Like when you read up on history..hundreds of years would pass without that much advancement but now in the last 100-150 years things changed so much.
Why?
In: Technology
Technology is an exponentially growing field. The reason being the ability to build off of other ideas and concepts. Edison used 100 minds to create the lightbulb and the direct current standard. Tesla took these technologies, combined them with Henry fords assembly line, cadillacs system of interchangeable parts, and Stanley Whittingham’s lithium ion battery to create a fully modern electric vehicle.
A lot of newer inventions owe a lot of their success to the invention of the computer. Not only for the physical technology, but also for the ability to share information worldwide instantly(compared to the older ways of mail oreven telegraph.
Technology makes other technology easy to discover. It frees up our time to focus on the next level of what we want to achieve.
The transistor. It’s able to turn raw electricity into information. It’s able to turn raw electricity into the power that charges our phones computers and TVs. It was able to send radio signals across the the world.
Everything exploded after the transistor was practically used.
Technology builds on itself. Computers couldn’t be made in the 1400s, manufacturing techniques weren’t there. Some of our inventions make it easier to invent other things. Computers are a great example of this. They drastically extend the capicity of other engineers and scientists. They’re also in a feedback loop. Computers allow advanced in materials and manufacturing. This allows for better computers that in turn allow better materials, manufacturing and design. This feeds back on itself in a loop.
The arrival of the industrial age in the 19th century set off a chain of events.
Industrialization meant that people could spend less time farming and just barely surviving. People migrated to cities to work in factories en-mass.
Having people living closer together led to more people getting educated.
Research in this time led to the invention of Electricity, modern physics, and steam power. Steam engine technology was later adapted into gas engines. Humans no longer had to rely on just Horse power and Ox power to get things moving.
Come the 20th century WW1 and WW2 led to the greatest leaps of technological development. A state of total war where much of the worlds economy was transformed into a weapon of war.
Funding for Research and Development of new technology was basically unlimited and the price of losing the war so high that people were willing to look the other way in terms of safety and human experimentation.
After the war a significant amount of surplus hit the market. Farmers suddenly buy military trucks for cheap to replace horses.
Then came the space race. The US and the USSR trying to out-spend each other during the cold war to get a man on the moon.
Many if not most of the technological developments that define the 20th century were derived from these events. Mass production of cars, computers, jet airplanes, radar and radio, nuclear power, and velcro.
In the 19th century you had three forces come together for the first time in a big way.
One of them was the development of the modern scientific enterprise — you’ve got lots of brains applying themselves to learning more about the world in a very systematic way. It stops being something that rich people do for fun, or something that is only open to absolute geniuses, and starts being a career that lots of people can get into.
Another is industrialization, where suddenly there was a huge amount of capital and resources being applied to creating new markets, products, labor saving devices, and so on. In some countries (notably Germany) this became very linked to the work of the scientists and universities in a synergistic way: the industries would fund the science, the science would aid the industry.
Another is the rise of the modern state, which began applying larger and larger resources to scientific enterprises that had a technological component. This became especially important in the 20th century, around the areas of military and war, but there were many spin-offs from this that became broadly used. So someone else brought up the transistor — this was an Army-funded research project that was meant to make more compact amplifiers for radios. But it ended up having many other applications and helped launch Silicon Valley.
Once you pair these three forces up, and people start figuring out you can put them all together, they collectively hoovered up a lot of “low hanging fruit” — things that were relatively easily discoverable and producible, and things that could be incrementally advanced (like packing more transistors into chips). Occasionally a brand new idea came along, but often the “progress” was in exploiting existing ideas or getting them adopted at a large-scale in a way that would enable further developments (so the real genius of someone like Edison was not so much that he invented the light bulb, which was an improvement on ideas already out there, but he convinced people to sign up for an electric grid, which opened up many other possibilities once it was in place).
Prior to the 19th century you really just don’t have these things linked up very efficiently. States funded wars but not industry or science; science was largely done by people not especially interested in practical implications (and their science was too basic to be of much use, most of the time); commercial activity was dominated by guilds and craftsmen who had a lot of ingenuity but were not exceedingly interesting in innovation because it would threaten their monopolies. It took a very long time for a lot of these things to change; the real prerequisites for all of this were created during the Early Modern Period in Western Europe, when revolutions in politics, science, and economics all took place at about the same time, in the context of war, exploration, and religious strife. It’s a fascinating period of history and set the stage for what would come next.
* This is because technology helps to you invite more technology.
* If everything you dreamed up had to be drawn by hand, it would take a long time to create something even if you came up with lots of good ideas.
* Then you’d have to mail those to someone else to help you work on them etc.
* However, once the internet was invented, you could share you good ideas with other people much faster.
* The same can be said about when the telephone was first invented, or radio, or even the concept of writing.
* Each major breakthrough in communication allowed good ideas to spread faster and so the whole pace of technology increased.
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