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Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Penicilin, Heart transplants, Supersonic travel. Nuclear power, Nuclear weapons, Nuclear naval propulsion. Space exploration. Artificial Satellites, GPS, Succesful cancer treatments, NMR and other imaging diagnostic tools. Wireless bi-directional personal television (the 20's name for making a zoom call from your phone). And the list goes on.

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Do any of those even come close to 1822-1922 changes of aviation, global telecommumications, ubiquitous electricity, cars, Quantum Mechanics, and so on? Space exploration, nuclear propulsion and satellites are great, but their impact on people’s daily lives is far smaller than the above, imo.

I think the author was largely correct.

How not? Penicilin alone has a giant impact on the lives of people. What about anti-conceptionals too.

So did (even to a greater effect) the doctors washing their hands. Between 1822-1922, only in Physics humanity discovered/developed, the laws of Electromagnetism, the laws of Thermodynamics and their microscopic extension: Statistical Mechanics, the special theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the General theory of relativity.

The last 100 years have been about doing things in large quantities in a cheaper, faster way. Of course there has been great progress (the era of the PC/Internet by far the most important one) but the rate is significantly lower.

Personal Computers (and smartphones, etc) are the largest change by far.

They are definitely the biggest change in the past century and on par with those big innovations I mentioned, so I wouldn’t want to undersell them as they’ve been a major disruptive change to most / all fields.

However, they wouldn’t exactly be incomprehensible to someone from the early 1900’s, since they already had the telegraph, telephony, and fax machines which could send pictures over a long distance came very soon after this article was written.

Whereas I think a person from the early 1800’s would genuinely struggle with understanding the modern world.

In my earlier reply to GP, I had forgotten about space exploration, and I think that is a major technological advancement that would amaze someone from 1922. However, I still think that someone from 1922 would expect such things of 2022 in a way that someone from 1822 would not expect of 1922. 1822 - 1922 is the difference between being a barely-technological world to being a fully-blown one, in many, many fields.

Modern medicin would be nothing short of miraculous from the eyes of someone from 1920.

Ditto 1922 medicine compared to 1822.

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