Big Inventions Timeline

[Under construction]

This is a visual experiment to see if there is a pattern to big invention pacing. Invention times are shown by approximate start of mass usage, not point of invention itself. Scale of importance is up to 10. Emphasis is on everyday life and not so much military and business unless their impact spills into everyday life.

 . @@@@@@@| Railroad
 1860
 . @@@@@@@| Telegraph
 . @@@@@| Photography
 . @@@@@@| Interchangeable parts (precision manuf.)
 1870
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 1880
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 1890
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 . @@@@@@| Phonograph
 . 
 1900
 . @@@@@@@@@@| Light-bulb
 . @@@@@@@@@@| Car
 . @@@@@@@@| Movies (silent)
 1910
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 . @@@@@@@| Airplane
 1920
 . @@@@@@@@@@| Radio
 . @@@@@@@@@| Electric appliances
 . 
 1930
 . @@@@@@| Sound in movies
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 . 
 1930
 . @@@@@| Antibiotics
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 1940
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 . @@@@@@@@@@| Atomic weapons
 . 
 1950
 . @@@@@| Electronic computer (mainframe)
 . @@@@@@@@| Vaccines
 . @@@@@@@@@@| TV
 1960
 . @@@@@@@@| Jet travel
 . @@@@@@@| Transistor
 . 
 1970
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 . @@@@@@@@| Microcomputer 
 1980
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 1990
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 . @@@@@@@@@@| Internet
 . @@@@@@@@@| Cellphone
 2000
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 . @@@@@@@@@| Smartphones & e-pads (pocket or flat phone/computer)
 2010
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Patterns?

Backing up (Ctrl-minus), there seems to roughly be 3 general "lumps": 1) Civil war era, 2) start of century with transportation and electricity-related inventions, and 3) computer-related inventions around the end of the 20th century (although these are less clustered). There's also a near 50's lump, but they don't seem to have a single underlying trigger. Some of the lulls do appear to correspond to deeper recessions (late 19th century, Great Depression, and 70's "stag-flation".) I was actually surprised at the 50's cluster. I expected the 1900's cluster would be significantly larger before I made the chart.

Perception of Newness

I remember a dinner-table conversion our family had in the early 1980's where my teen brother proclaimed, "There hasn't been any big invention since I was born. Have big inventions stopped?" My dad then pointed out the microcomputer, but my brother correctly pointed out that it didn't have nearly as big an impact as say the car or TV did, at least in homes.

We tried to predict what would be the NextBigThing for everyday life, and couldn't come up with any besides flying cars. But we ended up witnessing the Internet, and phones everywhere, and now internet and phones everywhere; something that truly ranks up there with cars and TV as far as changing lives. It's killing (paper) newspapers, books, magazines, the post-office, and arguably allows Al Quida to exist and triggered the Arab Spring.

But it's strange that something as big as the Internet didn't strike me at once as something huge. It's largely because I saw the pieces and previews of it grow gradually. I started using email and text-chat in the mid 1980's on mini-computers. Then discussion-board-like services and on-line bill-paying in the early 90's (via dial-up modems); then I saw CompuServe in action. That's probably the closest to any Eureka realization. It was essentially a preview of the web.

Smart-phones followed a similar path: first the Apple Newton (PDA), and then cell-phones, then feature-phones, and finally PDA's and cell-phones merge with a mostly-intuitive finger-GUI. It's kind of like watching a baby be born one limb at a time.

The early cell-phones were big clunky things for rich executives. My first impression was, "that's cool, but it's a toy for the rich." They gradually shrank in size and cost.

It's not like being an isolated farmer suddenly seeing a Model-T-like car come chugging down the road for the first time. But even then, he would have probably seen a railroad train before, so it's kind of like a small railroad that's off the tracks. Perhaps a record player or nuclear weapons were part of the few that were "out of the blue" without similar precursors. Here's a quote from one of the first news articles about the nuke:

"This atomic bomb newspaper edition described the nature of the atomic bomb, citing it having a blast equal to 20,000 tons of TNT...", Quoting Truman as saying, "It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East." http://www.archives.com/genealogy/newspaper-genealogy-atomic-bomb.html

That may have taken a while to sink in; because to most it was probably "WTF?" upon first reading. Those in the military probably thought, "They mean 20,000 pounds, not tons. Probably a typo" since the largest conventional weapons of the time were around a 7 ton yield. To go from 7 to 20,000 would seem like a mistake. It almost would be like waking up in the morning and seeing the sky filled with FlyingCars.

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