
What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation? - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/upshot/what-was-the-greatest-era-for-american-innovation-a-brief-guided-tour.html?_r=0
======
Animats
1870-1920. Electric light, automobiles, aircraft, radio, paved roads.
Railroads everywhere in the developed world. Electric mass transit (trolleys,
subways) in major cities. Tractors and combine harvesters on farms.
Refrigeration. X-rays.

In computing, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company (later IBM) produced
the first printing tabulator, the beginning of commercial data processing.

Those 50 years held the greatest lifestyle changes in history.

~~~
pkorzeniewski
I'm constantly amazed how many not well-known things were invented back then
that sound like something that came only recently, for example sending photos
over the wire - some time ago I saw a video [1] about wirephoto [2] that blew
my mind a little, I would never guess that the first photograph sent over the
wire was in as early as 1921!

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LetlcmqZFyA)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirephoto)

~~~
SilasX
Any reason homes with phones back then couldn't have "emails", in the sense of
being able to receive text messages from other phone numbers and automatically
print them to a paper feed?

~~~
digi_owl
Well you had things like ticker tape.

but there was not really any concept of store and forward like you have with
texts and email.

Notice how they had to tell the operator to make sure there was a clean line,
then manually sync the two devices.

I guess you could claim the telegraph network had something akin to store and
forward, as each operator would note the message, and then relay it down the
chain.

~~~
Animats
Edison's first profitable invention, in 1869, was a way to get stock tickers
to sync up automatically. It was a hack (send lots of idles every once in a
while to force the printing wheel to hit a stop) but it was good enough to
deploy. Previous printing telegraph technology, back to 1852, required a
skilled operator at the receiving end to manually sync. That was used only for
main lines with heavy traffic.

Howard Krum finally figured out how to do sync right in 1919, when he invented
serial stop-start async as we know it today. In 1924, he came out with the
Teletype Model 14 tape printer, with the first reliable mechanical async
decoder. That design was used into the 1960s, and most computer serial ports
are compatible with it. (45.45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.)

Telegraphy was store and forward, but manual at first. By the late 1920s,
punched tape was used, but someone had to manually look at tape, tear off each
message, and put it in the proper outgoing reader. This was manual Sendmail.
After WWII, automated forwarding centers were built, with paper tape punches
connected to readers via a bin as the storage mechanism and telephone-like
switches to change connections. These were hugely expensive to operate for the
amount of data transferred, but it was essentially email, with
electromechanical technology.

(I restore Teletypes as a hobby. Here's a Model 14 working.[1]. If you want to
see some in action, they'll be at the Clockwork Alchemy Steampunk Convention,
Memorial Day weekend, in San Jose.)

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14](https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14)

~~~
digi_owl
Thinking about it, i guess magnetic tape replaced those paper tapes for a
while. Before various "solid state" solutions were worked out with enough
capacity to handle the same job.

------
grey413
In terms of pure impactful science I'd say 1920-1960 or so. Quantum mechanics
and everything it led to (modern chemistry, in particular) is the big one, but
there was also relativity, the modern evolutionary synthesis, huge advances in
statistics, the math of computing, and so much more.

~~~
wycx
I agree. The important advance in the first half of the 20th century was
understanding how atoms work, and that knowledge lead __directly __to
semiconductors, the nuclear industry, and laid the foundation for modern
chemistry, materials science and all the analytical technologies than enable
chemistry, physics etc (i.e. x-ray analytical techniques, mass spectrometers).

Something that I did not know until recently was that the "mineralogy" of
steel was not understood until the 20th century. If you do not understand the
phases comprising a material, it is difficult to relate bulk material
properties to bulk composition.

------
kabes
The push for innovation is probably the greatest right now. However, I like to
think the greatest innovations are those that make my own life simpler.
There's: airplanes, cars, electricity, GPS and others. Innovation today, while
technically impressive, is mostly making my life more complex, not more
simple.

~~~
fma
The average Joe see innovation as stuff like Facebook and snapchat...meanwhile
research is losing money...

------
lordnacho
The printing press, and its proliferation a few hundred years ago.

Without it, the cost of copying information is enormous. When you can't copy
stuff cheaply, you end up copying only a few things. Like what whoever is in
power likes. Or whatever the accepted wisdom of the day is.

With it, you can have ideas, spread them, and get feedback from a lot of
people. That goes for social ideas like liberalism, religious ideas like
Protestantism, scientific ideas like gravity, and technological ideas like all
the ones on HN.

You also get away from authority. If you have some new thoughts about how
government should be organised, it's a lot harder to stop you telling
everyone.

