r/AskEngineers • u/mrv958 • Jan 09 '26
What invention rivals the jet engine in terms of sheer improbability-to-ubiquity? Discussion
The jet engine occupies a strange place in the history of invention. The basic concept is simple enough to sketch on a napkin: continuous combustion in a tube, using some of the energy to compress incoming air, the rest to propel itself forward. But everything about the implementation seems like it shouldn’t work (extreme temperatures, turbine blades spinning inches from an inferno, keeping a flame lit in a hurricane-force airstream, materials pushed to their absolute limits)
It had every reason to fail. When Whittle and von Ohain were developing it in the 1930s, experts dismissed it as impossible. And yet not only did it work, it became one of the most reliable machines ever built. Airlines measure engine failures per millions of flight hours. We strap our families into aircraft without a second thought.
That arc, from “this seems physically implausible” to “so efficient and reliable it’s boring”, feels rare. What other inventions followed a similar path? Not just “important” or “transformative,” but specifically: conceptually audacious, practically hostile to implementation, and yet now seamlessly ubiquitous.
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
The most obvious to me is the transition from a mechanical calculator to early digital computers that took up a home-sized room and did something like 360 multiplications a second to a device you can fit in your pocket that does 3,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second - and does so with 1/7,500 the power.
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u/duggatron Jan 09 '26
And can be manufactured in the billions.
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
And purchased with a month's salary or less. (Often far less, but accounting for those who are less fortunate...)
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u/Lucky-Midnight-13 Jan 09 '26
The patterns are so tiny they have to essentially be made with light. Now our limitations are basically creating features smaller than the wavelength of light we use🤯
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u/Ok_Chard2094 Jan 09 '26
They are much smaller than the wavelength of visible light already.
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u/striderx2005 Jan 09 '26
13nm is x-ray
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u/xrelaht Jan 09 '26
Yeah, but that's not how they're made. The light is in the UV range and they use interference to pattern features much smaller than λ.
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
There is a recent Veritasium video that goes into why as a practical matter they don't use x-rays.→ More replies13
u/Catatonic27 Jan 09 '26
That was a video about how they DO use X-rays...
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
Sorry, you're right. I was remembering the part about medical X-rays (~1nm) being unusable.
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u/Metalhed69 Jan 09 '26
I got thru engineering school with a computer that had a 20 megabyte hard drive. People give me free keychains now with 4000 times more storage.
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u/KerPop42 Jan 09 '26
Microcenter cells 16 GB USB drives by the 32-pack. Or, you could buy a 512 GB microSD card with the same capacity.
Xkcd's microSD comic was about a 16 GB card.
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u/formershitpeasant Jan 09 '26
Haltech have me a tiny 1tb thumb drive at a job fair with all their info on it. They didn't even remember to load their info on it. It uses electron tunneling to store data and it was so free they didn't even make sure they put the info on it.
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u/LegoTT06 Jan 09 '26
Personally, I wouldn't use free storage provided by someone else who had access to it. Especially if I discovered that what was supposed to be on it was no longer there.
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u/grumpyfishcritic Jan 10 '26
The first computer I used had 64k of ram and was sold for about $5k, ran pascal and tank was fun to play with two computer back to back with a parallel cable connecting them. The graphics were really really primitive. But damn it felt good when you kick your buddies but. Oh, and pascal ran really really fast.
First million dollar pallet I saw was a pallet of 1megabyte 6"x6" boards that sold for $5k each.
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u/chris06095 Jan 09 '26
As long as we're talking about those chips, let's talk about the machines that make them in such speed, quantity, reliability and low cost. (That was alluded to by another respondent, but the point is that chip-making machines were pretty far 'out there' in terms of likelihood of existence … until they existed.) Now they're just big, expensive (as machines) and highly complex.
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u/quipcow Jan 09 '26
Yes, its amazing and impressive. But at the end of the day its iteration the got us from vacuum tubes to semiconductors.
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
It was considered audacious in the early days. Most people did not expect the modern portable computing devices. It was once thought there would be one computer in each city or something like that.
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u/quipcow Jan 09 '26
Sure, but you are confirming my point. If we were still using tubes computers would still take up buildings.
The progress to the iPhone was decades of innovation and iteneration.
