The Floo Revolution

[sunnyskywalker]

Occasionally, something on Pottermore actually makes sense and supplements what's in the books rather than breaking all of time and space. Here's one that I think works: Ignatia Wildsmith (1227-1320) invented Floo Powder some time in the 13th century.

What other things happened around this time?

• The Golden Snidget was used in Quidditch for the

Comments

[chantaldormand]

I agree that instant travel would speed up technological development, but I wonder just how spread out the Floo technology was. Aside from sports, there doesn’t seem to be much of technological advancement during that time. I would expect at least new potion brewing methodology or new manufacturing methods

[sunnyskywalker]

I wonder if population size would work as a limitation? Traveling faster helps with a lot of things, but if you still only have a few thousand people, there are limits to how much they can invent in a short timespan. Hm, I'll have to think about this more. I don't expect all the details of her imagined medieval history to work, in any case; it's just surprising that any of them do

[chantaldormand]

Population size and amount of networks could limit development.
Imagine that Kate wants to visit Tom, but she is connected to different network than he is. First she must floo to Jane who is hooked to the same network she is hooked. Then she has to walk through the village Jane lives and visit Mrs. Brown. There she has to first politely drink tea with Madam and then politely ask to use her floo network. Then finally she get to visit Tom.
That would be tedious if you wanted to visit someone frequently.

I wouldn't be surprised if in the beginning there were a lot of splinching accidents.

Wouldn't that mean that Floo network was exclusive to England?

I know what you mean, lately first half of month exhausts me so much that after work I don't have much of energy to work on chapter analysis or responding to comments :(

[sunnyskywalker]

Incompatible networks would be a nightmare, definitely!

The inventor was supposedly British (she went to Hogwarts, anyway), so presumably they were the first adopters and dealt with the most early-adopter problems. But it must have spread to the Continent within a couple of decades, I would think, and they still burned witches. So... hmm. Maybe there was a national pride thing going on, the British magicals just made a bigger deal of it, and so their non-magical neighbors were more aware of a witches/fire connection than their Continental counterparts? Flimsy, but I'm too tired to think of anything else right now.