Homes are much, much safer (against fire and earthquake damage, for example) and tremendously more efficient than they were 50 years ago. What a builder from that time would be astonished about would be the numerous additional code requirements, especially in a state like CA. Your typical 1960s tract home, which is what was generally built 50 years ago, is a piece of crap today.
Codes for safety are a big improvement.
I think my comment is partly down to a bit of tirade at what seems to be a new attitude to building - one where the actual building is viewed as somewhat disposable, and also a reflection of a considerable differences regionally in housing.
I’m in South Australia, here we used to build double brick houses. The sweet sopt for quality houses would have been the 70’s where we had concrete raft construction worked out, and had got past most of the less durable materials issues (although the 60’s - and its ubiquitous cream brick houses were pretty good.) Then we swapped to a dominance of brick veneer - where the outer shell is a single brick - but the structure is wood frame and pasterboard internal wall, and now most houses are wood frame, with rendered external sheet - and not a brick in sight. These are houses you can just about punch a hole in with your fist. Desipte a lot of codes requiring minimum insulation and the like, those old 70’s double brick houses usually had vastly better thermal performance. These modern houses usually require a huge airconditioner hung on the side - whereas the older houses could maintain temperature with minimal assistance. Note that for most of us it is performance in the heat that matters. It was 45C degrees here last Friday. That is 111F.
So, my complaint is one of attitude, not technology.
Latecomer to the thread, but I wanted to add my 2¢:
The reason air travel hasn’t seen a major technological jump lately ultimately comes down to engine design. Almost all the advances in aviation have come from better engines (some from better materials, a bit from electronics). The piston-engine airplane reached its ultimate technological maturity in the early 1950s and the turbojet/turbofan engine by 1970. A fundamental limitation for high-Mach travel is that until recently it was impossible to maintain engine combustion without slowing the incoming airstream to subsonic speed; much above Mach 3, that leads to your engine melting. After decades of stagnation a few unmanned prototype SCRAMjet missiles have been flown, and the Skylon jet/rocket hybrid is based around a novel scheme for cooling the incoming air enough that it doesn’t overheat the combustion chamber. In theory high-Mach travel could actually be more economical for very long (>6000 mile) trips because the plane could fly at altitudes where air resistance is very low; the engines are the roadblock.
It totally has. It went from non-existence to ubiquity over just a few decades in the middle part of the 20th century, progressing from open-cockpit, one man, propeller driven biplanes to huge, air conditioned (and for a while, supersonic) jets, over that same period. It just hasn’t changed all that much more in the period you have been paying attention to.
No it isn’t, just your cherry picked examples. The one you focus on, computers and related electronic things like cell phones (and smart phones, which just are phones that have computers in them), just happens to still be going through the same sort of period of explosive advance that air travel did during the mid twentieth century. This will not last that much longer (despite the fantasies of the Moore’s Law fundamentalists). Advances in the other fields you mention actually haven’t been all that impressive over the same period. Like air travel, the explosive advances in automotive engineering and medicine happened several decades ago, and what has happened more recently has been incremental and relatively minor.
The differences you ask about are entirely an artifact of the way you have cherry picked your examples and your time period.
It clear the OP is only looking at the speed factor and I explain the economics have change that is cheaper to go the rout of big air bus than supersonic plane. There some very big air bus that no one had 10 years ago. The money is going to building bigger planes and taking more people .
In the future when energy problem and environmental problems is solved you may start to see Concord 2 so on. Or when private space flight pulls it of and can profit than you may start to see really fast travel like never before that make Concord look like snail.
The military has some really fast planes and is reaching even faster planes it just there is no money in it for airliners.
They lost alot money running the Concord .
While I believe this question has been answered (because of cost), I do feel like I need to defend myself here:
Fine, I’ll pick stuff at random.
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Archery Bows: from an episode of Storage Wars, bows made today are way better than bows made 20 years ago.
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Hepatitis A and B: now vaccines are available.
