alt Hacker NewsI constantly wonder what life was like, then, for the earliest inventors, scientists, and curious minds in our history. Surely they didn't have many people to bounce ideas or build things with. How did they find the strength to persist in their interests? These days, it's far easier to quit when you cannot find community since you can distract yourself with many kinds of entertainment instead; and with bleak economic outlook everywhere, the very act of persistence itself can feel rather pointless.
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They did have immense networks and were constantly communicating with one another. In On the Origin of Species, I was amazed how Darwin basically knew all the top breeders and naturists form South America, Arab Gulf, Oceania, which he mentions by name. He mentions his peers from the first page in the introduction and the correspondence and responses he got from them.
There's not many geniuses without an ecosystem around them that produced them. And even if there are, how would we know about them if they weren't well connected enough to start mattering?
They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers
I would say that a big part of research in Ye Old Days was either your local peers and colleagues but especially it was exchanging letters with the known Big Names in their respective fields. It is not without reason that nowadays that correspondence between researchers is a great source of insight.
Maybe it's a bit over-generalized, but I generally find there are two types of people in world, the important one here is the one's who are genuinely curious, and they tend to be that about everything, especially things they don't understand.
Growing up rural, I had about zero people interested in technology around me, even less about programming. But, there was a few of those "curious people" who I talked to about computers and programming. They mostly had no idea, but they were interested, and engaging to talk about, they acted more like a wall to bounce the ball against, rather than actually mentoring me for programming, or whatever.
Anyways, these people, the curious ones, exists everywhere, even in rural areas, even in places with less than 1000 people. They tend to be seen maybe as eccentric, odd or weird, but you can talk to them about everything and anything, and you'll still probably learn something, if not about the subject, maybe about yourself or maybe about your new friend :)