An article in tomorrow’s Washington Post uses the iPhone as a jumping off point to describe the current “pause” in technological innovation, something I’ve written about a few times here.
Simply put, we are not living in particularly innovative times; the technological movement in our era is of a refining nature rather than an inventing one. The iPhone is not a new invention, it is simply a refinement of the telephone. All the technologies we are used to, from transportation to the internet, are the products of era decades or even a century ago.
As British historian David Edgerton notes in his new book, “The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900,” much of the basic technology we rely on today was introduced many decades ago, although improved upon in multiple ways since.
Computers, vaccines and antibiotics, nuclear weapons, birth-control pills, television, cellphones — all are the product of early- to mid-20th-century innovation and development. The piston-driven internal combustion engine, the basis of our most common modes of transportation, was developed in the 1870s and ’80s. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the feasibility of sending the human voice over electrical wires in 1875. Contemporary diesel trains use an airbrake system that was patented in 1872.
If a person were to time-travel from the late 1940s to today, observes Edward Tenner, a technology historian, he’d have very little trouble recognizing our age.
Tenner, the author of “Why Things Bite Back,” about the unintended consequences of technology, argues that truly radical innovation has occurred in roughly 30-year cycles — and that our own era isn’t one of the radical waves.
The period from 1885 to 1915, for example, gave birth to such world-changing inventions as the airplane, movie projection, the radio, revolutionary new fertilizers and pesticides, as well as mass-production techniques such as the assembly line. Basic designs that we still use — the bicycle, for example — sprang from this era, too.
The next great wave, he says, extended from 1945 to 1975. That was the period of the polio vaccine, antibiotics, commercial jet travel, the space program, semiconductors, nuclear power. Even the Internet began during this period; the first e-mail was sent in 1972.
The post-1975 period has produced fewer of these radical new technologies, Tenner says. But that’s not to say we’re slackers. Like the 1915-45 period, this era has produced many small, un-hyped and crucially important advances that have made older technologies better and more efficient.
So, thanks to new materials and computer-aided design, the fuel efficiency of the 747 has doubled since that jumbo jet’s introduction in 1970. New, stronger polyester-core threads break less often, so high-speed sewing machines can produce clothing at much faster rates. Cancer hasn’t been cured, but new drugs have improved survival rates. For many, AIDS has been transformed from a death sentence to a chronic illness. “Incremental changes can add up to levels of refinement that are truly breathtaking,” Tenner says.
I submit that in many ways, we are moving backwards. We can no longer travel to the moon; we can’t even travel supersonically to go on vacation. And even though we can now make phone calls wirelessly from most of the world, those calls are scratchy and of poor quality, far worse than the quality obtained with 19th century telephone technology.
The article ends on an optimistic note: if, in fact, technological inventiveness rides on a 30 year cycle, we are due for another wave of innovation. And not a moment too soon.
