This is surprisingly accurate, reserved and balanced through the lens of society as well as science. I was expecting something more fanciful like flying horses or whatnot.
You don't know what you don't know so there's nothing about computers here, but most of this article was really well done.
> I'm sure that technological advancement in 2022 will be amazing, but they will be nothing as amazing as the present day than it is over 100 years ago (i.e. 1822).
I don't know about that statement.
- Radio
- Movies
- Motorized Rail Transit
- Airplanes
- Blimps
- Recorded Audio
- Electrification (esp. lighting)
- Telephony
- Cars
- Subways
- Fax
- Early Television
- Telegraph
- Skyscapers
- Underwater tunnels
- Air Conditioning
- Elevators
- Modern Hospitals
- Machine Guns, Tanks, Dreadnoughts and other tools of modern war
- Stock Tickers
- Early computing (Tabulators, IBM, etc.)
- Modern Steel Manufacturing
I would bet that the people of the 1920s would find the world of the 2020s much more recognizable than the people of the 1820s would find the world of the 1920s.
Let's start by explaining smartphones, then Twitter and Facebook and then on how companies used them to hijack elections and destabilize democracies in multiple countries.
Or, for an amusing time, try to explain how a cryptocurrency works.
My mom, born in 1935, doesn't understand what I do beyond that I write computer programs (which isn't even that much true anymore).
They had electric telegraphs, telephone and radio, so I'd explain it as miniaturized wireless telephones and typewriters combined, additionally with capabilities of paperless networked teleprinters of a kind. Some of the stations would be libraries with expert librarians on hand to tirelessly answer your questions.
> then Twitter and Facebook
I believe this is already covered. Anyone can now own a small personal broadcast station.
> try to explain how a cryptocurrency works.
I'd use the analogy of a network of tabulating machines with accumulators controlled by inputs according to something quite like point to point teleprinters instead of by punch cards. Records with a copy on each machine, would store on a very flexible type of automatically configurable control panel board with a special arrangement of relay circuits capable of acting as a memory, rather than in boxes of cards. Such a machine could track some quantity, addable and subtractable like a currency. I would then bring up the difficulty of protecting against liars and double spending. One solution might be to connect each machine to automatic slot machines and have them play till there was a winner who then got to broadcast an append to the record with the longest history in their collection of records. I'd also note that the more slot machines there were, the more slots were magically added to each. The idea being to make it costly for any one view to dominate the network.
Far from perfect but the gist could be communicated to anyone with a bit of imagination. Modern technologies have had a large impact on life but can be connected to 1920s tech. This is unlike the gap from the 1820s to 1920s that saw electromagnetism, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, radio broadcasting, telephone, electricity and electric engineering, atomic physics, flight, automobiles and more.
Remember when we needed to go to a payphone to tell our parents we were in the mall and to ask them to pick us up? And that they had no way to phone us while we weren't home?
You can ask your phone what's the molecular mass of methane. Or ask it to identify a song that's playing in the restaurant.
Both Ponzi and tulip mania pre-date 1922. So, not that hard.
Also, fiat currency, cryptography, wire transfers, and banking all existed before 1922.
Information still traveled at human recognizable size in 1922, largely the same in 1822 (just got a bit faster over telegraph). Whereas today the first website you visit probably contained more information (bloat) sent to your phone than a person in 1922 would have came across in an entire year.
In other word, the largest transformation is not on the front end, but that doesn't make it less significant. Everyone can make a Google landing page - but it's the stuff behind it that makes it Google.
We have some cool stuff compared to 1922, but you could argue the shift was greater.
Airplanes existed in 1922. But nobody you knew flew on them. You didn't take them from the US to Europe on business trips; you took a ship. You didn't take them from New York to LA, either; you took a train. You sure didn't book flights online while sitting in your couch at home.
The same (in fundamentals) technology existed in 1922. But all the social change came after that.
The first transatlantic flight by Charles Lindberg was 1927, 5 years _AFTER_ this article was written.
People were trying to do a transatlantic flight in the 1920s the same way as we are trying to make hydrogen cars, applicable artificial intelligence (self-driving?), or other "nearly true" things today.
There were many notable attempts at a transatlantic flight. As such, the article is able to point out the issues (ex: the lack of oxygen in the upper atmosphere, leading to hypoxia).
An individual pilot can do a transatlantic flight with the use of a breathing apparatus, similar to a scuba diver. But large-scale flights wouldn't be possible until the invention of pressurized cabins (used as a secret-weapon during WW2: the US Superfortress Bombers would fly so high thanks to pressurized cabins, that other airplanes couldn't reach them).
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Predicting a successful transatlantic flight would be like predicting a self-driving car today. We see lots of cool tech demos and people starting to understand the issues / technology... but it clearly doesn't exist yet. Not in any way that's usable.
We're probably 5 years off from a plausible tech-demo (ex: Spirit of St. Louis like attempt), and decades away from a commercial offering.
Lindberg's flight was of 33-hours. This article is suggesting an 8-hour flight time, well into the realm of science-fiction by 1922 standards. The 400+ gallons of fuel of "The Spirit of St. Louis" was manually strained and manually purified by the team, for no commercial process existed yet to make the fuel pure enough for high reliability.
A trans-atlantic flight was "inevitable", because the march of progress over the last 10 years was so dramatic, so incredible, so inspiring, that it almost certainly was going to happen. But it absolutely was still science fiction by 1922 standards.