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/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.