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85 Big Ideas that Changed the World
ccnull writes "Forbes just put out its well thought-out list of 85 breakthroughs since 1917 (sneakers) that have revolutionized the way we live. This is interesting on a number of levels -- crazy trivia (the microprocessor and the answering machine invented in the same year!?), a reminder of the past (the modem: 1962), and a frightening realization that not much of interest has come out of the last 10 years (a whopping 4 of the 85 ideas). Easily digestible and worth discussing."
The thing is that we don't have the perspective of history to indicate to us what will have long term relevance. I mean they listed Viagra on there. VIAGRA? I'm sorry, but the ability for an old man to get an erection is not one of the greatest innovations of the last 85 years.
One thing I didn't see on the list was nanotechnology, which is going to hugely impact the future. We're only seeing it in limited ways so far, but 10 or 20 years from now it's going to revolutionize a lot of things. Also, one thing I noticed was that, while a number of inventions like fiber optics were created some time ago, it's only recently that the implementations have borne practical fruit.
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I think the lack of recent good ideas has been explained best by Ben Stein.
QUOTE
1) Allow schools to fall into useless decay. Do not teach civics or history except to describe America as a hopelessly fascistic, reactionary pit. Do not expect students to know the basics of mathematics, chemistry and physics. Working closely with the teachers' unions, make sure that you dumb down standards so that children who make the most minimal effort still get by with flying colors. Destroy the knowledge base on which all of mankind's scientific progress has been built by guaranteeing that such learning is confined to only a few, and spread ignorance and complacency among the many. Watch America lose its scientific and competitive edge to other nations that make a comprehensive knowledge base a rule of the society.
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions. Bypass the legislative mechanisms that involve elected representatives and a president. This will stop--or at least greatly slow down--innovation, as corporations and individuals hesitate to explore new ideas for fear of getting punished (or regulated to death) by litigation for any misstep, no matter how slight, in the creation of new products and services. Make sure that lawsuits against drugmakers are especially encouraged so that the companies are afraid to develop new lifesaving drugs, lest they be sued for sums that will bankrupt them. Make trial lawyers and judges, not scientists, responsible for the flow of new products and services.
3) Create a culture that blames the other guy for everything and discourages any form of individual self-restraint or self-control. Promote litigation to punish tobacco companies on the theory that they compel innocent people to smoke. Make it second nature for someone who is overweight to blame the restaurant that served him fries. Encourage a legal process that can kill a drug company for any mistakes in self-medication. Make it a general rule that anyone with more money than a plaintiff is responsible for anything harmful that a plaintiff does. Promulgate the pitiful joke that Americans are hereby exempt from any responsibility for their own actions--so long as there are deep pockets around to be rifled.
4) Sneer at hard work and thrift. Encourage the belief that all true wealth comes from skillful manipulation and cunning, or from sudden, brilliant and lucky strokes that leave the plodding, ordinary worker and saver in the dust. Make sure that society's idols are men and women who got rich from being sexy in public or through gambling or playing tricks, not from hard work or patience. Make the citizenry permanently envious and bewildered about where real success comes from.
5) Hold the managers of corporations to extremely lax standards of conduct and allow them to get off with a slap on the wrist when they betray the trust of shareholders. This will discourage thrift and investment and ensure that Americans will have far less capital to work with than other societies, while simultaneously developing that contempt for law and social standards that is the hallmark of failing nations. Hold the management of labor unions to no ethical standards.
6) While you're at it, discourage respect for law in every possible way. This will dissolve the glue that holds the nation together, and dissuade any long-term thinking. Societies in which the law can be clearly seen to apply to some and not to others are doomed to decay, in terms of innovation and everything else.
7) Encourage a mass culture that spits on intelligence and study and instead elevates drug use, coolness through sex and violence, and contempt for school. As children learn to be stupid instead of smart, the national intelligence base needed for innovation will simply vanish into MTV-land.
8) Mock and belittle the family. Provide financial incentives to people willing to live an isolated existence, vulnerable and frightened. This guarantees that men and women of sufficient character to bring about innovation will be psychologically stifled from an early age.
