I was thinking about this earlier today - in about 100 years (give or take), we went from covered wagons to electricity, airplanes, telephones, indoor plumbing, skyscrapers, the internet, and so on.
Is this the greatest, quickest period of technological advancement in history?
What allowed us to really get the ball rolling like that - electricity?
Depends on the time-frame. If you are talking about a century scale then yeah, the 20th was the fastest to the extent that it can be measured.
Basically prior to the Reformation it would be unusual to find a century where the most ‘advanced’ people would have changed their lifestyles much in one century. Fashions came and went and technology changed within trades (iron replaced bronze, feudalism replaced democracy or whatever) but most people did exactly what their great-grandparents had done, but with better tools or slightly modified techniques. Invasions and so on would have forced rapid changes on some people, but just to the point of making them more similar to their more ‘advanced’ invaders.
Post reformation the pace of change picked up. Social structures began an accelerating breakdown and ideas started flowing rapidly. By the time you hit the late 19th and early 20th century tings had changed entirely. Very few people were even doing what their fathers had done much less their great grandparents. Entire skill sets were rendered obsolete within one generation, and then the new skillsets themselves were rendered obsolete. On all counts that could be measured things changed faster than ever. Speed increased, the destructive power of weapons increased, education, standard of living wealth and so on all increased far faster than ever before.
Why? That’s terribly complex. Electricity certainly helped, but electricity had been known and used long before the twentieth century so it was almost certainly a tool that could be exploited by the new system more than a result of it. Powered machinery also helped because it released production from the limits imposed by food production for the first time in history. Prior to the industrial revolution any area could only produce in accordance with how many horses and people it could feed and house. Powered machinery allowed concentration of industry in cities that would have bled entire countries dry if it were done using literal horse power. Near-universal literacy also helped, but once again that concept was known and could have been applied any time, so it was a result of the change, not the cause.
IMO the rise of economic and political power of the merchant and working classes and the establishment of unrestricted capitalism was probably paramount. Ideas build upon ideas. As a result technology increases logarithmically. Every new invention inspires a dozen other inventions and improves another dozen old ones. Provided a society if free enough to allow people to publicise and exploit most of those inventions it’s inevitable that growth will accelerate. In the western world for the first time in history everybody who had a good idea could tell people about that idea, and nobody could easily stop it from being developed. The fact that everybody had money and votes to spend on things that made their lives better rather than being taxed into the ground and told to lump it meant that there was a reward for developing those ideas.
My understanding was the latter half of the 20th century was alot faster than the first. I read a statistic that I can’t dig up right now saying we learned more inbetween 1950 and when the statistic was made (probably the early 90s) than we did in all of human history until 1950.
What made it possible? Probably international and domestic communication, the fact that travel and transportation is efficient and the fact that militaries and economies realized that innovation was far more important than mass production. ie, a state of the art military machine can beat many older, less advanced machines and a new medicine or invention will sell better than a less effective, older one. I really have no idea though.
Yep, the second half of 20th century was faster than the first. And the last 25 years of the second half was faster than the first 25. And the last 12.5 years of the last 25 years was faster than…
And similarly the last 200 years were faster than the previous 200. And the last 400 were faster than the previous 400 and so forth.
That’s inevitable. The rate of progress continues to increase. IOW the increase is increasing. With a few possible tiny exceptions any period you choose will be changing faster than the same period preceeding it. That’s been true for the last 40, 000 years.
I doubt that anyone could justify in any objective way that the last 50 years saw more learned than the previous 120, 000 years. We certainly learned a lot but we lost a lot as well. For example I doubt if you could find even one person who could name every macroscopic plant and animal species within 100 kilometres of their home, yet 10, 000 years ago everyone knew that. A lot of the new things we are learning are discoveries of old knowledge that has been lost.
We’re in the realm of opinion here, not pure fact. We had a recent debate about this very topic.
My opinion is that the 19th century was an era of quicker and more dramatic progress than the 20th. The reason being that we went from practically zero in terms of science and technology to quite a heck of a lot. In the 20th we had more bodies at work and more knowledge overall no doubt gained, but the leaps IMHO were not as great.
Two examples from medicine. In 1800 we did not have an accepted germ theory of disease and no antisepsis. We had no anasthetic, either. In 1900 we had antisepsis and anathetic. Two tremendous leaps.
Going from 1900 to 2000, we had highly developed theoretical and applied sciences of anathesia and antisepsis, but these were incremental changes. Much more knowledge at work, though.
So it’s a matter of opinion and perspective, but, of course, based on important facts.
