The root cause of these two problems still lies in ingrained cognitive barriers—a lot of people think 1850 is practically another era, and being able to calculate 10x10=100 is already impressive.
This is actually a very serious mistake.
In reality.
1850 was already a crucial junction for modern science.
At this point, many fields weren't nearly as primitive as people think.
Take vacuum measurement, for example.
As early as 1643, Galileo's student Torricelli built the world's first device to measure gas pressure.
He confirmed experimentally that atmospheric pressure is equivalent to the pressure of a 760mm mercury column... which is 7.6×10^4Pa, and pioneered quantitative measurements of vacuum.
And before 1850, Borden—the big shot who came up with the Borden tube—even invented deformable vacuum gauges.
Otherwise, how do you think Maxwell managed to derive the speed of light in a vacuum from his equations?