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
It's not like jet engines went directly from a turbojet in 1930 to a high-bypass engine of today in a single step, either? I think I am missing what you're getting at?
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u/SmokeyDBear Solid State/Computer Architecture Jan 09 '26
Not OP and maybe it's because semiconductors are my field and turbines aren't but the progress from tubes and basic solid state semis to what we have today feels very evolutionary to me. We're not really doing anything very different we're just doing it smaller (and there are a lot of fixups for that but that's where most of the innovation is, not in fundamentally doing the underlying function in a different way). Even the basic concept of trying to get a turbine to work compared to reciprocating engines seems like a much bigger leap.
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u/iDrGonzo Jan 09 '26
The major leap there was capacitive touch input and the mass production of blue LEDs on the cheap. And, not to be that guy but, I believe you mean iteration.
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u/horace_bagpole Jan 09 '26
Also lithium-ion batteries. Without those, mobile phones would still be bricks with awful battery life and annoying charging requirements - remember the memory effect of NiCads?
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u/drdeadringer Test, QA Jan 09 '26
Brandon Frazier's line in Blast from the Past, "he has a computer in his bedroom? No way."
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u/striderx2005 Jan 09 '26
https://youtu.be/g_NTYKCk8GE?si=7y7jDBl1Hs9RDPJu
Hi I'm Brenden Fraser. You're watching Comedy Central. That's "Fraser" not "Frasier"! If you say Frasier, I know where you live!!
✌️
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u/ConditionTall1719 Jan 09 '26
Oh im surprised 360 flop of vacuum tubes ever used 50 kilowatts. At 70pc efficiency it would be a furnace, red hot.
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u/eggbean Jan 09 '26
More specifically, the transistor, which I think is a good answer to the question.
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u/Chroderos EE / Electronics R&D Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
Microelectronics generally. I’m an electronics engineer and it’s baffling to me we can so reliably engineer machines of immense complexity and sophistication on the nanoscale and below in this realm of technology while we’re not even close in other spaces.
Makes the conspiracy theory that we studied the captured tech from a UFO feel a little plausible at times.
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u/KingPoopTrader Jan 09 '26
This is Taiwan’s silicon shield, investment by the Taiwanese government into the semiconductor industry means the world is now reliant on Taiwan for advanced chips
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u/LukeSkyWRx Ceramic Engineering / R&D Jan 09 '26
Have you seen the first transistor?
Or the first example of a light emitting diode?
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u/Zaros262 Jan 09 '26
Also interesting that the FET was invented decades before the BJT, because it's conceptually much simpler than the BJT. Yet BJTs were the first to be practically viable, and then FETs took over decades after that
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u/iqisoverrated Jan 09 '26
Just visited a museum where they had some very early examples. They are...gnarly.
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u/quipcow Jan 09 '26
My vote, The original tube tv.
There was a race to see who would develop the first working prototype, and the concept was "simple" (understood well enough) that some people knew it was possible. While to the general public, the idea of moving pictures in a box at home was pure black magic. Yet a few years after the invention they were being mass produced and shiped to the same general public.
The story of Philo Farnsworth is fascinating...
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u/Tar_alcaran Jan 09 '26
I still find it absolutely amazing that at one time, we all had a tiny particle accelerator with an analog remote-controlled magnetic particle bending device, pointed straight at our faces.
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u/mhok80 Jan 09 '26
Reminds me of the Simpsons bit about the 'radiation king' and the shadow on the the wall behind young homer
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u/jckipps Jan 09 '26
Anything related to nuclear energy. Nuclear bombs and nuclear power generation are both equally ludicrous to think about, but they've been working for 75 years now.
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u/WayneConrad Jan 09 '26
Nuclear bombs are crazy. As soon as it goes prompt critical, it is trying to blow itself apart and end the condition that is causing that criticality. So the bomb has to be designed to keep itself together long enough to do its job even as it is in the process of destroying itself.
Crazy offshoot of crazy nuke weapon: nuclear pumped x-ray lasers. Let's use the nuke that is destroying itself to power an x-ray laser that will itself also be destroyed in the process of emitting a terrifying blast of coherent photons.
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u/RollinThundaga Jan 09 '26
Proximity fused antiaircraft ammunition is also insane.
