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Comment by leto_ii | Hacker News Reader

Amazing feat. Yet it's not the first time that I've also felt bitterness pondering such past achievements.

I can't escape the feeling that we used to be so much bolder and unconstrained in setting goals for ourselves and actually pursuing them. I feel like 1900 people would have fixed global warming, unaffordable housing, universal healthcare etc.

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Engineers in the 19th century would be amazed that we can build mechanisms with thousands of moving parts — functions, classes, packages — just by typing on a keyboard. Not only that but they also spin around in the order of millions to billions of times a second and every computer in the world can talk to any other computer. Most of these machines are the size of a bar of chocolate and a huge amount of the software is given away for free in an ecosystem of OSS, applications, and programming languages thriving on competition.

I see your point about a lack of modern day gumption in the physical world but I sleep at night knowing that what we do with software more than makes up for it.

And also the only way they could embed logic into objects was through some very convoluted physical mechanism.

Those physical mechanisms did have advantages, though. The signals on railways would physically interlock so you couldn't accidentally clear two trains to enter the same portion of track. Perhaps the electrical circuits on modern signalling systems have similar interlocks and it isn't all left up to software (at a minimum you wouldn't want to ever let the system go "all green", for example).

It is common for industrial safety relays to have mechanical interlocks internally.

https://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literat...

That’s still the case. My mom was Wire Chief at a railroad, and when something broke, everything failed safely and ground movement to a halt until she could get the problem fixed.

Failsafe systems are still common where safety or vast expense is at stake.

A bit surprising: nobody had override powers? Possibly sending someone over to flip the switch?

> Engineers in the 19th century would be amazed

Would they?

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-19th-century-vis...

People in 1900 effectively had two world wars that lead to a massive number of deaths, thinking it was some golden age of unlimited accomplishment without terrible costs would be a mistake.

Didn't say they were perfect, but when it comes to the speed of scientific and technological progress, nothing beats the late 19th- mid 20th century era.

This is kind of like saying that the first person harvesting an apple orchard is better than the people that come after because they get to pick the low hanging fruit.

If you dug them out of their graves and presented the scientific world as we have it now it's highly likely they'd see the predicaments we are in now and a whole lot of that technological progress would be different. Turned out running economies on leaded gas burns up atmospheres and brains. Turns out that physics didn't have unlimited secrets to divulge without ever increasing amounts of effort and energy being applied to discover them.

have a good point there: Einstein, Nikola Tesla, the Wright brothers, Edison, Ford (with his usage of mass production), Alexander Graham Bell, modern surgery techniques... and that's only after thinking for 20 seconds...

... although, "somewhat" agree with pixl97 that there was so much to learn and discover during that time period, that many ideas were discoverable by only one or two people (where as things like CRISPR took dozens of researchers decades of building off of each other work to invent reliable DNA editing).

> nothing beats the late 19th- mid 20th century era

That is why we have climate change in the first place.

If we combined 1900 attitudes toward health and safety and 2000 birth rates, we might fix global warming and ecological damage (by drastically reducing the number of us).

Genocide the poor masses to make room for the rich ultraconsumers? I'll grant that's a bold plan... if a touch supervillain. But where does one recruit minions in this fantasy?

Elon is making robots

However the 1900's attitude to global warming was "this will be wonderful, shame it will take a few centuries".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

If anything, the fact that they could keep the economy and innovation going while a large portion of the population was fighting a war makes it even more impressive.

Were they? There was a lot of innovation related military aircraft, chemical weapons and tanks so maybe you're right. Not so sure about "keep the economy" going considering that aftermath of WW1...

My great grandparents fled Mussolini's Italy, despite the trains running on time. And I daresay, many if not all of our environmental problems are due to the bold and unconstrained development of technology.

Most of the trains did not run on time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Railways

Weird grievance but okay

They were kindly letting you know that a commonly held misconception you had is actually not true, not airing a grievance.

This wiki article doesn't prove anything, just cities two dudes who claim that the trains didn't run on time. Excellent 'refutation'. It's like citing one random dude saying that Stalin was a cool guy and basing your whole argument around it.

Seems at least as credible as the people saying that all the trains were running on time?

If you actually bothered to read the linked wiki article you would know that even that article actually claims that the trains service _improved_, just disputes who would be responsible for it.

It also says "The improvement was also more apparent than real"

Exactly this claim was based on one dude who happened to be some random Italian railways employee at the time. Regular employee, a courier, not even someone who would have even limited knowledge, such as someone dispatching rail transport on some random rail station or something like that. It doesn't refer any official statistics, even fake ones. Just one random dude's opinion. Can it be more ridiculous than that?

I think this is accurate, a cynical comment mentioned the two wars, but more practically, those wars and pandemics killed a lot of people, ending design trends before they could take hold. people from all walks of life as both civilians and military patriots and conscripts, from so many countries across Europe all at once

cities that werent firebombed were on somebody’s list to firebomb. Vienna could have met the same fate as Dresden, Dresden could have the charm of a Vienna or Paris. when you put it in perspective there are plenty more trends that are just lost through that dark age.

there are a lot of things from the 1890s to 1910s that I think would be appreciated today if people knew of them.

You’re not the only one: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

This is somewhat still this way in China, as we can see in architecture and infrastructure projects that are often bold, ambitious, and which happen rather quickly once decided.

In Europe, especially, it is very difficult nowadays for good and bad reasons.

Note, though, that this was for a temporary exhibition so being bold and forward-looking, with a level of showing off, what the whole point.

"Was" the whole point, of course.

And all kinds of mayhem is being done in Paris these years, in the name of the next Olympic games. Also a show-off event as a pretext to accelerated large changes.

i drive on the interstate highway system way more than i like, and i'm often struck with the thought that, if we didn't have our interstate highway system now, we wouldn't build one.

Rail network too. We should have high speed rail all over the country - instead, witness e.g. the molasses-speed design and construction of the California High Speed Rail project.

> unaffordable housing, universal healthcare etc.

They had a chance to (both were huge problems at the time), they decided to spend massive amounts of resources killing each other instead..

1940s and 50s people on the other hand had a fairly decent run at it.

Most of these problems are artificially created by governments via regulations and their support of corporations and their monopolies.

You would have corporations and their monopolies even without regulations. Probably even more.

> fixed global warming Sir, the correct term du jour is "climate emergency". "warming" is not to be used anymore since expected natural developments started to contradict the yearly proclamations made by Gore et al.

Huh? This is the hottest year so far.

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