alt Hacker NewsSee also: the sewing machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine
The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread.
And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.
Replies
If you have 30 minutes to spare the old program "The Secret Life of Machines" has an episode demonstrating how sewing machines work, in a delightfully quirky way.
It is said that Elias Howe was granted a vision in a dream about how to construct the needle for such machines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe#Invention_of_sewing...
And the dishwasher, the laundry washer/dryer...
There's also plenty of examples where technology creates something very different than the thing that humans were doing: photograph vs painting, car vs horse/bike. It would be silly to say that we have all this horse infrastructure and saddle UX that we don't want to break compatibility with.
Maybe the lesson is that humans are adaptable but machines/manufacturing is not? It's easier to make a great new thing that humans will use than it is to make a cost-effective production thing that exactly replaces what humans did.