When it made technology available to the masses, the smartphone & GPS. It became magical.
These sound more like achievements of the second industrial revolution.
i don’t think tech has become amazing. Technology won’t become amazing until we have strong AI and neuroscience understands the brain. When that happens then we will experience a cognitive revolution similar to the industrial revolution (we are in the early stages of one right now).
Before the industrial revolution, human civilization was limited to biological muscle in the forms of humans (free and slave) and pack animals. the industrial revolution created machines that could perform manual labor better than biology.
The cognitive revolution will do the same, machines that can perform cognitive tasks at a quality and quantity far surpassing what biology is capable of. When that happens, then we hit transhumanism. I’ve heard that developed economies could see GDP double several times within a year after this happens (I will try to find the article).
So basically, we are with the cognitive revolution about where the industrial revolution was around 1800. we see the beginnings of it, but it has barely started and the magic hasn’t happened yet.
Pedantic nitpick: Maxwell’s original formulation of electrodynamics consisted of twenty equations in quarterion formulation that nobody really understood until Oliver Heaviside discovered Maxwell’s work and reformulated a reduced set of equations into the four equations in vector notation (in the process developing significant portions of vector analysis) that are now presented to physics students as “Maxwell’s Laws”. The laws we learn now are a highly simplified model; the original equations actually presaged both general relativity and quantum electrodynamic field theory.
As for technology, every tool and technique that we use to extend our natural abilities can be considered technology. Clarke’s Third Law states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What Clarke failed to mention, however, is that this point began at the point of the Industrial Revolution. The invention of the practical steam engine allowed the amount of power wielded by one person to vastly exceed that formerly possible even with a team of working animals, but even today, relatively few people outside of engineering and physics backgrounds can explain how thermodynamic steam engines work.
Stranger
But why start at the industrial revolution? Did the regular bloke from 200,000 years ago (maybe much earlier, I think it started with homo habilis, but I don’t have the dates at hand) or so had a concept of how a stone tool worked a brighter fellow had invented? A guy skinning an antelope with a stone? It’s magic!
The requisite Star Trek clip here. (With a virtuoso facepalm.)
I don’t think a guy skinning an antelope with ever be considered ‘magic’ even 200,000 years ago. It was more like ‘Great idea Ug!’ Early humans weren’t that primitive even back then.
I think the thrust of the question is about the pace of technology that one person could experience in their lifetime. The Industrial Revolution was still fairly slow to be rolled out in the early stages. My vote still stands for a person born in the late 19th century and witnessed everything until the late 20th century. That is still an unmatched timeline in overall terms and the difference between the beginning and the end of it is beyond enormous. There were people born in covered wagons that lived in sod houses with no plumbing or electricity that got to witness the moon landings and even the birth of the internet not to mention thousands of other things we take for granted now.
Technology development is not linear at all. There were only 66 years between the birth of aviation and the first moon landing yet we do not have the capability to send people to the moon again today. Airliners are safer than they have ever been but they cannot get you to your destination any faster than a 1960’s era 707 and it likely remain that way for your lifetime. Microwaves have been improved a lot but they have been around in some form since the 1946. The fax machine was invented 100 years before that in 1846 well before the telephone (1876).
The big innovation I see in the current generation lies mostly within information science and social media. That is truly revolutionary as well and only kicked off on a large scale in the past few years. We will have to see where it goes both good and bad but it truly makes distance inconsequential for most interactions among people. Contrast that with the system I had when I was young. You could call someone at home only but you were shit out of luck if no one answered the phone. No one had even a primitive answering machine. If they weren’t at home, there was no way to get in contact with them short of sending out a search party that had a good idea of where they were. I miss that feature more than any other now but the technology to counter it is here to stay.
But handcrafted tools aren’t “magic”; you can see directly how they work and observe the techniques by which they are made. Steam engines, on the other hand, require an understanding of the thermodynamics of phase transitions and how energy is stored and released to comprehend how it works. Until William Thompson and Rudolf Clausius formulated the second law of thermodynamics, the understanding of how to calculate the work done by the steam cycle of a heat engine, prior efforts were all just so much “magic”.
Stranger
You don’t understand the crystalline nature of a sharpened stone edge simply from observation. You don’t understand why a knife made of wood doesn’t work as well as a sharpened stone simply by observation. You do understand how a steam engine works as well as you understand how a sharpened stone cuts simply from observation.
The OP touches on it, but this thread ignores vaccines and antibiotics. IMHO, those two have done more for humanity than any of the technlogical toys we now (survive to) enjoy.
You don’t need to understand the “cystalline nature of a sharpened stone edge” to observe how a knife or axe works on a practical level, e.g. as a wedge that multiplies force by its geometry. Understanding how a steam engine functions and how it has to be sized to produce a given level of work requires an understanding of the thermodynamic behavior of steam.
Stranger
Yet steam engines were built and put to practical use before that knowledge of thermodynamics was acquired.
They’re wonderful…but they aren’t “amazing.” The principles upon which they work are actually fairly easy to describe and to understand. Jenner’s original work with cowpox could be accomplished by any one of us: it isn’t brain surgery. Just pricking folk with a messy needle.
The stuff that’s truly amazing is the stuff that we couldn’t do, ourselves, today, or even really fully comprehend. No one mind can ever truly comprehend a Saturn V, or Windows 10.
(Whether or not anyone would want to…)
In The Birth of the Modern, Paul Johnson makes a great case for 1815-1830, and the many political, social and technological innovations from that period.
I always think of my father telling me the story of the first escalator in Denver, and thinking, “I wonder what things will be invented in my lifetime that I’ll look back on with that kind of amazement?”
Any technology that fundamentally changes the way your world works can be amazing.
I’ve told the story many times. When I was a little girl I used to imagine having a magic book that would turn into whatever book I wanted it to be. There will never be anything as amazing to me as my magic book.
I think old clocks and machines that worked off of clockworks were pretty amazing and I think those date back to the 1500’s.
Check out this LINk about “Most Creepy Automatrons” or clockwork figures.
Seems to me that you’ve described an e-reader.
All technology improvements are amazing for their times.
I am sure the waterwheel producing power to turn shafts and run industrial process was amazing to the folks that 1st used it.
Technology became amazing when stone knives were first knapped.
This is not really a good example because we still have the technical capacity but simply have our budget priorities elsewhere. It’s not as if we couldn’t go if there were really a compelling reason. We would need to redo everything, but it’s not as if the technology needed to be rediscovered.
If one thinks about military technology, countless lives have been wasted by generals attempting to utilize old tactics despite the more advanced weapons which made these tactics obsolete.
Even WWII technology, hopelessly primitive now was enough to destroy whole cities and resulted in the deaths of scores of millions.
When I was a child, I read in the National Geographic the story of a primitive tribe and the author showing his neat high tech items, such as his rifle. The tribe member compared it to the weapon of his god.
Fire. Using it instead of fleeing from it. It must have looked like magic at first. Yes, stone knapping was also important, but the technique was sort of obvious, even though it took a lot of practice to get good at it. Then selective breeding and domestication of plants and animals. Far from obvious. Smelting and glass making must have seemed magical at the time.
For the modern age, I will insist that it was all inevitable once the transistor was invented. The vacuum tube, important as it was, simply could not have built the modern era. No one who saw the Univac I in operation can doubt that.