What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
nytimes.com
What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
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Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#21870-1920. Electric light, automobiles, aircraft, radio, paved roads. Railroads everywhere in the developed world. Electric mass transit (trolleys, subways) in major cities. Tractors and combine harvesters on farms. Refrigeration. X-rays.
In computing, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company (later IBM) produced the first printing tabulator, the beginning of commercial data processing.
Those 50 years held the greatest lifestyle changes in history.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#3[deleted]
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#4The printing press, and its proliferation a few hundred years ago.
Without it, the cost of copying information is enormous. When you can't copy stuff cheaply, you end up copying only a few things. Like what whoever is in power likes. Or whatever the accepted wisdom of the day is.
With it, you can have ideas, spread them, and get feedback from a lot of people. That goes for social ideas like liberalism, religious ideas like Protestantism, scientific ideas like gravity, and technological ideas like all the ones on HN.
You also get away from authority. If you have some new thoughts about how government should be organised, it's a lot harder to stop you telling everyone.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#5Now.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#6The golden quarter..
https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technolog...
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#7750–950 The Islamic Golden Age. Most relatable to HN was the work of al-Khwarizmi who was one of the fathers of algebra and whose name rendered as Algoritmi in Latin led to the term "algorithm".
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#81870-1920. Electric light, automobiles, aircraft, radio, paved roads. Railroads everywhere in the developed world. Electric mass transit (trolleys, subways) in major cities. Tractors and combine harvesters on farms. Refrigeration. X-rays. In computing, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company (later IBM) produced the first printing tabulator, the beginning of commercial data processing. Those 50 years held the grea…
I'm constantly amazed how many not well-known things were invented back then that sound like something that came only recently, for example sending photos over the wire - some time ago I saw a video [1] about wirephoto [2] that blew my mind a little, I would never guess that the first photograph sent over the wire was in as early as 1921!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#9750–950 The Islamic Golden Age. Most relatable to HN was the work of al-Khwarizmi who was one of the fathers of algebra and whose name rendered as Algoritmi in Latin led to the term " algorithm ".
Well Diophantus had already done most of this work for the foundations of Algebra 500 years before.
Besides that, not much during that time compared to the industrial revolution to call it the most innovative era.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#101870-1920. Electric light, automobiles, aircraft, radio, paved roads. Railroads everywhere in the developed world. Electric mass transit (trolleys, subways) in major cities. Tractors and combine harvesters on farms. Refrigeration. X-rays. In computing, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company (later IBM) produced the first printing tabulator, the beginning of commercial data processing. Those 50 years held the grea…
seems to me most of that can be traced back to the electric generator/motor. Without it, the rest of them becomes impractical or impossible.