When did technology truly start to become amazing?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Not very efficient or reliable ones. Newcomen’s ‘atmospheric engine’ was basically an ad hoc design that could only produce up to about 5 hp and because of the poor understanding of the effects of thermal differences on the thermodynamic cycle, operated at extremely low throughput efficiency. Watt’s innovation of the jet condenser reduced pressure and thermal losses by separating the injection of the condensed working fluid from the main piston chamber, but was still monumentally inefficient and not possible of being scaled beyond about a 10 hp output. While some of the limitations were due to material strength and manufacturing tolerances, these engines were just terribly inefficient and were far to massive to be used for anything but stationary applications that required a constant low power supply (mostly used as water pumps for mines and canal locks). The way in which they fundamentally worked and how to gain the possible efficiencies were a mystery to Newcomen, Watt, and their contemporaries; the phase transition from liquid to steam and the resulting work that could be done was just so much magic. It required the development of the model of the Carnot cycle and investigation into the behavior of steam under various pressure conditions to really understand how a steam engine works and how to extract good efficiency for a given thermal gradient such that steam engines for practical mobile applications such as marine vessels or industrial high pressure applications could be built.

Well, sort of. We have a clear understanding of the elements of the necessary technology, but the specific experience and engineering details of how we did it are either lost or obsoleted by change of materials, processes, et cetera. We could not literally “go to the Moon today” because we don’t even have a launch vehicle currently capable of lifting sufficient mass to carry a human crew and lander to Lunar orbit. That we could build such a system is not in question, but constructed to modern engineering standards and processes would likely take just as long as the original Apollo program. Actually, most estimates of a timeline are much longer, but those also assume the extensive bureaucracy involved with getting NASA to approve of anything; practically speaking from a purely technical standpoint, we could probably design, develop, and qualify a new crewed Lunar-capable launch vehicle, spacecraft, and lander in [POST=17178323]no less than five years and more likely close to eight years[/POST] given an essentially blank check budget.

There will be, of course, those who argue that because we’ve done it before and have the “blueprints”, we could just rebuild the Apollo/Saturn system and do it again. Those people, however, will conveniently ignore that even setting aside the marginality of the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn V rocket compared to modern reliability and functionality standards, that there is considerable ‘tribal knowledge’ in any complex system to make it function, and simply aping what people have done in nominal operation in the past without going through the exercise of understanding how the system works (and how to determine when it isn’t working) is fundamentally cargo cult engineering. I work in this world every day, and there is no substitute for making your own mistakes and knowing not just the how, but the why of system function.

Stranger

42

I think I misunderstood you initially. I agree. Historically invention preceded the science that explained it. Perhaps that is not the way the future will go, but yes, it does seem to be magic until the science is developed to explain it.

43

When it comes to the tolerances and engineering and such I’ll vote for GPS.

44

Up until the Twentieth century that was certainly true. Researches into optics, electrostatics and electrodynamics, and chemistry were all largely experimental efforts where theory followed afterward to explain the effects, often incompletely or incorrectly. It was really in the mid-Ninetenth century, and specifically with James Clerk Maxwell, that the first actually predictive models based purely on mathematics came into being, and not until the Twentieth centur that prediction frequently proceeded (and helped to formulate the experimental approach for) observation.

Stranger

45

When we achieved sustained powered flight, everything else would be an evolution of something.

Declan

46

Indeed. A magical thing that I knew wasn’t real even as I dreamed about it as a child. Now I own two. Technology doesn’t get any more amazing than that.

47

I suppose it’s all pretty amazing if you haven’t been using it for 100 years.

But I would say that certain periods like the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, the period around World War II through the 60s where advances in flight, radio, nuclear energy and space exploration really took off, and the last 20 years or so where the computer has fundamentally changed society stand out as periods when people actually living in them are actually amazed by what is being created.

48

While the late-to-early-post WWII era was quite interesting, to me the tipping point was when you could buy a 4-function, 8 digit pocket calculator for $30. Not so much as the effect of that particular device, but the surrounding effects of mass production of cheap, increasingly powerful, digital products. You pretty much knew that cheap, powerful, wireless-connected pocket computers were going to happen soon.

49

I dunno; wasn’t there that famous newspaper retraction in the '60s, after reasonably concluding in the '20s that flying through the airless vacuum of outer space (a) can’t be extrapolated from what works in an atmosphere, and (b) is impossible?