~~~
dilemma
I agree that information (communication) is fundamental to human society. But
I don't agree that information technology is a force for equality and
decentralization of power. Over the course of history it's been the opposite -
papyrus enabled the the expansion of the Roman empire, the nation state could
not exist without paper and printing, and digitalization is creating larger
multinational corporations than was possible before, and we will soon see
states evolve to a version where it has even more control over citizens.

~~~
ksdale
This is an excellent oberservation but I would point out that all of your
examples are of one group having a large information technology advantage over
another. I think the situation _could_ be different as very powerful IT
becomes as widespread and inexpensive as seems to be the trend. Perhaps there
is some point where the worst IT is good enough that it's hard to parlay a
tech advantage into any form of oppression and at that point it's a tool for
equality and decentralization.

------
11thEarlOfMar
In practical terms of impacting the greatest % of the population, some data
that I'd like to have seen here are around life expectancy:

\- Life expectancy, men/women

\- Infant mortality

\- Accidental death

\- Death by illness/disease

\- Death by military conflict

For example:

\- Life expectancy (US, men & women average)

1870: 35.1 years

1920: 54.1

1970: 70.9

2012: 78.7

The most years gained were 1870 - 1920.

As for military conflict, innovation happens in politics and diplomacy as well
as technology. I'd like to see how innovations in politics and diplomacy have
impacted death by military conflict as military technology become increasingly
lethal.

~~~
dredmorbius
Gordon actually has some _really_ good chapters on healthcare and medicine,
among the very best parts of his book. He's also absolutely nuts with graphs
and tables, and covers much of this in detail.

TL;DR: 2x the improvement of life expectency came _before_ 1950 as after.
Medicine since 1970 has been expensive, high-tech, changed rapidly, and
delivered very little. Much the improved outcomes arises from improved access
for the underserved, not radical treatments. Genomics and stem cells are
specifically and pointedly disappointing.

------
tunnuz
You're living it.

------
paulpauper
The future of innovation is micro, not macro - genomics and biotechnology,
apps and on-demand entertianment, miniaturization and nano technology, etc.

The past always seems better than the present, probably we're not good at
assessing our progress, but only retrospection can we.

------
thaw13579
Probably depends on what constitutes innovation and the time scale. It could
be argued that language, agriculture, money, etc. have changed people lives
than more dramatically than recent technology.

------
k__
Hopefully getting the Internet in the hands of many non-technical people with
Smartphones and tablets will get us to another Era of Innovation. Many people
started using the Internet that wouldn't have it it was only available on PCs.

The "born after the iPhone" children will get old enough next decade to do
their own thing and new ideas will spread :)

~~~
greatdipper
>Hopefully getting the Internet in the hands of many non-technical people with
Smartphones and tablets will get us to another Era of Innovation...

This seems to be a fallacy. Give internet to 10 random people and 9 of them
will use it for Porn and Social media. You know, instant gratification stuff.

The one guy who uses it to "expand their horizons" will find himself too alone
and powerless in a culture that has gone south by the the aforementioned 9
people who wouldn't take their heads up from the social media in their mobile
phones....

~~~
k__
Well, but if one of 1000000 people does something on the scale of google,
facebook or wikipedia, this would be enough.

With the internet, ideas scale much better.

Before smartphones, we nerdy white males made stuff.

Now the rest of the world can take over :)

~~~
greatdipper
Well, is it possible that problems solved by those things were not the real
bottlenecks of real innovation.

But they took away something that had brought about innovation in the past and
had a very good chance of brining it in the future....idle human thought.

------
MistahKoala
Across human history, it's probably 10,000 BC to the present era. Within that
period, the sliver of time occupied by the Second Industrial Revolution, as a
catalyst for accelerating growth and progress henceforth, hasn't yet been
bettered by any other period for the scale of its impact.

------
curiousgal
750–950 The Islamic Golden Age. Most relatable to HN was the work of _al-
Khwarizmi_ who was one of the fathers of algebra and whose name rendered as
_Algoritmi_ in Latin led to the term " _algorithm_ ".