9) Develop a suicidal immigration policy that keeps out educated, hardworking men and women from friendly nations and, instead, takes in vast numbers of angry, uneducated immigrants from nations that hate us. This, too, leads to the shrinking of our knowledge base and the eventual disappearance of social cohesion.
10) Enact a tax system that encourages class antagonism and punishes saving, while rewarding indebtedness, frivolity and consumption. Tax the fruits of labor many times:
First tax it as income. Then tax it as real or personal property. Then tax it as capital gains. Then tax it again, at a staggeringly high level, at death. This way, Americans are taught that only fools save, and that it is entirely proper for us to have the lowest savings rate in the developed world. This will deprive us of much-needed capital for new investment, for innovation and our own personal aspirations. It will compel us to ask foreigners for ever more capital and allow them to own more of America. It will also promote an attitude of carelessness about the future and, once again, encourage disrespect for law.
11) Have a socialized medical system that scrimps on badly needed drugs and procedures, resorts to only the cheapest practices and discourages drug companies from developing new drugs by not paying them enough to cover their costs of experimentation, trial and error.
12) Elevate mysticism, tribalism, shamanism and fundamentalism--and be sure to exclude educated, hardworking men and women--to an equal status with technology in the public mind. Make sure that, in order to pay proper (and politically correct) respect to all different ethnic groups in America, you act as if science were on an equal footing with voodoo and history with ethnic fable.
ENDQUOTE
Don't forget that the folks at Ma Bell saw little use for the transistor, so they licensed it cheap to Sony and other Japanese companies, who proceeded to get rich selling transistor radios. Anyone making a list in, say, 1955, might well have left the 1947 invention of the transistor off.
Also, some of Forbes' choices are strange: tetraethyl lead? This did not "change the way we live".
In 20 years we may look back and decide that the free software movement represented a landmark shift in the way people view software, licensing and IP issues.
The discovery that tetraethyl lead could prevent knock was huge leap forward; it was a huge boost to the automotive industry, since it allowed manufacturers to build safer/more reliable/more powerful/etc engines.
These days all we hear about are the health risks of tetraethyl lead (it's toxic as hell), but back in the early 1900's it was seen as a tremendous leap forward. Without it, cars, airplanes, etc would be very different today.
Did you see that? 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrates computer
windows and a wooden stylus he calls a mouse. 1968. Can you say
"Microsoft vs Lindows trademark lawsuit"? How about 1968, can you
say that? (I knew the concept was old, but I didn't know it was
that old.)
> To a packed house at a computer conference in San Francisco,
> Stanford Research Institute's Douglas Engelbart made a dramatic
> presentation that included first-time demonstrations of onscreen
> "windows," teleconferencing and a wooden stylus device he called
> a "mouse." Engelbart didn't see much value in the peripheral, and
> neither did Stanford Research, which owned the patent and later
> licensed it to companies like Apple Computer for a $45,000
> one-time fee. Two decades later, Engelbart's in-vention was the
> PC standard.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
No mention of Microsoft.
My Ass hurts.
The list's a little silly, but whatever. Steve Forbes's comments, however, are a good dose of absurdist techno-capitalist babble.
Exempli Gratia:
Ray Kroc, for instance, didn't invent the fast-food phenomenon back in the 1950s. But when he saw the facility run by the McDonald brothers, he quickly grasped--as they did not--the awesomely exciting implications of their techniques in a business that was notorious for failure. The idea of creating a chain of thousands of similar restaurants that spanned the globe was, before Kroc's vision, utterly preposterous.
Alternate reading -- Ray Kroc, shrewd businessman, stumbles upon small very profitable business. He proceeds to buy their franchising rights, eventually purchasing the business and taking legal control over the use of their own name, and makes a fortune. McDonald brothers are left in the dust.
Yet all too many academics, politicos, bureaucrats and even businesspeople don't understand that risk-taking is the wellspring of our progress.
Sure, Steve, because we know that none of the great innovations of the twentieth century have involved financial or institutional support from governments, universities, or big business. All garage tinkerers...
