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AlanCrowe comments on Brain Preservation - Less Wrong
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"Hundreds of years off" is a common estimation people give for technologies that seem really complicated and hard to make with our present knowledge. I've always found this fairly ridiculous; it's pretty much unprecedented in human history. When have we ever conceived of a specific technology, which we had any understanding of the workings behind, and taken hundreds of years to make it? The only cases I'm aware of that any sort of technology has been in-development for that long are if you count things like heavier-than-air flight, where we spent hundreds of years not applying the scientific method to understanding the problem and just threw up solutions willy nilly.
In June 1768 Eramus Darwin told Josiah Wedgewood that Edgeworth had 'nearly completed a Waggon drawn by Fire'. In modern parlance, a motorcar. It didn't work, and Edgeworth was a bit of a dreamer; I don't know how far he actually got. Nevertheless, people saw the technical possibility of motorised road transport that early. Others were also attempting the technology. The motorcar is a good example of a slow burning technological development, taking perhaps 120 years from being obviously possible to being on sale.
This does meet the specifications I had in mind, save that 120 years is less than "hundreds." It's the slowest example I'm aware of though, and its inception began before the second industrial revolution, and quite early into the first.
The last 200 years have seen the development of most of the technology the human race has ever created. The first industrial research lab was founded less than 140 years ago. 300 years ago, we were only barely engaged in the process of applying dedicated empirical research to making new stuff. In terms of predicting future technological development, we really don't have hundreds of years of meaningful data to extrapolate from.