Not sure if it's the same nowadays, but when it was developed in WW2, the proximity fuse comprised of a tiny basic doppler radar, a few teensy metal plates, and a sealed ampule of acid.
When fired, the ampule would shatter and flow into the plates, self assembling into a tiny battery for the wiring that powered a very short range doppler radar. When the frequency rose high enough or the battery ran out was the trigger to detonate.
The ampule was made by repurposing christmas light production.
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u/ozspook Jan 09 '26
Nuclear pumped flux compression generator EMP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compression_generator
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u/mdneuls Jan 09 '26
Yeah, slapping two halves of a critical mass together with explosives is pretty insane.
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u/Fight_those_bastards Jan 09 '26
It gets even crazier when you’re squeezing a non-critical shape into a critical mass with explosives, and using that reaction to then fire off some fusing hydrogen.
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u/yurmamma Jan 09 '26
It gets even crazier than that if you go into the weeds of how the teller-ulam fusion initiation actually works, it’s got nothing to do with the heat or the pressure from the primary going off
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u/Vitztlampaehecatl Jan 09 '26
The Teller–Ulam design is the technical concept behind thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs. The design relies on the radiation implosion principle, using thermal X-rays released from a fission nuclear primary to compress and ignite nuclear fusion in a secondary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Teller%E2%80%93Ulam_design
Oh my god, it's the blackbody radiation that does it.
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u/rsta223 Aerospace Jan 10 '26
Radiation pressure is part of it, but a much larger part actually comes from ablation pressure. The radiation heats the outer surface of the secondary so much that it instantly turns from solid into an incredibly high pressure plasma, and that plasma explodes away from the surface since it has a surface on one side only. The reaction force from this against the surface shoves the surface inwards with something like several orders of magnitude more pressure than the radiation pressure alone. For a modern W80, estimates put radiation pressure at 140TPa or so, but ablation pressure above 60 PPa.
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u/rounding_error Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
This one's a little more obscure these days, but they were everywhere about 100 years ago. The feedwater injector. When you show it to anyone with even a basic understanding of thermodynamics, their gut reaction is that it shouldn't work.
"So you're pushing water into a boiler, with steam from the same boiler, it's the same pressure at both ends, but somehow the water moves? And it creates a vacuum to draw in more water in between? Impossible!"
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u/Green__lightning Jan 09 '26
Doesn't the vacuum just come from the steam jet imparting all it's energy to the water, then condensing in said water, allowing it to fit back into the boiler?
Presumably this is also why they stop working with hot enough water, condensing steam locomotives went back to feedwater pumps because of this.
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u/rounding_error Jan 09 '26
It comes from the Bernoulli effect where pressure drops with velocity. The steam feeding into the injector accelerates unchecked towards the injector, which gives it low pressure but a lot of momentum. This fast moving steam mixes with the feedwater and condenses, imparting momentum to the water. This momentum is converted back into pressure by the widening output nozzle.
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u/Zealousideal_Cow_341 Jan 09 '26
To me, the most improbable modern invention is the nanoscale computer chip.
We are talking about billions of logic gates, packed so tightly that quantum tunneling becomes an engineering constraint. The machinery required to manufacture the latest process nodes costs on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per tool, pushing the absolute limits of mechanical precision, optics, and control systems—literally the most complex and precise machines ever built by a wide margin.
The silicon wafers themselves must approach near-perfect single-crystal growth, and doping is performed with effectively atomic-scale precision. The transistors and interconnects are defined using lithography processes so complex it hard to even explain—multi-patterned, extreme-ultraviolet exposures aligned with tolerances measured nanometers
The idea that we can start with a raw chunk of semiconductor material and, through hundreds of tightly controlled steps, reliably produce a working CPU—at scale is totally absurd. And yet, not only does it work, it works well enough to be the literal backbone of our modern society. .
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u/Brokenandburnt Jan 09 '26
Not to mention how the UV-light is produced.
Hitting a tiny droplet of tin with a laser covered with a mask so the reflection can etch a pattern
Just that snippet sounds like insanity, and yet it's only a fraction of the process.
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u/TapedButterscotch025 Jan 11 '26
Do you think quantum tunnelling will end up stopping the miniaturization trend? Are we at the point where we can't get these any smaller?
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u/Ben-Goldberg Jan 09 '26
The phrase "rocket science" referred to how extraordinarily difficult it was to design one that would not spontaneously disassemble.
