You're right, and I didn't mean to imply that a few centuries was a particularly long time (just that this is the time in which my scant knowledge is useful).
Telescopes and microscopes also provided the motivation for improvements in lensmaking in the 17th and 18th centuries, but I don't know how much this had been limited by motivation vs technology before then.
> but I don't know how much this had been limited by motivation vs technology before then.
The answer I've always found has been it's a bit of both. Motivation drives technological development but motivation is also very heavily driven by the available technology. You have to conceive that a thing is possible before you can think about what tech can be developed to do it for example.