But the most potent fiscal incentive is reducing marginal tax rates--i.e., the tax you pay on each additional dollar you earn.
Ah yes, the Steve Forbes innovation. Surprised that wasn't number #86 on the list.
Trial lawyers have progressed too far in diffusing the stark difference between fraud and honest business mistakes.
Yeah, like the Ford Pinto. Just an honest business mistake...
The fundamental concept of limited liability--you can't lose more money than the amount you invested in an entity--is being eroded.
Fun fact -- our founding fathers viewed limited liability corporations with some concern. As a result, such corporations could only be chartered by state legislatures, and had to be renewed every few years. If a corporation didn't seem to be serving the public well, state legislatures would often decharter it.
Corporate directors with M.B.A.s and considerable experience in running businesses have been discovering that in the eyes of the Securities & Exchange Commission they are not qualified to sit on audit committees, because they are not certified public accountants.
Perhaps that could be because spending a few years learning management culture at Harvard doesn't qualify you to thoroughly analyze corporate finances.
Democratic capitalism is moral.
Democratic capitalism? Is that something like military intelligence?
You won't long succeed in business if you don't serve the needs or wants of others.
Yeah, that's why Ken Lay did so poorly...
Red All Over: Rambling Missives from an Aspiring Revolutionary
Maybe our problem is due to a lack of original thought.
Might as well blow some good karma here.
Why would you post a cut and paste from 4 days ago, then why do the moderators follow along as good little sheep and mod it up as interesting and insightful?
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Actually, they do have a list of failed also rans. The list reads like corny science fiction: flying cars, faxed newspapers, videophones, 3d movies, nuclear bombs for digging/construction, interactive TV, and spaced-based solar power collectors.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
Has it revolutionized the world? I've never used a cell phone in my life and have no intention of ever buying one. There are pay-phones on almost every corner everywhere in the world.
A odd realization of the way cell phones have impacted our lives came to me when I was watching the "futuristic" movie A Clockwork Orange. Alex and his droogs go to people's doors at night pleading to be let in to use the phone because there had been a terrible accident. Most people's sympathy would force them to open the doors and they would then be robbed, raped, and sometimes murdered by the gang. Today though, with the wide proliferation would eliminate that as a way in. You'd either not let them in at all ("Surely one of you must have a cell phone!") or you'd go upstairs and toss your cell phone out a window so they could use it if it were a real emergency.
Of course, I think that people have also gotten more sour and nasty than portrayed in Mr. Kubrick's movie, but that has little to do with cell phones.
1954 -- Telstar The first commercial communications satellite is launched
Oh, well! If History is taught in the U.S. as Forbes' "historians" show it, no wonder why Americans are so unaware of the world's reality.
Would cause fewer inventions as well. Such a fragile thing creativity is. Certainly a human being is robust as far as being able to survive and being able to function. But the ability to be brilliant requires far more healthy brain cells than what is required to survive. In between brilliance and survival a whole hell of a lot of sharpness can be taken from the blade without much notice. And how could one tell long term if everyone were deficiant?
We have no guarantee on perputual mental accuity. If such a thing exists about our persons that inflicts damage to our brains, the less smarter we will be.
People have been more literate in the past than what we are today. Certainly we have more technology about us, which presents an image of sophistication, but are we as sophisticated as individuals as we were in the past?
The other myth is that there were no good alternatives. In fact alcohol worked as well then as now. (It just wasn't patentable.)
They managed to suppress the evidence for just how toxic was the lead they were scattering around for many decades. The suppression was deliberate and criminally fraudulent.
Leaded gasoline was a disaster and a crime on a scale similar to the asbestos deception of the same era, but one that has still not been prosecuted, largely for political reasons. It is almost a miracle that leaded gas got banned at all. The ban certainly wouldn't happen in today's political climate, even though lead was killing a World Trade Center's worth of Americans every week. Killing Americans is a corporate privilege.
It's a matter of education and etiquette. People learned to scoop their doggie poo; they will learn how to use cell phones.