~~~
spacehome
That's 200 years. Consider how US society has changed in the last 200 years.

~~~
partycoder
The last 200 years are special. We've gone from 1 billion to 7 billion people.
It's hard to compare that with a period of time when there were only ~200
million people.

------
elchief
I didn't rtfa but if I recall correctly, patents per capita peaked in the
1860s

~~~
aswanson
Patent lawsuits per capita today probably exceed that.

------
tosseraccount
200000 years ago? The invention of language.

------
dredmorbius
As I should have suspected from the context, this concerns Robert Gordon's
epic _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_ , which I've read and am trying to
synthesize a review.

The article here suffers from much one of the book's major faults: it's an
epic romp through the _details_ of technological advance, and their impacts,
_both_ of which are admittedly interesting, but lacking in the backbone of
theory and a model to explain both _what_ technology is, specifically (one
definition, from Gordon, is "the sum of our ignorance", though that requires
further explanation ;-), and _how_ it impacts everyday life.

Don't get me wrong: Gordon's grasp and exposition of history is masterful,
detailed, and extensively researched. Unlike much of economics, he looks
_pointedly_ at every-day impacts, and strongly questions many (though not all)
the often-questionable interpretations of economists.

I also agree strongly with Gordon's conclusion that _technological progress_
hit an apex _prior_ to 1920. More specifically, and Neil Irwin does a huge
disservice in not mentioning this, Gordon specifically distinguishes _rate of
change_ and _impacts_. While _technology_ has changed markedly in his third
era (the book is divided in three parts: 1870 - 1920, 1920-1970, and
1970-2015, nearly 50 years each), the _impacts_ have been quite limited.
Little in household appurtenances, particularly kitchens, has changed since
1970, other than introduction of the microwave. Transport's pretty constant.
Medicine, for all the expense poured into it, has delivered virtually nothing,
particularly contrasted with 1900-1950 (and, for what it's worth, earlier).
Work and manufacture has changed, but only modestly, and _productivity_ as
measured by economists (dollar output per worker hour) has increased at best
modestly.

And, sorry, HN, but Gordon's quite harsh on information technology -- it
delivered, somewhat, from 1994 - 2004, but little 2005 - 2015.

That's all covered in the book, and missing from Irwin's article.

What Gordon himself misses is IMO even more interesting.

His core thesis is what's called "the Solow Residual" \-- what's left over in
regression analysis after accounting for economic growth using capital and
labour. (Gordon was a student of Robert Solow's). What bothers me, _greatly_ ,
is that Gordon all-but-answers his own question -- he points at the 99% growth
in worker productivity 1920-1950, and the 133% increase in horsepower and kW
per worker over the same period. On numerous grounds, power makes sense to
consider in transformational activity.

Gordon completely dismisses it.

Several other researchers have dug into that in depth. Robert A. Ayres
(apparently it's a rule for all economists in this saga to be named "Robert")
is one, there've been other analysis, including Hall and Klitgaard, and a
recent item I've seen. Solow and Ayres had a correspondence according to
Solow's archive at Duke University, though I don't know the upshot of it.

Another element missing from Gordon's analysis is some sort of theory of
technology -- what it is, how it operates. He describes this to some extent,
but it's quite insufficient. He mentions the real-world, everyday-life impacts
of many early technologies, but doesn't think to reference Maslow's Hierarchy
of Needs, another lacking point.

Along with that is a _metric_ of technological impact. Gordon's is GDP and
especially GDP/worker. This is actually and area of some disagreement in
various circles, but a concept of energy throughput has been proposed by
Leslie White, known as White's Law.

I could also quibble with some economic discussions and considerations, though
most are quite secondary to his point and if anything would, corrected,
_strengthen_ his basic thesis.

But yeah, today's got nothing on the 1880s, progress-wise.

------
bobowzki
Now.

~~~
imtringued
I guess that means innovation ends now too.

------
imakesnowflakes
The golden quarter..

[https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-
technolog...](https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technology-
come-to-a-halt)

~~~
ZenoArrow
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I see the choice of years as another
effort to put the 1960s on a pedestal. If I was being even more cynical, it
wouldn't surprise me if the article was written by a Baby Boomer.

You could pick any era in the 20th century and find multiple examples of world
changing innovation, and there were other periods of rapid change further back
in our past as well (the Industrial Revolution springs to mind).