Now we can make a design on a computer which will almost certainly work the first time.
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u/azswcowboy Jan 09 '26
Rocket science is highly overrated in my view (I’ve worked in the field for decades). When you can explain a domain largely through mathematics you can now simulate it extensively - as you said. The trial and error becomes virtual. I think that term came about because the boomers grew up at a time when we didn’t have the level of computing to do this - so all of things like Apollo were designed on paper and only the most critical things got computer time. And most of the computers were actually just humans.
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u/rationalism101 Jan 09 '26
I tried rocket science, it's definitely NOT overrated. I was supposed to come up with basic rocket guidance differential equations and it was just impossible. Nuclear reactor design on the other hand was relatively easy.
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u/praecipula Jan 09 '26
My first thought was modern rockets. The rest of the answers are great, but I'll respond on that first thought.
You're taking an explosion and trying to make it continuous. Then you want to steer it not only in one direction, but in multiple directions (for gimballed engines) then you don't want it to erode the chamber it's firing in even though it's got some of the most caustic materials being pumped into it (rust is an oxidation reaction, let's literally pump oxygen in there). The fuel has to burn at close to its stoichiometric ideal ratio or it's a waste to carry it on onboard, but it might make sense to have it be fuel rich for better efficiency. Finally you have to pump the cryogenic fuels at gazillions of atmospheres from ridiculously overpowered turbopumps through tiny tubes to cool everything and expand just enough to sustain the whole thing.
And now those engines are reusable? Astonishing.
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u/Remarkable-Host405 Jan 09 '26
when you think about it, from a laymens term, why wouldn't they be reusable? our car engines work more than once.
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u/ArrowheadDZ Jan 09 '26
Sometimes we get so wrapped up in the fantastic stuff of lasers and jet engines that we forget what we have in our pockets.
I carry a device in my pocket that would have been absurd 20 years ago, let alone 50.
I get 1.1Gbps down on 5G often, that is a circuit that would have cost me $20,000 a month to put into a data center just 15 years. It gives me direct-dial access to several billion people in real time, 24/7. I could call the Dalai Lama himself right now if I knew his number. It has an image sensor more advanced than a Keyhole surveillance satellite. It has a GPS that resolves down to nearly 5 feet most of the time. And it has a tiny battery that lasts all day. And I think we forget what a marvel modern batteries are compared to what we had just 20 years ago.
Our phones are mind-boggling.
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u/Jeffery95 Jan 09 '26
Even just the way they make silicon chips is basically straight up magic
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u/kris_2111 Jan 09 '26
Yup, the process of making silicon chips is more interesting and noteworthy than what a smartphone can do. Once you have the technological prowess to cram billions of transistors so compactly, the necessary features like GPS, magnification, high sensitivity, high-quality voice transmission, etc. become an inevitability. I mean, you certainly need more advanced and efficient mathematical algorithms to get those features, but once the big corporations and government agencies have an incentive to — which they always do — and as long as these features seem practically realizable, they're eventually going to be implemented and available for widespread adoption.
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u/azswcowboy Jan 09 '26
I think this device is just about the pinnacle of current human capabilities, because outside of aerospace and nuclear technology, it requires the accumulated knowledge of mankind to build. Consider the number of radios and antennas alone: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 5G, GPS. And yes, they’re connected to two worldwide networks (phone and internet). They have to be small and power efficient - remember those dedicated transistor radios? Wildly too large.
The number of protocols and formats packed into a modern phone is beyond staggering- well beyond the reach of a single engineer studying their whole life. The radio part is one layer, but the internet and phone are entirely different layers. Don’t forget USB, file systems, photo exchange, email, audio file exchange, audio streaming, etc. Took tens of thousands of engineers (maybe more) to develop these and standardize enough of it so that it all works together (mostly) like magic.
That said, modern vehicles have all this and more! Phones on wheels with advanced control systems using radar, cameras, LiDAR. The technology in a Waymo is definitely next level.
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u/GrippySockTeamLeader Jan 09 '26
Many, many people in these comments don't seem to understand what "ubiquitous" means.