Or how about splitting the atom – where a-tom was picked to convey un-splittable? Could we have even speculated about DNA fingerprinting before DNA was discovered? What about the workings of GPS satellites before relativity got theorized?

50

Wikipedia:

The NY Times editorial, reproduced on the Wiki page, was only one of many articles in many publications that heaped opprobrium on Goddard. The U.S. government and military were equally stupid, until the V1 and V2 and cash purchases of Nazi rocket scientists.

51

I am surprised there isn’t focus on the Theory of Relativity and Quantum Physics and creation of the first atomic bomb, ushering in the Atomic Age.

Newton’s laws operated in ways we could observe and make “common sense” of based on our everyday experience. The new physics is marked by its incomprehensibility.

The atomic bomb gave us access to a level of power that we are not able to truly comprehend.

52

How about the printing press?

53

I feel compelled to point out this is nothing more than CGI movie magic, and a completely fictional creation.

Tesla liked to impress the rubes by issuing photos of himself sitting amonst the big sparks of his coils, but these were fakes – double exposures. By modern standards a guy just sitting there is pretty tame, so the movie turns it up a notch using CGI to envision him walking through all kinds of sparks. Visually compelling, but unrelated to reality – he had no desire be burned or electrocuted.

And to quote one of his obituaries: “In his development of the Tesla coil, Nikola Tesla produced a device which produced extremely high voltage high-frequency currents and these produced startling effects. Apparatus of this kind was seen in electrical and physics laboratories for many years, but it never served any really useful purpose.”

54

If anything, the many tech changes have been surprisingly ineffective in how they’ve changed everyday lives. Most tech these days just makes something more efficient or replaces existing items. It doesn’t divorce us from the day-night cycle the way electricity does, or reshape where we live the way the automobile did. Think of the way inventions as wildly different as broadcasting and effective birth control have shaped our family size and structure, the way we talk, or our awareness of the outside world. My mother grew up on a farm without electricity or running water, and the tales she has of those days are virtually unrecognizable to modern day people.

55

The printing press certainly led to a revolution in literacy and ability to convey complex political, philosophical, and scientific information to a wide audience, but there is nothing particularly amazing about it as an example of technology. In fact, it is surprising that it took as long as it did for the print press to become a useful technology. The technology of movable type existed in China and Korea for centuries before the Gutenberg press.

Relativity and quantum mechanics are also miraculous revolutions in the understanding of the fundamental mechanics of the universe, and they’re still a mystery to the general public (in part because of the poor education provided about them) but their applications to practical technology were and remain pretty limited. GPS is about the only technology in everyday use that really requires an understanding of general relativity and most people aren’t even aware of that, as relativistic corrections feed into corrections to the satellite ephemerides; you can be a user of the GPS system, even developing applications for receivers, without ever having to appreciate or understand general relativity. Quantum mechanics offers a giant conceptual revolution in computing and encryption, but that has yet to become a practical reality. From a practical standpoint, formulation of the laws of electrodynamics and electrochemistry has had far more impact, as nearly every single piece of what we would consider a powered ‘technology’ is in some way intimately dependent on an understanding of electrodynamic and electrochemical theory.

However, this suggests that a similar revolution in technology awaits our ability to grasp and manipulate the other fundamental forces. Just as in the mid-Nineteenth century we could scarcely generate enough electrical power to be able to use electrodynamics in practical application, we struggle today to manipulate the nuclear forces, and then only by smashing them together crudely at very high energies in gigantic mechanisms and taking statistical measurements of the ‘random’ results to look for patterns. Should we in the future be capable of making fine manipulations directly to nuclear interactions, the kind of things that are pure science fiction today like tractor beams, force fields, handheld nuclear isomer batteries or portable fusion generators may be commonplace technologies beyond the wildest dreams of science fiction writers. When and how this could happen, however, is beyond guestimate of the most sagacious of futurists.

Stranger

56

Of course. This is why I said that it would all need to be redone. I think we’re both making the same point, but phrasing it differently.

The phrasing I questioned was the assertion that we do not have the capacity to send people to the moon today. There are two ways of interpreting that, either we don’t have the ability to send someone today (or in a given short time period), or that we do not have a technical capacity to engineer a system. The former is obviously correct, we don’t have any spare systems laying around. The latter is as obviously incorrect.

In any field, there is a learning curve which must be mastered again if the skills have not been practiced. However, if the core knowledge has been lost, such as occurred in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, then it’s not simply dusting off the books and doing it again. Entire bodies of knowledge had to be rediscovered and relearned.