It's fun to observe the small circles that we run around in because of beauracracy(sp?). Cell phones could have been implemented in 1947, but
The FCC stymied the idea by limiting the number of radio-spectrum frequencies for mobile telephone service; it didn't reconsider its position until 1968.
Anyone see parallels with wireless technology?
Thank you FCC for protecting me!!!
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
Regarding the "knock" argument, ethyl alcohol was widely known in the 20s to be a safe alternative to tetraethyl alcohol, though it cost a bit more. There's also a myth that leaded gasoline was easier on valves but in fact the opposite is true and only through the introduction of chemical "scavengers" into the fuel which swept the lead out the back of the tailpipe were they able to eliminate this problem.
t m#cars
Folks this is nothing more than a classic cost/benefit analysis made by the automobile and petroleum companies back in the 1920s. They chose profits at the expense of public healthand the environment. They got away with it for nearly 50 years until the early 70s when the scientific evidence against leaded gasoline was too overwhelming to ignore.
From http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/Lead-History.h
While they were busy glossing over its perilous shortcomings for the public health, tetraethyl lead's boosters almost forgot that their "gift of God" posed some serious problems for cars. Instead of benefitting, engines were getting destroyed by lead deposits. GM researchers had noted this early in TEL's life, but Charles Kettering was anxious to get the new product to market. Problems, he argued, could be worked out with real-life experience to guide them. But necessary changes were slow in coming.
In May 1926, three years after leaded fuel went on sale, GM's Alfred Sloan wrote Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, to express concern that valve corrosion with Ethyl gas was so bad after 2,000-3,000 miles that it rendered cars "inoperative." Rather late in the day, one would have thought, he urged further development of the product. Referring to Ethyl's decision to re-enter the market, he wrote, "Now that we are back in again and are considering pushing the sale [of Ethyl] to the utmost, I think we ought to be concerned with this question."
So the additive that Standard, GM, Du Pont and the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation defended so vigorously before the Surgeon General and the nation wasn't even any good yet--it junked people's second-largest investment, after their homes. Incredibly, in spite of the near-magical claims being made for TEL, GM's own car divisions were at this very time bitterly resisting engine modifications to take advantage of it. In fact, GM's Buick, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac divisions would not recommend it to their customers until 1927, when they circulated bulletins to their dealers calling on them to withdraw any objections to leaded fuel. This was six years after TEL's invention and a full year and a half after a fractious national debate on TEL at the high-profile Public Health Service conference in Washington. Tellingly, support for TEL was forever lacking in the Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, the automotive engineering community's leading organ.
The damaging effects to which Sloan referred necessitated the introduction of chemical "scavengers," which would cause the residue of the spent ethyl fluid to leave the engine along with the car's exhaust gases, thus preventing lead buildup. After a little trial-and-error experimentation proved the destructiveness of chlorine, ethylene dibromide (EDB), a byproduct of bromine invented by Dow Chemical in the twenties, was selected as the scavenger of choice.
Proving the old maxim that you only make things worse when you tell a lie, Ethyl's adoption of EDB and its widespread use have created several waves of secondary environmental disaster. In more recent times, EDB combustion has been linked to halogenated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in exhaust, believed to be cancer risks. Also, when EDB is burned in the engine, it creates methyl bromide, which as a component of automobile exhaust the World Meteorological Organization has termed one of "three potentially major sources of atmospheric methyl bromide," which harms the ozone layer.
