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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I'm always amazed at how modern the world was in 1890-1910. I recently learned that the train line I take to work every morning (Metro North's New Haven line) was electrified in 1907!

At Disneyland, Tomorrowland has an exhibit the Carousel of Progress. While it's ostensibly about the advances in home technology over the last 100 years, what really strikes you is how quickly it becomes recognizably modern. Electric lighting and cooking became common in the 1920's, and by 1940 you've got a dishwasher, television, etc.

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Don't forget that it was true only for a very small percent of Earth's land/people. For example in Eastern Europe - Bulgaria, electricity reached smaller towns and villages during the 1950s and 60s.

Even Americans didn't have electrification or indoor plumbing everywhere in the 1930's.

Even seemingly modern, developed countries didn't have indoor plumbing in the 1930s.

My parents grew up in houses on modern (for the time) housing estates in England in the 1950s/1960s without indoor plumbing. Though it was indoor in the sense that the shed was attached to the house out back, but the plumbing was not inside the house until the late 1960s.

The number of dwellings in Japan with flush toilets increased from 45.9% in 1978 to 83.0% in 1998.

* Statistics Bureau, Japan.

It isn't that 1890 was modern; 2010 is lacking in advancement.

Please. The internet and cell phones have changed the world as much as any technology since the light bulb.

Your world. Which is much smaller than THE world.

That said, here are some things invented after the lightbulb that have had more effect than cell phones and the internet.

Aeroplanes. Transistors. Integrated circuits.

And dwarfing them all, the sulfa drugs.

I'm not sure that this is true. The light bulb changed the fabric of society down to the hours people kept. The internet has mostly made it more convenient to do things you already did. Instead of calling your brother on his birthday, you leave him a facebook message. Instead of sending a fax or telex, you send an e-mail. But people largely still work the same way in the same patterns.

OP said SINCE the lightbulb - it is acknowledged that the lightbulb had more effect :) As you say, it fundamentally changed almost everything. It made it possible to safely, reliably put light where before there was no light. The light of burning things is, by comparison to electric light, horrifically dangerous, expensive, unreliabe and inconsistent. Electric light not only enabled people to do things in the hours of darkness, but to create new places to work in, or just to store things, or to create new objects and mechanisms using the new ability to put light anywhere we wanted whenever we wanted (could you imagine trying to inspect the interior of some complex internal component of some huge fantastic construction using a gaslight, or a lump of burning wood?). The tiny bulb in a torch (US - flashlight) is so ubiquitous, but so incredibly useful. So many industries suddenly became so much better, so much safer. Mining, transportation. Lightbulbs touched everything, and created not just new ways of doing things, but made the impossible possible.

So far, the internet and cell phones have not been nearly so revolutionary, but the OP did say "since" :)

This is as true as saying that the automobile let you do what a horse could do, only easier and faster.

On the surface, it's seemingly true, but in reality the details make all the difference. Affordability, for example. Horses were expensive, not everyone owned them, whereas cars could be subject to manufacturing efficiencies and eventually became cheap enough to allow mass ownership. Also, the convenience and inexpensiveness of taking a long trip by car utterly transformed the world.

Similarly, the world is growing far more connected through the internet than it ever was via phone, fax, telex, etc. Speaking personally, prior to the internet I didn't have a lot of interaction with people living outside of my hometown, but today it's not unusual for me to communicate with friends living all over North America and Australia and to talk with acquaintances and strangers all over the world.

Also, people are not working in the same patterns. A significant number of people who do knowledge work have gone to work for themselves, which would not have been so easy pre-internet. Similarly, through inventions like ebay, etsy, crowd funding, self-publishing of music and books, and so forth a lot of people are finding it easier to switch to creative careers. How many lives have been changed by people changing their careers through sites like kickstarter and indiegogo? What percentage does that represent of all people who have made similar changes to their lives enabled by the internet and modern technology?

... in the US

I'm ostensibly responding to everyone here that posted a comment similar to your own.

I've been traveling for 8 months now, nearly 6 of which were through a half dozen in South America, including the poorest, Bolivia. The Internet and computers have had huge impacts on the day to day lives of the people in these countries. Wifi is widely available almost everywhere, the only time we had some difficulty was in a city on the precipice of the deep Amazonian jungle.

As I understand it, the idea of hard currency is being challenged in many African countries due to proliferation of cell phones and other technologies facilitated by the Internet. Social networks are allowing for evasion of government censorship in middle eastern and Asian countries.

So, I guess, what I'm saying is, I challenge the premise of any comment that relegates the benefits of computers and the Internet to first world, western countries.

I was commenting more on the dishwashers and TVs in the 40s. My grandmother grew up in a rural area of Eastern Slovakia in the 40s and they didn't have a dishwasher or TV. Probably because they didn't have electricity. They didn't even have proper floors, just dirt.

That's one of the greatest developments of modern time - the extent to which modern technology is everywhere. While TV took ~30 years to become widespread, even poor people in developing countries are using computers and smartphones not much different to people in western countries. 30 years of technological difference shrunk to 2 at most.

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