Throughout history companies and individuals have come up with ideas that were so ahead of their time the world wasn't ready for them just yet, which is why so many well-known inventions are much older than we think. Here are a few ideas which were just a little too early, sometimes by centuries.

The flushing toilet is one of those mod cons we all take for granted but it's been around longer than you might think. The Minoans had a working model back in the 18th century BC but sadly it died along with them.

The Romans loved a soak in a warm bath, preferably among friends and every city had at least one bath warmed by thermal waters. They were places to relax, socialize and of course get clean. However, the fall of Rome brought darker times and it was centuries before we got the knack again.

Electricity is a modern invention, so archaeologists were understandably confused when they found what appeared to be a crude battery dating back to more than 200 years before Christ in modern-day Baghdad. It is a pot with a metal rod which is surrounded by a copper cylinder. The cylinder can then be filled with an electrolyte and work as a battery. It's not known what it was actually used for at the time, but the name Baghdad Battery stuck.

Steam powered the Industrial Revolution, but it dates back to the first century AD when Hero of Alexandria came up with a device he called an aeolipile. It was a radial steam turbine which turns when the central water container is heated and was not unlike a jet engine. Sadly few people saw the potential at the time.

Hero did get further with a vending machine, however. His concept dispensed holy water in return for a coin. If he’d been alive today he’d have probably been big in bottled spring water. It was another couple of millennia before anyone got the same idea again.

Artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was full of ideas which were centuries ahead of his time. But his crowning glory was probably the day he came up with the idea of manned aircraft.

Sadly for Leonardo it was hundreds of years before powered flight was made possible. But his designs, inspired by wildlife, look a little like a rudimentary hang-glider so it's conceivable it could have flown had it been built.

In 1632 the philosopher Rene Descartes came up with the concept of the contact lens. The idea didn't take off at the time, perhaps because of the less-than-catchy title: glass tubes filled with liquid and placed next to the cornea.

We began making forms of the computer earlier than you might think. In 1786, an engineer in the Hessian army called J Muller described the idea of a Difference Engine – a mechanical device capable of calculating sums. In 1822 Charles Babbage completed work on a small Difference Engine, but the metalwork involved in the construction proved too expensive to make it viable for mass production.

Way back in 1883 an American named Charles Fritts became the first person to develop a solid state solar cell. But if he was hoping for big things he was to be disappointed as it was only 1% efficient.

We think of electric cars as being a modern phenomenon, but people have been trying to invent them for 200 years. In 1891 American inventor William Morrison built the world’s first workable electric car. By the turn of the century 28% of all cars produced in the US were electric. Believing it would be the future, Henry Ford threw all his efforts into the electric car.

Ford was helped by Thomas Edison, who produced a model in 1912, but electric's days were numbered. People wanted more horsepower, affordable cars and to drive longer distances. With gasoline becoming more freely available electric simply couldn't compete.

Today virtual reality is taking the world by storm, but it's actually been with us for decades. Back in the 1950s people first tried to engineer a virtual reality experience, and by the 1990s people had high hopes for the technology.

But the VR revolution fizzled and died as the technology simply wasn't quite good enough. However, these days devices such as Oculus Rift, Playstation VR and Sony VR are some of the most coveted gadgets out there.

In 1977 Polaroid developed a way for users to shoot motion films, record them onto cassette and play them back through a viewing terminal, known as Polavision. The product never caught on and it became known as an expensive flop. However it was a forerunner of the camcorder.

Back in 1985 Apple created an exciting piece of technology but had no idea what to do with it. Called the Hyper Card it allowed people to jump between one virtual card and another by pointing a cursor at it. They couldn't think how to use it, so it bundled it up into the new Apple computers and hoped people would sort it out for themselves. They didn't, but it did become the inspiration for the web browser.

Apple certainly popularized the iPad and touch computing, but others were way ahead of them. Back in the 1980s, the likes of Go Corp, Linus and Pencept all produced their own versions. Microsoft even had a go a few years before the iPad, but it too didn't get off the ground as the technology wasn’t quite ready yet.

There have been several sites which did Facebook-style social networking before Facebook and flopped. Special mention goes to the people who based theirs on Kevin Bacon. SixDegrees.com was based on the theory that we are all separated from the actor by just six steps.

Whether it's Google Express, Amazon or ASOS, today we're used to same-day delivery, but back in the 1990s a host of companies tried and failed. Webvan and Kozmo were two of the highest profile failures. They raised vast amounts of cash, burned through it quickly and never came close to making money. Back then the business model was unsustainable, despite working well now.

Cloud computing is revolutionizing the world of business, but it’s an older idea than you might think. Way back in the mists of time Netscape founder Marc Andreesen developed Loud Cloud, a cloud computing service. The market wasn't ready and they had to change it to become a more traditional data center.

Today Bitcoin is everywhere, but people have been trying to get so-called cryptocurrencies off the ground for years. During the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, Beanz and Floorz both started up businesses offering a way for people to buy things online. Yet the idea of digital currencies was widely ridiculed until Bitcoin came along.