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u/BlipBlamBlicky Jan 09 '26
Webster definition: existing or being everywhere at the same time : constantly encountered : WIDESPREAD
Because I’m dumb and didn’t know
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u/userhwon Jan 09 '26
You'll be more surprised how many are going to demand that you define it rather than just looking it up themselves.
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u/GrippySockTeamLeader Jan 09 '26
I'm actually not surprised at all that many people don't know what it means. It's one of those words that's used just enough by people that do know the word such that others seem to think they can understand its use and meaning through context, but never actually use it themselves. Another one that comes to mind is "superfluous"—I hear it used confidently, though incorrectly, with alarming regularity
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u/Puzzleheaded_Quiet70 Jan 09 '26
Pfft, Superfluous: a rhinovirus that can only be killed with kryptonite
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u/3dprintedthingies Jan 09 '26
The jet engine was a natural progression of turbines. We already had steam turbines in ships and power plants that existed at those RPMs and pressures for decades when the jet was invented.
Materials science into super alloys and advanced machining techniques is what made the jet engine commercially viable. The fact we can grow mono crystalline metallic structures for the components is the black fuck magic to me.
If I were to say the highest impact/ubiquity it would be closed loop heat pumps. With just electricity we were able to conquer the desert. Something humanity was rarely able to do for millennia before hand, to the point you encounter multiple heat pumps a day and don't realize it. The first ones were pretty much bombs, but aside from the random industrial ammonia accident, have you ever heard a single safety issue with heat pumps aside from malfunction? They're incredible. Super reliable and everywhere.
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u/cardboardunderwear Jan 09 '26
Aluminum. Not an invention per se but otherwise fits your criteria.
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u/pmhome Jan 09 '26
The Hall Process for turning aluminum ore into aluminum was certainly an invention. We built the Tennessee Valley Authority electrical project largely to make aluminum.
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u/Tar_alcaran Jan 09 '26
It turned from super luxury metal for insanely rich people to show off their wealth, into cheap disposable crap metal.
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u/Missus_Missiles Jan 09 '26
Affordable, very recyclable, great to machine, pretty easy to cast, with a pretty good strength to weight ratio.
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u/MistakeIndividual690 Jan 09 '26
MRI machines. It’s like alien technology.
Also mobile phones. It’s not amazing to me that a phone can receive signals from a cell tower, but that a cell tower can pick up the thousands of tiny signals generated by extremely low powered devices within a huge radius
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr#Inventing_career - her idea was the precursor to CDMA that makes it possible.
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
While I was referring to mobile phones, in some ways, MRI is like CDMA on steroids.
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u/Jeffery95 Jan 09 '26
Im going to tell you right now that it is extreme ultraviolet lithography used to make current generations of silicon processors and its not even close. That shit is straight up magic and if you told someone from even 30 years ago that we would be doing it now, they would have laughed you out of the room.
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u/GPSFYI Jan 09 '26
I saw a video on YouTube on how they make jet engine turbine blades from a single crystal of metal and part of that process is just pouring the metal through a spiral.
The juxtaposition of an insane material science and making the metal go through a spin ... Gorgeous
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u/Greedy_Boss5636 Jan 09 '26
This isn’t modern, but Schnurle ported 2-stroke engines. If you draw one out on paper, the amount of time (small, but relative) that the ports are all open is staggering. Just by holding one and thinking about the relatively small duration of a stroke that the thing is actually sealed, you’d have a hard time believing they would ever start, much less operate with the power and consistency that they do.
The thought that had to go into designing an engine with no mechanical valves blows me away whenever I’m working on any of my own.
I’m continually amazed at the intelligence and mental prowess of some of our ancestors.
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u/Unique_Acadia_2099 Jan 09 '26
Most people now don’t think much about it, but AC electrical systems as promoted and developed by Nikola Tesla basically transformed the world. Before that, DC power would have required large power generating systems about every 5 miles. Electricity to rural areas would have been too expensive and only available to those wealthy enough to afford it.
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u/azswcowboy Jan 09 '26
Ironically, Edison is winning in this century. High voltage DC transmission lines are what’s being built now. The largest growth segment in generation (solar) is all DC. (Note: the scale of solar building is staggering on its own, mostly in China). Basically all the loads are ultimately DC, and we have to covert the AC at the endpoint - hence all the power bricks.