Yes, but that is just semantics. By choosing different words or even defintions of words for our categories we can get any answer we want.
In 1800 we did have an accepted theory of disease and hygiene. We did have anaesthetic in the form of alcohol, opium, wintergreen oil or a blow to the head. In 1900 we had highly developed theoretical antisepsis and inhaled anaesthetic but these were incremental changes. No leaps at all.
Or alternatively
In 1900 we did not have any knowledge of viruses disease and no antibiotics. We had no complex anaesthetic either, being restricted to chloroform, alcohol and other simple organics and aneasthetists had no capacity for monitoring or airway control. In 2000 we had not only discovered and studied viruses but manufactured them in vitro. And we had not only invented several distinct classes of antibiotics but one entire major class had become obsolete within decades of being discovered. And we had available a huge range of complex anaesthetics including somnorifics, muscle relaxants, intoxicants, epidural/blocks and local anaesthetics. We also had airways and even heart monitoring and control techniques Massive leaps
Like I said, it’s purely a semantic trick and the answer varies depending on the categories chosen and the way you choose to define them. We can call the step from alcohol to chloroform a huge leap or incremental step at whim, just as we can call the step from chloroform to halothane a massive leap. Or we can call either one an incremental change.
The real trick is to look at things that can be measured objectively and so can’t be manipulated via semantics. To stick to your chosen field of medicine we might ask how many diseases had >90% mortality? How many diseases had any treatment at all (whatever standard of effective you choose)? How many organs could be operated on with >10% chance of success? How many patients dies under anaesthesia? how many aneastehtics were vaialble? How well could aneathetics be tailored to the patient? And so forth. By using these types objective measures we can avoid ad hoc reasoning and selection of categories that fit our cause. We may be able to define ‘disease’ in several subtly different ways, but so long as it is applied consistently the answer will be correct.
And I can’t think of any objective standard by which the rate of technological progress in medicine wasn’t far faster in the 20th century than the 19th. Can you?
There was the “Golden Age of Economic Growth” (1950-1973).
Krugman commented c. 1991 that his computer on his desk may have been 10x faster than it was several years ago, but it wasn’t 10x as useful.
Then the internet came along and blew this thinking out of the water.
Anyway, to proxy cutting edge technological progress, I’ll present per person economic growth rates for Western Europe, as provided by the master of long run economic data, Angus Madison:
1820-70 0.95%
1870-1913 1.32
1913-1950 0.76
(Note:2 World Wars and 1 Great Depression were not helpful.
Some of the technological progress that occurred in the interwar
period was thought to pay off in terms of growth during the next period.)
1950-73 4.08
1973-98 1.78
BTW: One could argue that technological progress was greatest in the 20th century, scientific in the 19th, while the 18th century excelled in political-philosophy. (Using the cutoff dates of 1820 and 1913 would strengthen this argument.) Each is step is prerequisite for the next. Just throwing that out.
I have to agree with the 19th century. Take someone of adult age in the year 1999 and put them back in the year 1900. That person would still find telephones (or at least telegraphs), railrods, movies, phographs, photographs, hospitals with sterilization procedures, near universal schooling, and many of the fixtures we associate with “modern” life. Those fixtures might be slower or more primitive, but they’d still be there.
Now, takes someone from 1899 and put them back in the year 1800. No telecomuincations whatsoever. No transportaion other than horseback and sailing ships. Hospitals would be breeding grounds for germs and only the selct few would have any kind of education.
I believe the person in paragraph 2 would be much more shocked at what was missing than the person in paragraph 1.
And the remarkable surge in the 1800’s appears to be in large part a result of the industrial revolution which is dated roughly from 1760-1830 more or less coinciding with the invention and refinement of the steam engine.
You don’t think that a person from today might be shocked by surgery with no antibiotics: basically surgery was amputation, and done fast at that? That would shock the hell out of me. Read some accounts of military hospitals, even in WWI to get an impression of how things really were. Patients with infected wounds with buckets and bedpans hung under them to catch the pus. Huge infection rates and inevitable slow deaths for anything but planned surgery. Amputation was routine. Reconstruction was all but unheard of beyond simply closing the wound and setting the bone.I would also be shocked by the rampant malnutrition, the fact that most of the population over 30 would have some form of deformity. amputation or scarring.
The fact that it takes hours for all but the rich to move from one town to another, and weeks to cross the oceans, the total sense of isolation that brings. The fact that most work outside of large factories was still done by hand and most light and heat still came from fires.
