What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In computing, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company (later IBM) produced the first printing tabulator, the beginning of commercial data processing.
Those 50 years held the greatest lifestyle changes in history.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto
More generally, though, "email" was called "mail". In cities, there were often two, and sometimes three mail deliveries daily. It would be possible to carry on a round-trip correspondence over the course of a day.
The precursor of online shopping was called "catalog stores" -- Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the canonical example. I just caught an item over Ansible last week that Sears had discontinued its catalog in 1993, the year before Amazon started.
Robert Gordon, economist at Northwestern University, has just published a book on technology and growth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In it he notes that the typical urban home of 1920 was connected to five "networks": water, sewer, gas, electricity, and phone. I'd add postal mail and the highway, railroad, canal, and shipping networks as well, though those had a "last mile" component of individual delivery. Still, this largely offered similar capabilities to today's Internet.
Email was postal mail.
Online shopping was catalog shopping.
References, information, and entertainment (as well as advertising, without tracking or pop-ups) were performed via books, encyclopedias, newspapers, and magazines. Phonographs provided audio, as well as over-the-air radio broadcasts. Libraries provided extended access.
Latencies were higher, but the throughput of even a horse-drawn cart is pretty good.
but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email.
Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices.
I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.
Howard Krum finally figured out how to do sync right in 1919, when he invented serial stop-start async as we know it today. In 1924, he came out with the Teletype Model 14 tape printer, with the first reliable mechanical async decoder. That design was used into the 1960s, and most computer serial ports are compatible with it. (45.45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.)
Telegraphy was store and forward, but manual at first. By the late 1920s, punched tape was used, but someone had to manually look at tape, tear off each message, and put it in the proper outgoing reader. This was manual Sendmail. After WWII, automated forwarding centers were built, with paper tape punches connected to readers via a bin as the storage mechanism and telephone-like switches to change connections. These were hugely expensive to operate for the amount of data transferred, but it was essentially email, with electromechanical technology.
(I restore Teletypes as a hobby. Here's a Model 14 working.[1]. If you want to see some in action, they'll be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention, Memorial Day weekend, in San Jose.)
(Edit: in fairness, that would be more like "land line texting" than email.)
That said, it seems most of them were operated over dedicated networks. And the one i can find a reference to that was operated by AT&T had their own area codes etc.
All in all i get the impression that it could be done, but likely only so at great expense. Consider that having a ticker tape printer in your home suggested you were someone with great wealth that was watching the stock market 24/7.
Even having a telephone was not chump change. My parents talk about having one phone for several households, with the bell patterns used to indicate who it was for.
I suspect we should not underestimate how much the IC and packet switching has driven down cost of installation and operation.
But suppose someone like Edison had gotten hold of the 1920s transistor lab experiment and tried to make it better by trying many different materials. (That's how he got a usable, cheap light bulb filament; thousands of materials were tried, ending with carbonized paper.) They would have tried selenium (selenium rectifiers were known) and galena crystals (crystal radios were known). They probably would have gotten a point-contact transistor out of galena, which would have led to germanium. It would have been unreliable and heat-sensitive until germanium purification was figured out. They might have tried grey tin, which is a semiconductor but a dead end. They probably wouldn't have tried silicon, because you have to grow silicon crystals first, which is hard and wasn't done until 1950.
So a transistor radio might have been demoed by 1930 or so.
But yes, the 50 years from 1870 - 1920 essentially created the modern world as we know it. Shy television, many plastics, antibiotics (though massive healthcare improvements had already been made), nuclear fission, lasers, transistors & computers.
Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth does a stellar job of detailing the various impacts of technology on the period 1870 - 2015, divided into roughly three fifty-year periods: 1870-1920, 1920-1970, and 1970-present.
The combination of electric motors and internal combustion engines seems most specifically powerful.
It seems, however, that this theory is not very well supported except for the general impression one might get reading about his behaviour in other situations - Newton doesn't seem to be the humble type.
There was also the backstory for Alpha Centauri. Firaxis' sci-fi Civilization where the landing of the space ship goes anything but smooth.