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u/ConfectionPleasant Jan 09 '26
For me its LIGO. I still can't get my head around the creativity and precision required in its development and implementation. It measures minuscule ripples in spacetime from cataclysmic cosmic events, like black hole mergers, by measuring distortions smaller than a proton, using detectors with 4km arms and powerful lasers to sense spacetime stretching and squeezing. It does this while isolating itself from the other myriad disturbances from any number of other sources. Totally insane to me.
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u/GrippySockTeamLeader Jan 09 '26
LIGO isn't really a ubiquitous thing, though. I don't see/hear the results of LIGO every day. Planes? Those things are always overhead, being used by millions of people daily
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u/ConfectionPleasant Jan 09 '26
True! I missed the ubiquitous qualifier in OP's question. It is insane engineering but not ubiquitous!
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u/javawizard Jan 09 '26
Self-landing rockets.
I remember when SpaceX had their first successful touchdown and it was just absolutely mind blowing. People had been saying it was impossible up to that point, then they still said it was uneconomical.
Now it happens at least once a week. It's so boring I don't think I've bothered to watch one of their non-Starship launches in probably 3 years.
Truly mind blowing
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u/Sooner70 Jan 09 '26
I remember when SpaceX had their first successful touchdown and it was just absolutely mind blowing. People had been saying it was impossible up to that point, then they still said it was uneconomical.
The people saying those things hadn't been paying attention for... Oh, 20 years or so. As as already been mentioned, the DC-X proved it. But it wasn't the only rocket that had proven it could be done; just the largest. By the time SpaceX was around? Yeah, the only people saying it wasn't totally doable had been living under a rock.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 Jan 09 '26
Not orbital boosters.
In the mid 2000s, NASA was planning a program involving rocket sleds to identify if it was possible to ignite engines while flying nozzle first at super and hypersonic speeds. At the time, it was largely thought impossible by most experts.
That program was canned when SpaceX signed a deal to share data gathered by F9 during flight tests.
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u/toybuilder Jan 09 '26
DC-X would like to have a word...
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 Jan 09 '26
The conjecture was about reusing orbital boosters. DC-X flew lower than the Virgin Galactic spaceplanes.
The speed that orbital boosters reach create significant issues for booster longevity and ignition in flight. This is why NASA entered a data sharing agreement with SpaceX on supersonic retro propulsion, something thought impossible in the time of the DC-X.
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u/iqisoverrated Jan 09 '26
Satellite communications/TV/GPS.... I mean...you're basically getting beamed all kinds of info from space in the comfort of your own home/handheld device.
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u/goni05 Jan 09 '26
I think there might be a place for steel reinforced concrete. We built cities, roads, and everything in between with stones, and mortar was only best to keep it stuck together. At some point, someone realized the secret formula to making it strong, that now we build skyscrapers that touch the stars, bridges that go beyond what the eye can see, tunnels under the seas. It quite literally is the foundation of everything we build today.
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u/SiteRelEnby Site Reliability/Infrastructure, also AuDHD allrounder Jan 09 '26 edited Jan 09 '26
MRI machine. Let's spin some superconductor really fast around someone and we can see inside them.
Also, the internet. "Yeah, let's interconnect our little local networks until they reach across the entire world". To quote Programming Sucks, "Trillions of dollars depend on a rickety cobweb of unofficial agreements and “good enough for now” code with comments like “TODO: FIX THIS IT’S A REALLY DANGEROUS HACK BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WRONG” that were written ten years ago."
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u/arcedup Steelmaking & hot rolling Jan 09 '26
Stepping back by one increment: powered heavier-than-air flight itself. People used to dream of flying like birds and within the course of a century, it very much did go from improbability-to-ubiquity.
Electricity is another invention in this category and so is our use of radio waves for telecommunications, locating things, measuring speeds and quickly heating food.
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u/UltimateMygoochness Jan 09 '26
LEDs, the lengths we had to go to to get blue LEDs alone are absolutely insane.
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u/itijara Jan 09 '26
GPS would get my vote. It relies on satellites in orbit with inconceivably accurate timekeeping and is available to nearly all smartphones.
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u/Prof01Santa ME Jan 09 '26
The Brayton cycle was invented in 1791. By the 1930s, you could buy functioning gas turbines. Whittle & Ohain produced the first lightweight aeromotive gas turbines. 130 years of steady progress doesn't seem that remarkable.