And if a lack of universal schooling might shock someone from 1900 how do you think a modern person would react to institutionalised racism that effectively deprived millions of a right to freedom, much less education? I find the level of racial discrimination in even the US in 1900 far more shocking the concept that someone couldn’t go to high school for free. And that’s without the rampant imperial racism of the day. And how would the sudden realisation that poor people really did live in fear of starving to death because of economic depression seem to a modern person? Or the idea that a woman could be repeatedly raped and beaten by her husband and have no recourse? Or the fact that pretty much every family was guaranteed to lose at least one child to disease or illness.
And a lack of universal schooling versus a lack of universal basic health care? Which would be more shocking, a child turned away from school, or a child dying a la “Tiny Tim”?
I can’t prove it of course, but I suspect that your view of how comfortable and culturally similar 1900 was to today is inaccurate, to say the least. I’ve read enough accounts of the time to know that I wouldn’t live there if you paid me. In most cases I wouldn’t want to even visit.
In contrast an average person from 1900 taken back 100 years would see little practical difference. Although telegraphs, steamships, trains, movies and so on all existed in 1900 they were expensive. Most people, even in the US, would never have used such things and as such wouldn’t miss them. Contrast that with a person from today taken back 100 years. Most people today do use TVs and cars and computers and household appliances. They would genuinely miss those things.
Once again I think we can easily fall into a trap of cherry picking examples. Schooling as opposed to racial and sexual equality. Free shooling rather than free medical aid. Anaesthetic rather than antibiotics. Telegraph rather than picture transmission. They are arbitrarily decided categories. But how would the two time-steps compare objectively? Want to try?
My objective points of comparison would be:
How many devices would be missing from the average workers house if she had to go form 1999 to 1899? How many from 1899 to 1799?
How many tasks in an average day/year would a person from 1999 be unable to complete in 1899 if they held the same job and lived in the same size city? How many for a 1899-1799 jump? Ideally choose professions that still exist in the same basic form such as rancher, lawyer, cabinetmaker, infantryman and so on.
How many times would the average 1999 30 yo have been unable to obtain medical treatment if they had been born in 1869? (Include diseases prevented through inoculation, antibiotics etc, any workplace injury fixed with modern medicine, any chronic illnesses cured due to free health care, including spectacles which weren’t freely available to many in 1899 and so forth)? How about for the earlier timestep? I can think of at least a dozen examples of where I would have received life-altering medical care that I simply wouldn’t have been able to obtain as a worker in 1899.
Education really seems to be the only obvious factor that is objectively better between the two eras, but that is counterbalanced by medicine and social equality issues. There were some luxury products like movies and steam train travel that the wealthy would miss between 1899 and 1799, but far more items like TV, motor cars and electric lights that even the very poor would miss between now and 1899.
Aside from education can you suggest some objective standards that we might apply to measure the rate of change? Try to think of examples that can be genuinely compared, so “speed of international travel” or “price of fastest international travel as % of annual wage” or “Average use of international travel” would be better than “price/number of international sea voyages”. Similarly “relative cost of instantaneous communication” or “frequency of use of instantaneous communication” is preferred over “cost/frequency of telegraph use”.
Select any10 objective standards and I think you will find that the cultural change between 1999 and 1899 is far higher than the change between 1899 and 1999.
I think we all tend to agree that we’ve certainly expended more effort on technological innovation in the 20th century than the 19th but the subjective measure of how much progress that effort has lead to is up for debate. In a sense, pretty much all of the low hanging fruit have been picked, it’s very hard to come along nowadays and contribute something so radical it changes the way we live utterly. The Internet maybe, or the transistor. Contrast this with the 19th century and the early 20th century when a single “good idea” could change things utterly.
On the other hand, we’re making a lot more steady, incremental progress and, because we know so much more than before, were making more progress in more areas. The incremental research in making optical fibres slightly more efficient lead to the globalisation boom which is something else that’s managed to change our world. But the cause and effect are much harder to sort out in these cases and it becomes hard to compare the two types of progress.
Well, it’s not exactly the same wording, but I think it’s defensible to argue that public health and particularly sanitation/clean drinking water efforts in the late 19th century (until the first decade or two of the 20th) have saved more lives than any other medical advance since then (even on a per-year basis). And the only other contender, antibiotics, were discovered in the first third of the 20th century.
Of course, we’re making medical discoveries at a faster rate than every before, but in more specialized and less broadly applicable areas.
For my money, inventing language was the real step; everything else was just a lot of mop-up work.