I'd also strongly recommend the subsequent programme, The Day the Universe Changed, which follows a similar, though temporally arbitrary, connect-the-dots motif.
The two sequels to Connections aren't as good, though C3 is the better of the two.
Also: if you're interested in the background of technology, look up the story of Joseph Needham and his extended exploration, Science and Civilisation in China. Begun in 1954, it remains in process, with 27 volumes. Needham himself died in 1995. Simon Winchester's written an excellent (and much shorter) biography of Needham.
So, if your starting with the correct raw materials and enough food you could probably get to early CPU's in 10 years or so.
I think that example demonstrates the opposite. Getting raw materials is not a problem; it's so easy that people thousands of years ago were shipping raw materials thousands of miles when there was a need for it.
It's knowing the need and having the need which is the hard part... Tons of silicon can be found on your local beach and have been forever. But we only got computers a century ago.
Sure, now we can extract gold from sea water and it's just a question of cost. But, in a collapsed world your much more limited.
Something that I did not know until recently was that the "mineralogy" of steel was not understood until the 20th century. If you do not understand the phases comprising a material, it is difficult to relate bulk material properties to bulk composition.
Without it, the cost of copying information is enormous. When you can't copy stuff cheaply, you end up copying only a few things. Like what whoever is in power likes. Or whatever the accepted wisdom of the day is.
With it, you can have ideas, spread them, and get feedback from a lot of people. That goes for social ideas like liberalism, religious ideas like Protestantism, scientific ideas like gravity, and technological ideas like all the ones on HN.
You also get away from authority. If you have some new thoughts about how government should be organised, it's a lot harder to stop you telling everyone.
- Life expectancy, men/women
- Infant mortality
- Accidental death
- Death by illness/disease
- Death by military conflict
For example:
- Life expectancy (US, men & women average)
1870: 35.1 years
1920: 54.1
1970: 70.9
2012: 78.7
The most years gained were 1870 - 1920.
As for military conflict, innovation happens in politics and diplomacy as well as technology. I'd like to see how innovations in politics and diplomacy have impacted death by military conflict as military technology become increasingly lethal.
TL;DR: 2x the improvement of life expectency came before 1950 as after. Medicine since 1970 has been expensive, high-tech, changed rapidly, and delivered very little. Much the improved outcomes arises from improved access for the underserved, not radical treatments. Genomics and stem cells are specifically and pointedly disappointing.
The past always seems better than the present, probably we're not good at assessing our progress, but only retrospection can we.
The "born after the iPhone" children will get old enough next decade to do their own thing and new ideas will spread :)
Right now almost every existing industry is being reborn online. Amazon did it with retail. Uber is currently doing it with tranaportation. This interconnectivity is leading to increasing centralization in the quest of efficiency. Trillion dollar corporations might not be far off.
The internet coupled with AI and automation. will further transform entire industries. Low hanging fruit include banking, finance, accounting and legal indsutries. Will a bank branch exist in your city 50 years from now? Add robotics to the mix and then we are looking at serious improvements in quality of life. Machines could perform tasks requiring high dexterity and may match or exceed humans in this regard. When self-driving comes, it will transform how cities look and our relationship with transportation. Millions of lives could be saved. This wave of automation will put millions out of work - IIRC the trucking industry is the largest employer in the US. Since the invention of the loom people have predicted that machines would put the population out of work. So far, people have found ways to stay employable in the service of machines (making, operating and repairing them). But we may have peaked in that regard. People will find it increasingly hard to make themselves useful in this new economy. How will society respond? Will we adopt a basic income ? Will we achieve an Athens without the slaves? What will capitalism look like in 50 years?
Other stuff i cant even begin to imagine. How will medicine look like in the next 50 years? Our quality of life as measured by life expectancy may improve, but what about the quality of those final years? Will we still just live long enough to be killed by cancer? What will combat look like? War? The current drone wars seem to hint at the direction we are going. In the future, advanced nations might fight entire wars in far away lands without a single citzen being physically deployed. Will global deaths from conflict increase or decrease as a result? How will the enemy respond? What will our energy infrastructure look like in 50 years? Will we have free energy? Or at least close to 100% renewable? Or will battery technology or some other issue still stand in our way?