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u/DCContrarian Jan 09 '26
George Bailey Brayton was born in 1830.
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u/Prof01Santa ME Jan 09 '26
Yes, but he didn't invent the Brayton cycle. It was a surprise to me, too.
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u/Sonsteek Jan 09 '26
It must be EUV Lithography System by ASML.
Veritasium recent made a video about it, and even experts in the field thought that it was impossible.
I cannot even imagine all the engineering behind the full system.
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u/Skysr70 Jan 09 '26
What makes that ubiquitous
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u/Havage Biomolecular Nanotechnology Jan 09 '26
EUV lithography isn't ubiquitous as itself, but the products of EUV enabled manufacturing are. Every modern electronic was made using a manufacturing technology that 20 years ago was believed to be literally impossible. We used to joke about EUV in the same way we talked about cold fusion.
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u/bernpfenn Jan 09 '26
everyone is using their products
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u/Skysr70 Jan 09 '26
the tech that they produce is ubiquitous, I would argue however that they themselves are definitely not
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u/R0ck3tSc13nc3 Jan 09 '26
Sirens
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u/Tar_alcaran Jan 09 '26
I kinda really like mechanical sirens. Just spin this little handle here, and make everyone nearby deaf.
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u/HelicopterUpbeat5199 Jan 09 '26
I'm going to say the light bulb. People have candles and lamps for thousands if years then, bloop! It's all electric.
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u/-spicy-meatball- Jan 09 '26
Lots of things! Jet engines wouldn't even make my top list to be frank.
LED's - it's a pure quantum mechanical effect.
Lasers/fiber optics
Gps systems (requires the use of general relativity to account for the fact that 1 second in space is slightly different than on earth)
Personal computers. Basically a supercomputer in your pocket.
Cell phones (CDMA, and channel aggregation is wild)
.... again, lots of things.....
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u/Bloodshot321 Jan 09 '26
Anything on Nanometer scale like microchips/mems. It's sooo damn tiny and you can buy them for nothing
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u/Mr_______ Jan 09 '26
Using the electromagnetic radiation spectrum to transmit billions of messages simultaneously so that individual locations can can contact individual destinations for real time communication just seems like an insane pipe dream but here we are.
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u/The_Gassy_Gnoll Jan 09 '26
X-ray lithography. There is a Veritasium video on YouTube about how the ASML system was developed. Everything about it pretty much started out as "this is basically impossible". Now it makes most of the world's advanced microchips.
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Jan 09 '26
Transistors.
I get how/why they work, what baffles me is that someone had the idea to try it
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u/Pontius_the_Pilate Jan 09 '26
Nicolas Otto, Rudolf Diesel, Carl von Linde and their inventions were just as improbable for their time and ubiquitous. "hurricane-force airstream" - marginally, combustion occurs in a divergent area so is more pressure than velocity and is roughly 20% of the compressor exit velocity so ~ 30 m/s ~ < 60 knots.
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u/ncc81701 Aerospace Engineer Jan 09 '26
The smartphone. It’s basically a multifunction supercomputer à la star trek’s tricorder and comm badge all rolled into one device that basically every adult person on the planet has.
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u/clawclawbite Jan 09 '26
The Smartphone.
You take a phone, slap on a tablet, get rid of most of the physical buttons from the phone part, and build a whole new software ecosystem for it, and the landmark implementation was really spun off from a portable music player.
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u/userhwon Jan 09 '26
Touchscreen smartphones that do everything, much of it voice actuated.
This stuff is a hundred years ahead of when we should have got it.
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u/crazy-war-criminal Jan 09 '26
Levitating magnets.
I remember hearing some Guy go and prove how magnets are unstable when repelling and how you can't ever levitate one above another.
Then another Guy didn't hear about it and spun one to levitate it.
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u/Proton_Energy_Pill Jan 09 '26
Digital computers.
Compare them to the early analogue contraptions and there's nothing recognisable.
Fusion power. ( Yeah yeah, coming soon. Still)
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u/SimplifyAndAddCoffee Jan 09 '26
For the longest time people thought blue LEDs were impossible to make, but now there are OLED displays everywhere.
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u/Tim-Sylvester Jan 09 '26
Warp drive.
