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What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
51–60 of 67 posts
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you had things like ticker tape. but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with texts and email. Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line, then manually sync the two devices. I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the chain.
Edison's first profitable invention, in 1869, was a way to get stock tickers to sync up automatically. It was a hack (send lots of idles every once in a while to force the printing wheel to hit a stop) but it was good enough to deploy. Previous printing telegraph technology, back to 1852, required a skilled operator at the receiving end to manually sync. That was used only for main lines with heavy traffic. Howard Kr…
Interesting! Thanks for the detailed explanation and info!
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?
The transistor was patented in the twenties already but only created in the forties. I wonder what could have been possible if the information revolution happened a lot earlier?
Coexisting Biplanes and BBS:es.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?
The transistor was patented in the twenties already but only created in the forties. I wonder what could have been possible if the information revolution happened a lot earlier? Coexisting Biplanes and BBS:es.
Someone discovered that a 3-terminal semiconductor device could be built using copper oxide as a semiconductor in the 1920s. But copper oxide is a lousy semiconductor, and it was a lousy transistor. So it was just an interesting lab phenomenon. It wasn't until Bell Labs finally figured out the physics behind semiconduction in the 1950s that transistors really worked.
But suppose someone like Edison had gotten hold of the 1920s transistor lab experiment and tried to make it better by trying many different materials. (That's how he got a usable, cheap light bulb filament; thousands of materials were tried, ending with carbonized paper.) They would have tried selenium (selenium rectifiers were known) and galena crystals (crystal radios were known). They probably would have gotten a point-contact transistor out of galena, which would have led to germanium. It would have been unreliable and heat-sensitive until germanium purification was figured out. They might have tried grey tin, which is a semiconductor but a dead end. They probably wouldn't have tried silicon, because you have to grow silicon crystals first, which is hard and wasn't done until 1950.
So a transistor radio might have been demoed by 1930 or so.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#551870-1920. 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…
Not especially relevant, but that explainer clip was amazingly easy to follow. I can't remember the last time I watched a clip that explained something potentially complicated with sufficient detail. The string/line analogy worked really well, too.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#56In terms of pure impactful science I'd say 1920-1960 or so. Quantum mechanics and everything it led to (modern chemistry, in particular) is the big one, but there was also relativity, the modern evolutionary synthesis, huge advances in statistics, the math of computing, and so much more.
What elements of modern chemistry (and practical impacts) flow from QM specifically?
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#571870-1920. 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…
Vaclav Smil further collapses this to the decade of the 1880s, for which I think he's got a strong case.
But yes, the 50 years from 1870 - 1920 essentially created the modern world as we know it. Shy television, many plastics, antibiotics (though massive healthcare improvements had already been made), nuclear fission, lasers, transistors & computers.
Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth does a stellar job of detailing the various impacts of technology on the period 1870 - 2015, divided into roughly three fifty-year periods: 1870-1920, 1920-1970, and 1970-present.
The combination of electric motors and internal combustion engines seems most specifically powerful.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically print them to a paper feed?
Wealthy people could have a telegraph line installed, and did. Ulysses S. Grant got news of his election as president in Galena, IL, (along the Mississippi River, near the Iowa-Wisconsin state line) at the house of a local businessman with a private telegraph service.
More generally, though, "email" was called "mail". In cities, there were often two, and sometimes three mail deliveries daily. It would be possible to carry on a round-trip correspondence over the course of a day.
The precursor of online shopping was called "catalog stores" -- Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the canonical example. I just caught an item over Ansible last week that Sears had discontinued its catalog in 1993, the year before Amazon started.
Robert Gordon, economist at Northwestern University, has just published a book on technology and growth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In it he notes that the typical urban home of 1920 was connected to five "networks": water, sewer, gas, electricity, and phone. I'd add postal mail and the highway, railroad, canal, and shipping networks as well, though those had a "last mile" component of individual delivery. Still, this largely offered similar capabilities to today's Internet.
Email was postal mail.
Online shopping was catalog shopping.
References, information, and entertainment (as well as advertising, without tracking or pop-ups) were performed via books, encyclopedias, newspapers, and magazines. Phonographs provided audio, as well as over-the-air radio broadcasts. Libraries provided extended access.
Latencies were higher, but the throughput of even a horse-drawn cart is pretty good.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Check out Connections, Burke's shows are all about this. There was also the backstory for Alpha Centauri. Firaxis' sci-fi Civilization where the landing of the space ship goes anything but smooth.
That is a fantastic programme, and other than the leisure suits, has aged phenomenally well. The opening sequence of the first episode, in and above lower Manhattan, gives me the chills.
I'd also strongly recommend the subsequent programme, The Day the Universe Changed, which follows a similar, though temporally arbitrary, connect-the-dots motif.
The two sequels to Connections aren't as good, though C3 is the better of the two.
Also: if you're interested in the background of technology, look up the story of Joseph Needham and his extended exploration, Science and Civilisation in China. Begun in 1954, it remains in process, with 27 volumes. Needham himself died in 1995. Simon Winchester's written an excellent (and much shorter) biography of Needham.
Re: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation?
#60In practical terms of impacting the greatest % of the population, some data that I'd like to have seen here are around life expectancy: - Life expectancy, men/women - Infant mortality - Accidental death - Death by illness/disease - Death by military conflict For example: - Life expectancy (US, men & women average) 1870: 35.1 years 1920: 54.1 1970: 70.9 2012: 78.7 The most years gained were 1870 - 1920. As for militar…
Gordon actually has some really good chapters on healthcare and medicine, among the very best parts of his book. He's also absolutely nuts with graphs and tables, and covers much of this in detail.
TL;DR: 2x the improvement of life expectency came before 1950 as after. Medicine since 1970 has been expensive, high-tech, changed rapidly, and delivered very little. Much the improved outcomes arises from improved access for the underserved, not radical treatments. Genomics and stem cells are specifically and pointedly disappointing.