This seems to be a fallacy. Give internet to 10 random people and 9 of them will use it for Porn and Social media. You know, instant gratification stuff.
The one guy who uses it to "expand their horizons" will find himself too alone and powerless in a culture that has gone south by the the aforementioned 9 people who wouldn't take their heads up from the social media in their mobile phones....
With the internet, ideas scale much better.
Before smartphones, we nerdy white males made stuff.
Now the rest of the world can take over :)
But they took away something that had brought about innovation in the past and had a very good chance of brining it in the future....idle human thought.
When Islamic Spain fell, the Toledo School of Translators was founded.
This was a huge knowledge dump. Most major scholar centres in Europe have some connection with it.
Later all those translations allowed Europe to go through transforming processes such as the renaissance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...
Besides that, not much during that time compared to the industrial revolution to call it the most innovative era.
The article here suffers from much one of the book's major faults: it's an epic romp through the details of technological advance, and their impacts, both of which are admittedly interesting, but lacking in the backbone of theory and a model to explain both what technology is, specifically (one definition, from Gordon, is "the sum of our ignorance", though that requires further explanation ;-), and how it impacts everyday life.
Don't get me wrong: Gordon's grasp and exposition of history is masterful, detailed, and extensively researched. Unlike much of economics, he looks pointedly at every-day impacts, and strongly questions many (though not all) the often-questionable interpretations of economists.
I also agree strongly with Gordon's conclusion that technological progress hit an apex prior to 1920. More specifically, and Neil Irwin does a huge disservice in not mentioning this, Gordon specifically distinguishes rate of change and impacts. While technology has changed markedly in his third era (the book is divided in three parts: 1870 - 1920, 1920-1970, and 1970-2015, nearly 50 years each), the impacts have been quite limited. Little in household appurtenances, particularly kitchens, has changed since 1970, other than introduction of the microwave. Transport's pretty constant. Medicine, for all the expense poured into it, has delivered virtually nothing, particularly contrasted with 1900-1950 (and, for what it's worth, earlier). Work and manufacture has changed, but only modestly, and productivity as measured by economists (dollar output per worker hour) has increased at best modestly.
And, sorry, HN, but Gordon's quite harsh on information technology -- it delivered, somewhat, from 1994 - 2004, but little 2005 - 2015.
That's all covered in the book, and missing from Irwin's article.
What Gordon himself misses is IMO even more interesting.
His core thesis is what's called "the Solow Residual" -- what's left over in regression analysis after accounting for economic growth using capital and labour. (Gordon was a student of Robert Solow's). What bothers me, greatly, is that Gordon all-but-answers his own question -- he points at the 99% growth in worker productivity 1920-1950, and the 133% increase in horsepower and kW per worker over the same period. On numerous grounds, power makes sense to consider in transformational activity.
Gordon completely dismisses it.
Several other researchers have dug into that in depth. Robert A. Ayres (apparently it's a rule for all economists in this saga to be named "Robert") is one, there've been other analysis, including Hall and Klitgaard, and a recent item I've seen. Solow and Ayres had a correspondence according to Solow's archive at Duke University, though I don't know the upshot of it.
Another element missing from Gordon's analysis is some sort of theory of technology -- what it is, how it operates. He describes this to some extent, but it's quite insufficient. He mentions the real-world, everyday-life impacts of many early technologies, but doesn't think to reference Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, another lacking point.
Along with that is a metric of technological impact. Gordon's is GDP and especially GDP/worker. This is actually and area of some disagreement in various circles, but a concept of energy throughput has been proposed by Leslie White, known as White's Law.
I could also quibble with some economic discussions and considerations, though most are quite secondary to his point and if anything would, corrected, strengthen his basic thesis.
But yeah, today's got nothing on the 1880s, progress-wise.
https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technolog...
You could pick any era in the 20th century and find multiple examples of world changing innovation, and there were other periods of rapid change further back in our past as well (the Industrial Revolution springs to mind).