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C-Span: (Wikipedia): During January 1997, C-SPAN began real-time streaming of C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 on its website. This was the first time Congress had been live streamed online.
These are from three Google Searches of “a,” “b” and “c.”
Marketing people say the 747 was one of the most successful products ever invented, serving as the prime choice for long-haul travel from the 70s all the way to the 90s. Then the fly-by-wires came along.
Has the speed of arrows doubled every 18 months? No? Well, you have your answer right there.
Cupid’s Law.
:dubious: What does FBW have to do with a plane being intrinsically better-suited to long-distance travel than the 747?
I’m also late to the thread, but I just wanted to add that Gulfstream Aircraft Corporation, manufacturer of corporate airplanes, said in October that they are very close to solving the problems of quiet and efficient supersonic cruise. Two weeks ago a patent application from Gulfstream for a “relaxed isentropic inlet” for jet engines popped up on the web, which includes a sketch of a new supersonic bizjet. The sketch includes the telescopic “quiet spike” boom that they were testing with NASA’s help over the past few years. It helps to mitigate the sonic boom to allow for supersonic cruise over land.
Article about patent application
I’m not privy to any inside information, but when I was at the Savannah airport this summer (at Gulfstream headquarters) there were all sorts of new hangars there under construction. Nobody at Gulfstream would say a word about it (they are notoriously tight-lipped about aircraft in development), but everybody there smiled when we asked. One could infer they were for production of the new G650, but that production line is already in place and running. Occam’s razor points to a new airplane under development - so it may not be too long before we see the first production civilian supersonic airplane since Concorde.
And yet, Congress critters do not speak or act any faster than they did before 1997. An improvement in the speed of reporting news has not affected the speed of the creation of news, just as improvements in the control and communications for pilots has not affected the speed of air travel.
I suspect most of them.
I actually did some consulting work for a major-ish airline about ten years ago. It was actually pretty cool. Their offices are attached to their maintenance hanger so I actually got to see how they fix them and whatnot. While that doesn’t make me an expert, I did pick up a few things.
It’s difficult to “see” the technological jumps as a passenger. Some of the maintenance guys showed me the difference between several generations of engines. And they are doing a lot of work with materials and avionics. For example, the old mess of gauges and dials have been largely replaced with “glass cockpits” of monitors.
But from the passenger’s perspective, a 747 from 1968 looks about the same as a modern 747-8, even if they are very different on the inside.
Also, short of some profound leap in propulsion (ie propeller to jet), airlines and aircraft makers have more or less figured out the economics and physics of jet engines.
But none of these exhibit year on year multiple times improvements. Archery bows exhibit little better improvements than aircraft, and in many ways depend upon technology derived from the aviation industry. Improvement could just as easily be representative of an upswing in interest in archery as a hobby, and the additional money available to be spent on equipment. New vaccines is a long slow slog. We have not seen a sudden upswing in vaccine availability. The introduction of two vaccines for major diseases in a decade or two is not exponential growth. If it was, by now we would expect a new vaccine each week, and HIV, malaria, ebola, and the common cold would have long since been solved problems. But vaccines remain hard, and you can expect much the same progress as ever - despite new technology and understandings of how vaccines work - the easy targets are done, and it is just plain hard slog. CSPAN is just improved computer capabilities, and is thus not a valid example for the purposes of the discussion.
The short answer to the OP was simple - to punch through the sound barrier, the amount of energy (fuel, cost) increases dramatically. Thus, commercial air travel has stuck to about 90% of speed of sound. If you are in NYC, visit the Intrepid museum and walk through the concorde there. It’s TINY in cross-section. Long, pointed, and very small cross-section, it still gobbled fuel like crazy. hence “physics” as mentioned in one fo the first posts.
Note that where cost is no object - military aircraft - Mach 2 or 3 is perfectly normal tech. There just is not much of a demand for these technologies either. The real work of fighter aircraft, dog fights and bombing runs, typically takes place below Mach 1 . To some extent range is more important.