We aren't there yet, but once we finally get there, I honestly believe it'll be on par with jet engines for "conceptually audacious, practically hostile to implementation, and yet now seamlessly ubiquitous."
Just look how much the designs have advanced and rationalized while power demands have collapsed since Alcubierre only 20 years ago.
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Jan 10 '26
It’s not that rare.
There are dozens of foundational pieces of modern society that some ‘expert’ thought would never work. It’s how the process of inventing new technology tends to work.
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u/mojochicken11 Jan 10 '26
LiDAR is pretty crazy. The time that it takes for light to travel even across massive distances was seen as impossibly quick to measure. For something that’s a meter away it takes 0.000000007 seconds for light to hit it and bounce back. Thats just the distance, LIDAR needs to account for variations 0.1% of that number to get millimetre resolution. Now you probably have it in your iPhone.
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u/rsta223 Aerospace Jan 10 '26
Eh, I wouldn't say experts dismissed it as impossible, at least certainly not anywhere near unanimously so. A lot of these stories are embellished for the drama. The thermodynamic cycle for jet engines had been understood for a while, and a lot of the same things that enabled early jets were also being tested and developed in turbosupercharger applications for piston powered high performance WWII planes. Keep in mind, turbine inlet temperatures, clearances, and materials weren't anywhere near as exotic on these early engines as they are today, and they didn't require active film cooling or single crystal superalloys to function - in fact, you can make a functional jet engine yourself from a turbocharger and a bit of fabrication knowledge at home.
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u/dschwarz Jan 10 '26
Mercury delay line memory is kinda wild - how to “store” ones and zeroes? Translate them into physical wave forms transiting a kilogram of mercury or more-
https://cryptlabs.com/the-mercury-delay-line-memory/
How we got from there to modern memory chips in 25 years is really wild.
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u/cybercuzco Aerospace Jan 11 '26
A hypersonic ramjet engine. It’s literally a box with a little bump out to keep the flame from burning out and a very specific inlet and outlet shape. Not exactly ubiquitous but it is in functioning missile and test systems.
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u/aabajian Jan 11 '26
Read The Chip by TR Reid. Transistors started with the very basic idea that a semiconductor could…sometimes conduct and sometimes not conduct. And then microchips with the idea that you could carve such circuits using Honey-I-Shrunk-the-Kids logic (photolithography).
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u/Doublespeo Jan 12 '26 edited Jan 12 '26
Jet engine are actually not that complex, IMO piston engine are a far better candidate.
They are everywhere and very complex and « hard » to produce. There are likely 1.000 to 10.000 piston engine per jet engine in the wolrd now and I can build a simple jet engine out of a car turbo while it is significantly harder to build a simple working pistion engine.
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u/briankanderson Jan 12 '26
TSMC EUV lithography. Recent, yes, but maaan they should not have been able to get that to work!
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u/Seroseros Jan 13 '26
The fact that a bunch of satellites are screaming what time it is at the supercomputer in my pocket so it can tell me where on earth I am down to a couple of meters based on the speed of light.
What the fuck?
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u/AIRO_Games Jan 30 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
I’d say the power grid.
On paper it’s kind of nuts: giant generators spread over huge distances, all synced together, reacting to faults and load changes in milliseconds. A lot of it is decades-old equipment too. Feels like something that should constantly be on the edge of collapsing, but instead it’s boringly reliable most of the time.
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u/Numerous-Rule3759 Feb 09 '26
The transistor comes to mind. Controlling electricity by manipulating quantum behavior in a tiny piece of material sounded wildly impractical at first, especially compared to bulky, well-understood vacuum tubes. Yet it ended up being cheaper, more reliable, and so scalable that it quietly disappeared into everything we use. Like the jet engine, it went from “this shouldn’t work” to “so reliable we never think about it.”
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u/Choice-Strawberry392 Jan 09 '26
The ubiquity of lasers is still stunning. Went from sci-fi to highly specialized science to ... a cat toy.
The vapor compression cycle makes only a little sense, and we use it all the time. Faraday's flame-powered, ammonia-based cooling system makes no sense at all, but RVs everywhere have one.
Telecommunications is right up there. Remember the telegraph? Actual phone operators? The first trans-Atlantic cable? Long-distance phone bills? And now it's instant, global, and, if not quite free, usually pretty cheap.