In article ,
Franz Heymann wrote:

No foresight needed for the first - look up the history of the
tunnel - it was first proposed in the 18th century and preliminary
work started in the 19th.

The atom bomb was also speculated in the 19th century, but I now
forget the reference.

Impossible.

Don't be ridiculous. I said 'speculated', not 'built'.

The structure of the atom was only discovered well into the 20th
century, and the energy equivalence of mass was only suggested in
1905.

So? Many things were speculated centuries or millennia before the
underlying science for them was known. All you need is enough of a
clue to formulate a well-specified hypothesis and an imagination.
All right, damn few people have either, but some people have had
since time immemorial.

Many 'primitive' peoples had beliefs involving ancestral relationships
between apes and men. The heliocentric solar system dates from some
time before Christ. Rocket-driven space travel was speculated before
Newton's laws of motion were formulated.

I speculated that there could be non-nuclear DNA years before
mitochondrial DNA was discovered. In fact, I also speculated quite a
lot of other things about DNA, many of which are turning out to be
partially true. I have discovered since that time that a fair number
of other people had made similar speculations, some well before I did.



Regards,
Nick Maclaren.