With the eventual demise of the US market for leaded fuel written on the wall, Ethyl had to find a new market for its lead scavenger EDB, and in 1972 it did--as a pesticide. Twelve years later, EDB would be banned by the EPA in this application following a 1974 finding that it was a powerful cancer-causing agent in animals; a 1977 finding of "strong evidence" that it caused cancer in humans; and a 1981 determination that it was "a potent mutagen"--a carcinogen with especially damaging consequences for human reproductive systems, powerful enough that it should be removed immediately from the food chain. This was bad news, as the United States was by now putting 20 million pounds of EDB into its soils annually, and it had begun to show up in cake mixes and cereal. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would also act to restrict EDB exposure, and the EPA would cite its reduction in the atmosphere as an additional benefit of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
Today the mechanical benefits of unleaded gasoline are obvious. Ever wonder why your new car goes longer than your old one between spark-plug changes? Or why exhaust systems last longer? Or why oil changes don't need to be as frequent? Try unleaded fuel. In a report delivered to the Society of Automotive Engineers, lead-free fuel was shown to significantly reduce engine rusting, piston-ring wear and sludge and varnish deposits, as well as to reduce camshaft wear. In 1985 an EPA report concluded that reduced lead levels reduced piston-ring and cylinder-bore wear, preventing engine failure and improving fuel economy. Estimated maintenance savings exceeded the maintenance costs associated with recession of exhaust valves, which is caused by the use of unleaded gasoline.
Gary Smith, an English Ford engineer working in the area of fuel economy and quality/vehicle/environmental engineering, told The Nation: "The higher the lead content, the more it messes the engine oil up, and we wanted to get longer intervals between engine oil changes, so that's a negative for lead as well.... [The scavengers used in leaded gasoline] or combustion of anything with chlorine or bromine will make hydrochloric and hydrobromic acid, so the actual muffler systems get corroded. They end up on--and affect--the spark plugs. Because we're trying to keep warranty costs down and [lower] costs for customers, we found ourselves going away from lead."
Many people don't realize the wool has been pulled over their eyes in other areas as well. Why doesn't anyone ever talk about this???
How did the cellphone revoluntionize the world? Did it double crop outputs or cure a disease or what?
... oops, scratch that last part. (I have a nondisclosure agreement with Microsoft.)
It does sound just a tad pompous. Even the microprocessor computer has taken a while to come into its own, and it is a far more flexible device. But for real impact on people's lives, it has been argued that the inventions of a century ago, from the cotton gin to the steam engine to modern pesticides to the assembly line to the combine and automobile and airplane to safe surgery WITH anesthesia and antiseptics (even the discovery of the GERM was, well, revolutionary) to the Edison electric light bulb -- all before or about 1900. While we're at it, how about the invention of the telephone?
I'm just rattling off semirandom industrial things that I hope are in the right time period, but you see the fundamental changes these inventions wrought, versus the more subtle improvements of the second half of the 20th century. I do think we're slowing down because so many of the great inventions are taken, yet maybe are too impressed with what has happened in our lifetimes. Another poster wisely pointed out that recent pickings may seem slim because we haven't had time to figure out which inventions are great, just as it takes about 50 years to assess the significance of a President.
But really, the cellphone? An enhanced cordless phone? Half "the world" has probably never even used one. They're wonderful and all, but incremental and transitory. Eventually we'll have the goddamn things implanted in our skulls, linked not to cells but satellites that manipulate our every thought
As for:
How long did it take for [the cellphone] to revolutionize the world?
Answer: Not yet.
Postscript: Does it horrify anyone else here that historians will refer to us as living "at the turn of the century"? All my life that has meant 1901.
I had a feeling that the article would claim that everything was invented by the US (or exclude things invented outside the US), and where they had to include something huge, they'd fudge over the details about where it was invented.
I couldn't get the article to load properly (kept crashing Chimera) so I didn't get to see them all.
I would have thought one of the top ones would have been the TV ariel - invented in Japan, or the jet engine, invented in Britain, or radar, invented in Britain, or the computer - invented in Britain by Charles Babbage.
The US will be claiming it invented the wheel soon.
Well, a US company will probably patent it then sue everyone that wants to use "a circular device that aids travel".
Driving through the midwest in 1965 (Ohio, I think), there were occasional gas stations with the brand name "Boron". I was informed that the "Boron" chain was so-named because they used a boron compound as an anti-knock agent. Apparently this was not a great commercial success. I have no idea if toxicity was a problem, but my father said the company he worked for (Commercial Solvents Corp.) helped "Boron" with some difficulties they had keeping their compound dissolved in the gasoline.
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