the way down' explanation.
Or is it? Imagine a directed graph of technologies where each node has outgoing links to its dependencies. Nodes may be added randomly (if their dependencies are present), but we don't consider them important until important things depend on them. In other words, there is a PageRank threshold for "inventions".
Instead of adding possible new nodes uniformly at random, we might assume their chance of discovery is inversely proportional to the sum of the PageRanks of their dependencies. Similarly, a new web page is unlikely to link to many obscure pages. (Alternatively, I think you can add nodes randomly and periodically delete low-ranking nodes.)
The Davy reference was a bit aggressive, I must confess. The early ways of making magnesium metal would have worked on a lab scale, and would have been frightfully expensive. Practical Mg production had to wait for the large scale production of electric power for electrolysis, or for the production of silicon (in electric arc furnaces) for the Pidgeon process. Still, magnesium was being produced in large quantities by WW 1, if not before.
Industrial-scale production began in Germany in 1886. There was another significant change in 1924-1925 with the development of a truly anhydrous chloride melt, which significantly reduced anode wear and increased energy efficiency.
For the production of ductile iron, one major challenge was managing the loss of magnesium by boiling since the BP of Mg is so much lower than the MP of cast iron.
"Fundamentals of Magnesium Addition to Ductile Iron"
You can see multiple gating factors for why magnesium based production of ductile iron was not discovered (or at least industrialized) earlier:
- Early industrial magnesium production was expensive due to high electrolytic anode wear from impure raw materials.
- Electrolytic magnesium production was also expensive due to the high cost of electric power; 1880s-era generators had low thermal efficiency and generated electricity at high costs [1].
- Early ductile iron production suffered from high losses of costly magnesium, due to boil-off. The various economizing measures described in the second paper I linked above did not yet have their own enabling technologies available in the 19th century.
[1] I'm not going to try to reproduce my full work here, but I was surprised at the high cost of electricity I found referenced in an American chemical engineering textbook from 1940. On further investigation of the consumer price index and published historical electricity prices, I found that electricity was (by contemporary American standards) quite expensive before WW II, and relatively expensive through the 1950s. It wasn't until the 1960s that electricity became fairly cheap.
I've been digging into the topic since "progress studies" got more popular, but it seems like no one has done much in that direction (which is also what my initial hunches suggested should be tried).
There's a lot of grunt work to do if you want to label the data to match our current technological reality, but in the abstract, it still seems to me that building such models could yield interesting insights.
You can add all sorts of bells and whistles to make it more interesting (play with diffusion speed, the inherent difficulty of the discoveries required, etc.).
Equally possible that many things are discovered and due to historical time, those discoveries get lost and only measured as invented when discovered and documented.
How much has been invented and only counted as invented as it was written down and known about.
For example, ductile iron (which involves adding 1% magnesium to molten iron, causing carbon to precipitate on cooling as small spheroids instead of dendrites, making the iron much less brittle than ordinary cast iron) could have been invented any time after 1808, when Davy produced magnesium. But it wasn't invented until 1948. No one had done the experiment and seen that effect.
Another example, also coincidentally involving magnesium, is magnesium diboride. It was synthesized and its structure characterized in 1953, but it wasn't until 2001 that it was realized it was a superconductor with a critical temperature of 39 K.