It seems to me that you are overstating the case for calling 1900 surgery so primitive. Anesthetics were first used in 1846 and antiseptic surgical methods since Lister’s work in 1867 so both methods were well established by 1900 and certainly by the time of WWI. I suspect (no cites, but they you didn’t provide any either) that bad conditions in military hospitals were because of poor planning rather than a cultural or technology thing. I think military leaders of the time were caught completely off base by the number and severity of casualties resulting from the use of 18th century tactics against machine guns and rapid fire artillery. As a result too few medical personnel were available; too little antiseptics and anesthetics. WWI was probably one of the most poorly planned and executed wars ever fought and the medical screw-ups were just par for the course in that war.
Even today medical facilities can be overwhelmed by a sudden disaster with much suffering and death that would be inexusable under conditions where there wasn’t a sudden burst of casualties.
As Shalmanese said, how much relative progress in the 19th vs. the 20th century is debateable and could be the subject of a post-doctoral thesis I would think.
All the same I think the 19th century is a strong contender.
WWI is not a typical situation. It was, after all, the FIRST World War.
Total sense of isolation? I doubt it. At least you knew roughly how long it would take to get from A to B. In 1800, that would be nothing more than a guess. We didn’t even have a good map of North America in 1800. Now, that’s isolation.
One word: Slavery.
I can’t prove it of course, but I suspect that your view of how comfortable and culturally similar 1900 was to today is inaccurate, to say the least. I’ve read enough accounts of the time to know that I wouldn’t live there if you paid me. In most cases I wouldn’t want to even visit.
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I never said it was comfortable, only that the difference was greater between 1800 and 1900 than it was between 1900 and 2000.
I think this is a bit of an ethnocentric view. If you look beyond America and Western Europe, I think you’d see much more dramatic change in the 20th century. Look at China, look at India, look at Japan – change, driven by technology and other factors, was much more pronounced for those places in the 20th century than in the 19th.
Yes, I was speaking strictly from the standpoint of the US/Western Europe. If you read the OP, I think that was what he/she was asking. But if you look worldwide, it’s a different story.
I agree with this if you include the first forty or fifty years of the 20th. In about two thirds of a typical lifespan, our ancestors in America saw the introduction of:
[ul]
[li]automobiles widely available and affordable[/li][li]airplanes, and regular scheduled airline service[/li][li]household electricity becoming nearly universal[/li][li]the telephone becoming virtually universal[/li][li]the phonograph becoming virtually universal[/li][li]radio (and TV, though it was still something of a novelty in 1950)[/li][/ul]
These brought about changes in our way of life that, IMO, were much farther reaching than anything that has happened since. True we’ve got computers and the internet, but other progress seems to be mainly incremental…more efficent, safer cars; bigger and more economical airplanes (but not faster), radios and TVs that are better but not so much so that they match the earthshaking innovation of their original introduction.
IQ has also been going up the last 100 years. As to why, I don’t know if anyone knows for sure. More intelligent environments supposedly play a role. We now work with our brains and spend our leisure time following multiple forms of complex media (complex video games, international news) instead of mind numbing factory work like we did 100 years ago. Better nutrition plays a role too.
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0309/iq.html
A line on a graph corresponding to test scores climbs steadily from 1930 to 1990. In just 60 years, the IQ of the average person in the United States has gone up almost 20 points.
Gladwell: "Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans—at least, as measured by I.Q. tests—were getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people who give I.Q. tests continually recalibrate the scoring system to keep the average at 100. But if you took out the recalibration, Flynn found, I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third
So people are more competent to handle scientific advancements and to contribute to their developments due to higher IQs. That plays a role too I’m sure.
IQ has also been going up the last 100 years. As to why, I don’t know if anyone knows for sure. More intelligent environments supposedly play a role. We now work with our brains and spend our leisure time following multiple forms of complex media (complex video games, international news) instead of mind numbing factory work like we did 100 years ago. Better nutrition plays a role too.
http://www.rps.psu.edu/0309/iq.html
A line on a graph corresponding to test scores climbs steadily from 1930 to 1990. In just 60 years, the IQ of the average person in the United States has gone up almost 20 points.
Gladwell: "Twenty years ago, a political philosopher named James Flynn uncovered a curious fact. Americans—at least, as measured by I.Q. tests—were getting smarter. This fact had been obscured for years, because the people who give I.Q. tests continually recalibrate the scoring system to keep the average at 100. But if you took out the recalibration, Flynn found, I.Q. scores showed a steady upward trajectory, rising by about three points per decade, which means that a person whose I.Q. placed him in the top ten per cent of the American population in 1920 would today fall in the bottom third
So people are more competent to handle scientific advancements and to contribute to their developments due to higher IQs.
Forgot: [ul]
motion pictures[/ul]