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What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
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Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#121870-1920. 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…
Interestingly it took decades after that to roll out most of the things you listed. Meanwhile newer inventions like the mobile phone were rolled out faster and more globally, even to places where the inventions you listed still haven't reached.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#131870-1920. 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/wi…
I think that's because the equipment was bulky and expensive until recently. So it was reserved for corporate and government offices.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#14I didn't rtfa but if I recall correctly, patents per capita peaked in the 1860s
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#15750–950 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 ".
That's 200 years. Consider how US society has changed in the last 200 years.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#16750–950 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 ".
There is revisionism about the islamic world.
When Islamic Spain fell, the Toledo School of Translators was founded.
This was a huge knowledge dump. Most major scholar centres in Europe have some connection with it.
Later all those translations allowed Europe to go through transforming processes such as the renaissance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_School_of_Translators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_of_the_12th_centur...
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#17Hopefully getting the Internet in the hands of many non-technical people with Smartphones and tablets will get us to another Era of Innovation. Many people started using the Internet that wouldn't have it it was only available on PCs.
The "born after the iPhone" children will get old enough next decade to do their own thing and new ideas will spread :)
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#181870-1920. 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.
I think we could always find a thing that made the next big innovations possible. Newton said that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. I also wondered the other day if humanity could rebuild the current level of technology given a select team of our brightest and all available knowledge, but no tools or machines. We would have to recreate so much in lock step to event get to the most basic things. Just think of how much effort and technology is required to manufacture a simple ball pen.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#19The golden quarter.. https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technolog...
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I see the choice of years as another effort to put the 1960s on a pedestal. If I was being even more cynical, it wouldn't surprise me if the article was written by a Baby Boomer.
You could pick any era in the 20th century and find multiple examples of world changing innovation, and there were other periods of rapid change further back in our past as well (the Industrial Revolution springs to mind).
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#20750–950 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 ".
That's 200 years. Consider how US society has changed in the last 200 years.
The last 200 years are special. We've gone from 1 billion to 7 billion people. It's hard to compare that with a period of time when there were only ~200 million people.