The improvements are incremental but real. If anyone remembers seeing the ass-end of a jet in the distance after take-off, those 707’s spewed as much black smoke as an old deisel truck; those jets are banned in most countries now (and retired). Modern jetliners are cleaner and much more efficient. Look at 747 and now A830, the size of the flying cattle-cars has increased significantly in the last 50 years. Plus, the long-haul aircraft are now capable of travelling half-way around the globe non-stop, something which grew in the last 20 years. How much further would you need to go?
(The same applies to cars- engine failures, fuel efficiency, cleanliness, even the incidence of flat tires is so much less than 40 years ago. Rmember when some guy stuck on the side of the road with an overheated engine steaming from the radiator was normal? These massive improvements have snuck up on us. Similarly computers - remember when speed doubled every year, quality of video improved every PC generation? Well, we’re pretty much at the limit now. Processors are stuck around 3GHz, we just keep adding more cores. So all progress is sigmoid.)
Beyond Mach 3 requires fancier tech. We have orbital rockets and ballistic misslies - anywhere on earth in less than an hour. For intelligence gathering, there is a fleet of satellites sitting parked in orbit ready to be woken at a moment’s notice. The incentive to be able to fly faster and higher inside the atmosphere is limited, as less sophisticated countries get better surface-to-air missiles. (Think gary Powers).
I think long term the real incentive is trans-Pacific flights. Perfect for SST - nobody to complain about booms. However, it would have to be a real improvement - cutting a 14-hour flight to 9 hours may not be that great, but turning it into a 4 hour flight or a 2 hour sub-orbital will certainly attract a certain class of client. Now it’s just a matter of doing it economically.
The fact that the tech exists that allows NASA to build experimental Mach-8 vehicles indicates we are getting there… some day.
No. It’s something of a meme that houses are shoddier than those built in previous generations. They were saying the same thing every decade for over 100 years.
“Those old houses lasted forever.” Survivor bias. There was a LOT of shoddy construction in the era before building codes. Those houses usually didn’t survive to the present, and if they did, it was through what was practically sisyphean maintenance.
In the suburbs of my hometown, almost all of the tiny Cape Cods “made of ticky tacky” that were “built to last only 25 years” constructed through the 1950s are still standing and occupied. Meanwhile, worker’s cottages “lovingly hand-built by immigrant craftsmen who once helped build the great cathedrals of Europe” in the late 1980s and early 1900s are rapidly disappearing due to obsolescence, decay, or economics; it’s cheaper to tear them down and build new than to repair or renovate them so they’re suitable or modern living.
In the older houses I’ve owned, I can’t find a true right angle anywhere. Installing new doors or replacing molding is a pain. It wasn’t a problem in newer houses.
I know everyone hates the whole going to the airport thing. But people forget there was a time where they either mailed your boarding pass weeks ahead of time or you had spend time checking in at the airport. Now you just download the ticket from the internet or a kiosk at the airport. And with my phone, I can see my flight loitering over Denver…instead of sitting parked at the gate in Newark boarding passengers like it’s supposed to.
There *have *been major technological jumps in air travel - they are just happening under the skin of the airplane instead of out where the passengers can see them.
In addition to the engine/electronics improvements mentioned by other posters, there have been major changes to aircraft structures, including the use of composite materials, bonding instead of riveting, and improved methods of testing and inspecting for manufacturing flaws and deterioration/fatigue in use. All of this makes for lighter, stronger, safer, airplanes. The Boeing 737/747 you see flying today may look much the same on the outside to the original models from the 1960s, but inside they are very different.
Part if it just a tribute to outstanding engineering many decades ago. The basic shape of an airliner is optimal for it’s requirements, and the nerds with the slide rules pretty well nailed it way back when. Winglets are the one thing they didn’t know about.
The best way to mitigate the sonic boom is with the hadouken.