Here is the quote I responded to. Again

The world has not given up on space exploration since the Apollo program was ended. We haven’t reverted back to the 50s. It’s been proven possible once and we’ve accomplished much greater technical achievements since. If there was ever a need to send people to the moon again, we could do it again with more sophisticated technology.

Perhaps if one reads that in the same sense that we “don’t have the capability” to mass produce Model Ts this afternoon, then sure, I’ll give you that.

57

I’m still amazed by the landline phone system, it’ s reach, and how when the power goes out I can still make calls. It still must be the most robust communication system we have. Shame to think people want to take it down.

58

No kidding… I mean, just as far as consumer electronics are concerned, in the early 20th century, the telephone was amazing. In the 1920s, the radio was amazing. In 1950, the television was new and amazing. In the 1960s, the portable transistor radio was amazing. When I was a kid in the 1970s, the VCR was amazing. In the 1980s, it was the Atari 2600, then the various home computers. In the late 1990s, it was the internet, cell phones and large flat screen televisions. In the mid 2000s, it was the Blackberry, then the smartphone.

And that’s in one particular narrow field. If you look at medical things, you had germ theory, vaccinations, antiseptic surgery, antibiotics, blood transfusions, blood banks, etc… all of which were amazing advancements of the medical arts and sciences in their day.

All that’s happened since then is that we’ve got different things that are new and amazing, but the march of technology goes on- in another 5 years, it’ll be something else.

And… younger folks may pillory me for this, but fundamentally things aren’t that different than they were say… 70 years ago. We may have smartphones that don’t tether us to landline phones, and we can look stuff up on the WWW instead of in a library or encyclopedia, but we still have some form of alarm clock wake us up, we still take showers with water and soap/shampoo, we still eat eggs and bacon that are prepared using frying pans, we still take fossil fuel burning cars, buses and trains to work, we still watch television, although we’re not as firmly affixed to specific broadcast times as we once were, we sleep in regular beds, we still watch football, baseball, basketball and hockey, and we even still go to the movie theater from time to time. Technology’s changed how we do things, but for the most part, hasn’t changed WHAT we do.

59

What kind of ass writes something like that in an obituary? Not to mention that sparks are cool and don’t need to be justified by utility.

60

Depends on your definition, I suppose. Part of Transhumanism involves enhancing physical capabilities. People now have cochlear implants, implanted artificial ocular lenses, and we are even implanting electrodes in the brain to convey nerve impulses from sensory organs. Paraplegics can now control paralyzed (or robotic) limbs by using nerve impulses and can receive kinesthetic feedback from surgically implanted position sensors. If these folks aren’t transhuman, then I’m not sure what is.

As for the OP’s question - “When did technology start to become truly amazing?” The answer will vary depending on your perspective. If you adopt the perspective of your cohort, then technology starts to seem amazing only halfway through your lifetime. If you try to adopt the perspective of a person at any given point in history, I’ll suggest that perhaps the late 1800s and early 1900s were a pretty amazing time. Steam engines were useful and cool sure, but not “amazing” in terms of being truly life-altering and magical to the layperson.

I think the advent of the distribution of electrical power was pretty shocking, so to speak. Electricity is hard for a layperson to understand even today; to a Victorian-era person, it must have seemed truly magical that you could burn coal in a powerhouse a mile away and cause heat/light/motion to manifest in your home, with no moving parts in between.

And then there was aviation. Prior to 1903, nobody had ever seen anything heavier than a 30-pound bird borne aloft by the wind - and then the Wright brothers came along and managed to get a 750-pound machine to stay in the air. How fucking amazing that must have seemed at the time!

Radio was surely equally amazing for the average Joe. For someone born in the late 1800s, imagine suddenly having a box in your home that could replay audio from a distant source. The electricity that came into your home through physical wires and powered your radio was mysterious enough (see two paragraphs up), but this thing was getting its information wirelessly. WTF? How can this thing possibly work? Surely this was astonishingly amazing.

Got Wifi? It’s radio. We had that 100+ years ago. Electricity? Same thing. Powered flight? Yeah, had that 100 years ago too. Got some big planes these days, but they’re just bigger versions of the Wright flyer. Before those guys, people hadn’t powered through the air before at all.

Someone born in the late 1800s has seen all of that, along with the advent of nuclear weapons, and the advent of space travel, including human beings leaving the earth altogether to walk on the moon. What have I seen since the early 1970’s? Just improvements on all of those breakthroughs. Nice, but not quite as amazing as the breakthroughs themselves.