I think a few early 20th century inventions, in particular television and the atomic bomb, are pretty “magical” even by today’s standards. Most people couldn’t tell you how they worked. The Moon Landing is of course still impressive and hasn’t been outdone yet.
But I think technology truly started to become amazing in the second half of the 1980s. That’s when we had the first surrogate mother, test-tube babies were de rigeur, GMOs were being created in labs, human gene therapy was possible, nanotech and 3D printing were starting to be done, and the global Internet and GPS were (by 1989) already somewhat well developed. For the past 30 years or so, we’ve developed god-like abilities to alter reality, and that’s astonishing.
As for when amazing technology started to become commonplace in everyday life, I’d say by the mid to late 2000s. The Internet became a genuine social tool by 2005 or so, before then most people could only access it from home intermittently via dial-up unless they were willing to pay a lot more for a decent connection. Before then you couldn’t really be online all the time like now and the medium was more frustrating and limited, so it was still mostly a TV and phone call world. Bionic brain controlled arms and hands have become common technologies for amputees who have returned from the wars. GPS has gone from a semi-classified and expensive technology to replacing fuzzy dice on our windshield. Transgender operations are becoming more and more convincing, and plastic surgery is pretty much ordinary stuff. Smart phones have made access to information instantaneous in a way even the Internet alone couldn’t do.
I’d say since ~1988 for at the high end of things, and ~2008 for everyday life, we’ve been living in a “futuristic” and even transhuman world.
Not much of a standard, I reckon. Could most people today really tell you how the 1825 steam engine worked? The 1877 phonograph?
Faster-than-animal land transport and recorded media are still a pretty big deal.
I don’t wish to shoot down the thread, but it seems that the perspective in the OP is awfully short.
I think the Industrial Revolution was amazing. Completely new methods of transport (trains and steamships), new construction materials (iron, then steel), manual labor replaced by automated machinery (tractors, automated textile mills), world-changing scientific discoveries made possible by new technologies (telescope, microscope, etc).
Steam engines. The really complicated bastards, like triple-expansion systems. That’s amazing. And damn pretty, too.
Actually, the complexity of the rigging on a Clipper Ship is also amazing…and also very lovely.
Up until the 19th century, a single craftsman/artisan could pretty much master a given craft, and accomplish anything within it that mankind could achieve. The 19th century saw the introduction of technologies that required teams of draftsmen to design, and teams of engineers to construct. The downfall of “sole mastery” of engineering arts is the dawn of truly amazing engineering.
Integrated circuits are our most amazing accomplishment, I think. Few people really grasp how a computer works, except at a high level. The software and hardware are astoundingly advanced. And ICs have influenced everything about the way our species accomplishes tasks.
To me, technology became exciting when digital electronic items became commonplace. For example, the iPod replacing the Walkman. The DVR replacing the VCR. Downloading music and movies instead of buying tapes and discs.
Of course, all of these things were made possible by the integrated circuits that kunlun mentioned.
“It’s technology, not magic.”
“Well, how does it work?”
“It’s run by…um, crystals that think and make tiny bits of lightning do things.”
“I think you need to check your definition of ‘magic’.”
As has been pointed out, it’s totally subjective, but maybe the inventions/ideas of Nikola Tesla would be as good a starting point as any. Or possibly the invention of radio. The ability to send a voice across oceans instantly and without wires must have seemed pretty magical at the time.
The only quibble I’d have with radio as “amazing” is that it’s so trivially easy to accomplish. A coil, a crystal, a loop… Any of us could build a spark-gap transmitter and receiver out of the junk in a wrecked car.
The principles are astonishing; J.C. Maxwell, by putting it all together in four simple equations, was brilliant beyond all amazement. But the radio itself is a pretty darn simple piece of equipment, at least at the very, very basic level.
Now, one you get to signal modulation…that’s amazing! I could build a machine that would spark “S.O.S.” and another machine that could hear it…but damned if I could build a machine that would transmit a Beethoven symphony!
I don’t know the exact date but I know it wasn’t the 80’s because I was around then and we were just as amazed at some much earlier technology like widespread microwave ovens let alone things that happened before I was born like the moon landings or the development of the atomic bomb. The 70’s and 80’s actually seemed a little stagnant on the technology front from a consumer standpoint even though that wasn’t true behind the scenes. Sure, we got video game consoles and some home computers but they generally weren’t connected to anything and they certainly weren’t everywhere.
I remember feeling a little sad as a child because I didn’t get to live through the really cool part of the technology explosion like my great-grandmother who I knew as a child. She was born in 1883 and died in 1977. She was a child when the first cars were being developed, a full adult by the time the first airplane was flown in 1903, lived through two world wars, the development of the atomic bomb, got to see both radio and TV unfold, saw men land on the moon and countless other things that we take for granted now. I think it would have been amazing to have lived through that time period.
It turns out that this time period has at least as much potential over the next few decades but it hasn’t been realized yet. There have been tons of small to medium sized technological advancements in my lifetime (I am 42) but the only truly revolutionary one has been the widespread adoption of the internet. That changed a lot on its own but we need some equivalent breakthroughs on other fronts like transportation technology and really revolutionary medical advances for me to rank it as high as the first 3/4 of the 20th century.
Fair point, I really meant the transmission of audio as opposed to wireless telegraphy. As I understood it, one led pretty quickly to the other (within about 10yrs), but I admit I’m not all that familiar with either the history or the technical side.
The Victorian Age.
Steam Engines, Trains & Steam Ships revolutionized transportation.
The electric telegraph was an exponential improvement in communication speeds.
Photography, modern Metallurgy…the list goes on & on.
I guess the guy who first watched the other guy who had invented the hand axe, saw it applied and grasped its function felt the same as the OP about modern technology, it was magic to them. So same old, same old.
ETA: Hadn’t read all the responses, so I was ninja’d.
I think that it is the industrial revolution. That is when the world your children or grandchildren grew up in was substantially different that the world where you grew up. If change is slow then things are less amazing and more that is how the world works.