Has the Age of American Progress Ended? | Hacker News Reader

Has the Age of American Progress Ended?

9 pointsinitramfs8 comments

The Atlantic recently featured an article, titled "Why the Age of American Progress Ended" 12/12/2022. The article makes the claim that the first commercially available solar cells were invented in 1954 at Bell Labs. But on further research, it's been shown by Philip Pesavento (ORNL) and Kris de Decker at Lowtechmagazine that commercialization of solar cells using Schottky junctions in the early 1900s was potentially blocked by competing electric plants.

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Definitely. Spearheading EV's and solar energy. Medicines that rewrite a patient's DNA to save their life. Concrete plans for a moon base in a decade (is it?). Micro chips with dimensions in the single digit nanometres. The US is definitely in decline.

NB the US may not have been soley responsible for all this tech but definitely had at least a large hand in them.

lol I thought you were talking about China

TSMC does have the better fabs, and will continue to for the foreseeable future. The best coverage of this is by Asianometry's youtube channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZC6aFsk3M (the short answer is no - U.S. will only have 5% of TSMC production)

All the nodes can be compared here: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr... Asianometry has a great analysis of China's 7nm node at SMIC and TSMC's renegade genius: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W0YdacKwUo

>Micro chips with dimensions in the single digit nanometres.

US is behind Taiwan in this one thing.

https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low-t...

If you could buy solar panels produced by Bell Labs but not those produced by George Cove, then Bell Labs did indeed invent the first commercially available solar cells.

Correct. I should have quoted the article ". Take solar energy. In 1954, three American researchers at Bell Labs, the R&D wing of AT&T, built the first modern solar-cell prototype." "Our ability to decarbonize the grid is held back by environmental regulations that ironically constrict the construction of solar- and wind-energy farms."

The issue is the technology to develop solar may be available, but for over 100 years there have been cases where innovation seems to be blocked, by lobbying, rather than undiscovered or undeveloped. While it may have taken years to refine Cove's discovery for commercial readiness, it would not be impossible had their been so much resistance to it. That still seems to be the case today.

The classic example is James Watt's improvements to the steam engine. He partnered with a lawmaker and got his patent extended, lots of other improvements that built on top had to wait for his patent to expire before they could be more widely used.

https://mises.org/library/james-watt-monopolist

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