What about the scientists of ancient Greece? They realised the world was round, calculated its radius etc. Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes, Demosthenes…
Nitpick: not all of those guys were “prior to the 1700’s”. Newton died in 1727 and Gauss lived 1777–1855.
Scientific advancement may reasonably be viewed as an exponential growth. This means that in the past X years, we’ve made as much progress as in all of history before that… But it also means that for a person living a century ago, or a millenium, they would also have made more progress in the past X years than in all of history before that. Our time is not special in that regard. We’re not even special in that we think that we’re special: That’s been true in previous times, as well. Humans just aren’t used to thinking in terms of exponential growths.
On the literacy point, sure, most people in the developed world can read. But I’ve heard the case made that the proportion who actually does read has been more or less constant in history, at a few percent. We Dopers are strongly self-selected from among that small group who does read, and we probably tend to associate mostly with others from that group, so it may not be obvious to us. But most people do not choose to read; they do so merely from necessity.
If we’re talking about science as we now know it, I would tend to give more credit to Galileo. With the calculus which he developed, Newton was able to put Galileo’s work on a much firmer footing, and Newton correctly deduced that straight lines, not circles, were the natural motion of objects. But it was Galileo who came up with the much more fundamental notion that the natural state of an object could be motion, at all, and that forces would change motions, not just sustain them. Galileo was also a strong champion of the notion that if we want to learn how the world works, we should study the world itself, and not confine ourselves to contemplation of what seems philosophically elegant, which is a key element of what we now consider science.
That seemed to be the argument of Ray Kurzweil that technology is exponential, but only when an exponential curve starts reaching a certain point does it explode with growth (the observed difference between 64 vs 128 blades of grass is different than 100 million vs 200 million). According to him under these exponential rates of growth we should experience 20,000 years worth of technological development in the 21st century, if we are going to use 1990-2000 era rates of discovery and advancement.
Perhaps the 1700s era was the cutoff when the exponential growth started becoming obvious. However I am not sure I agree with it. Maybe the 1700s were just the first ages when we had the tools, machines & ideas necessary to become scientific on a meaningful scale.