What's the earliest era in which people could reverse engineer a car?

['Hamas' Jenkins]

Originally Posted by cdcox

When the US developed the atomic bomb, I'm not sure the science of the device was even the rate limiting step. I'd lean more to figuring out how to separate Uranium 235, building the factories to do it, and then the inherent time it took to do the separations were rate limiting.
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This is true. It required the production of the largest industrial buildings ever known to man, using more power than the city of Los Angeles running for years, producing little more than a handful of U-235, for a crude gun device that slammed two subcritical masses together.

Reading your post in many ways undercuts the feasible importance of Cyberdyne in Terminator 2