Ask Slashdot: What Was The Greatest Era Of Innovation? (nytimes.com)

speedplane writes: The New York Times is running a story on innovation over the past 150 years. [The story starts at the end of the American Civil War with the newly completed transcontinental railway in the 1870s. Then it highlights the profoundly different lifestyle of the 1920s, the end of 'The Great War' and the beginning of the Great Depression. By the 1970s, many of the transportation and communication changes from the 20s became fundamental parts of daily life. The story ends in 2016, an era in which human life has changed the most in the last 46 years.]

We're in the golden age of innovation, an era in which digital technology is transforming the underpinnings of human existence. Or so a techno-optimist might argue. We're in a depressing era in which innovation has slowed and living standards are barely rising. That's what some skeptical economists believe. The truth is, this isn't a debate that can be settled objectively.

What do slashdotters think is the greatest era of innovation?

Comments

that's an easy one!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, oh, I know this one!

3500 BC was the greatest era of invention.

Why 3500 BC, you ask?

The (approximate, of course) invention of beer.

Go ahead, tell me of a greater one. Can't, can ya?

Re:that's an easy one!

[jc42]

3500 BC was the greatest era of invention. Why 3500 BC, you ask? The (approximate, of course) invention of beer. Go ahead, tell me of a greater one. Can't, can ya?

People will no doubt laugh at this, but it's actually a good observation (though we should include wine in the list). The reason is simple: We humans need to ingest a fair amount of water each day to stay healthy. But historically, water itself has been rather dangerous stuff. Consider all the other people and animals upstream who have been using it for both bathing and disposing of waste of various sorts. Do you want to drink that water? Not if you want a long, healthy life.

Part of the year, our ancestors could get some of the needed water by consuming fruits, which are high in water. But they mostly don't keep very well, and they spoil. Fermented juices have their sugars partly converted to ethanol, which is toxic to most of the spoilage micro-organisms, so the resulting wine or beer is much less likely to spoil. (If it does, the result is often vinegar, which is another way of preserving the juice in a way that's safe for humans to consume).

It's pretty well understood among historians, anthropologists, etc., that fermentation processes were a significant part of our ancestors' development into a long-lived species that eventually dominated much of the planet. Yes, it's fun to get drunk, and to joke about getting drunk. And some other animals can get drunk, since ripe fruits often contain around 1% ethanol. (I've read some funny stories about groups of elephants getting a bit tipsy from the consumption of ripe fruit. Imagine a crowd of drunk elephants partying in your neighborhood. ;-) But the fact is that ethanol-laced liquids are historically an important part of our history, because ethanol provided a way to make those liquids safe to drink.

There was a fun study some time back, in which some researchers traveled around the world, stopping in various eateries, ordering food, and taking it back to their hotel room to feed to the lab equipment they'd brought along. They were testing it for safety (and ate the food that passed their tests ;-). Their main summary of their results was that, if you want a simple rule for ordering something safe to drink, no matter where you are, order beer. They didn't always like the beer everywhere, but their tests never found beer that was unsafe for human consumption. Wine was in second place, but they did find contaminated wine in a few places.

The explanation seems to be that, as anyone who has tried brewing beer knows, you have to be really careful about cleanliness during the brewing, or you get an awful-smelling glop that nobody will drink. With wine, the process seems easy, and you can get good-smelling wine by just letting the fruit juice (with perhaps added yeast) ferment, but sometimes the result has contaminants that aren't obvious. But with beer, this doesn't work; you have to boil it all to sterilize it, add a yeast culture, make sure that stuff floating in the air can't get into the containers, or everyone will know that you've failed the instant they sniff it. So beer probably is the most significant brewing achievement in human history.

Re:that's an easy one!

[Wovel]

Everything since beer is just an incremental improvement.

Re:that's an easy one!

[Kjella]

Just one comment/correction, for the most part people did not drink beer/wine as a substitute for water, they drank a heavily watered down version with the alcohol working as a disinfectant. I don't think even the small elite that could afford it drank the "real deal" all the time, because of the intoxicating and dehydrating effects. That would typically be for celebrations and ceremonies and other festive events. So having decent water to begin with was very important, whether it came from wells, rainwater, streams or lakes. The Greeks and Romans did some various forms of mechanical and chemical treatment in the big cities, but in practice filtered drinking water didn't become common until the 17-18th century. For the most part you took untreated water, mixed it out with a tiny bit of beer/wine and you drank it.

1870s to 1970s

[QuantumLeaper]

My grandmother lived in a time where she saw the invention of the Horseless carriage to man landing on the moon. Thing I have seen man land on the moon, but what have we done since then? That would top that?

Re:1870s to 1970s

[Iamthecheese]

It's not fair to compare a 100 year period to a 46 year period. (the time "since then") I strongly suspect the period from 1970 to 2070 will see changes your grandmother wouldn't dream possible even after seeing all that. Driverless cars, brain integrated internet access, thought controlled devices, strong AI, a global end to poverty-related suffering and an active, healthy Mars colony aren't any real stretch of imagination for the next 50 years.

Re:1870s to 1970s

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Trivia: I will never forget the moon landing, mum let me have the day off school to watch it at home, I was so enthralled by the broadcast that I accidently sat on a plate of spaghetti.

One small sitting for the boy, one giant mess for the mom.

Re:1870s to 1970s

[Evtim]

Maybe not sexy but certainly recognized by the whole world. I just read the story of Edward Jenner [1749-1823] - the father of vaccination, in the excellent "Book of the dead" from the QI guys. When the world started using his approach and saw the results this humble, great human, who disliked the fame and never tried to capitalize on it, who kept on working quietly to the rest of his days was hailed, respected and adored perhaps more than any other human in history [apart from religious figures, I guess].

British MP said that every foreigner - commoner, diplomat or dignitary he meets first asks him how is Jenner doing...Jefferson was ecstatic and highly complimentary...Jenner was presented to and awarded honors by the most powerful rulers in the world from US to Russia and more or less everyone else...even Napoleon released two captured Brits because Edward wrote him a letter [one of the captives was a relative of him]; Napoleon exclaimed "Ah, Jenner, I can refuse him nothing"

The day that we should always remember is 14th May 1796 [hey, today is the 220 anniversary, that's great!!!] - on this day he took discharge from the hand of a milkmaid who had cowpox and used it to immunize 8 year old boy who acquired then complete immunity to smallpox. No-one knows what happened to the milkmaid [Sarah Nelmes] but the hide of her cow Blossom is still in St George hospital...

Edward Jenner - what a man!

Solving for X...

[RyanFenton]

Let's see...
What is, THE FUTURE, Alex?

I'm thinking innovation scales with population, available tools, recorded experience, and accessible resources - all of which are still increasing.

In fact, almost every measurable aspect of human life is actually improving over time so far.

Combine the increasing effects of the Flynn effect, drastically reduced violence over time, automation, increased health standards, and I can't see how the immediate future won't continue the increase in innovation over time.

Not that this is news of course. It's so not news, that you barely even hear of it - and why it's actually so hard for many folks who don't pay attention to science and statistics to even believe. To most folks, the only science news they hear about the future is climate change and extiction rates - both of which are true, but are NOWHERE near a complete picture that science shows us. We've got a lot to fix, but compared to vast stretches of planetary history where single populations explode and take over the biological landscape, we're doing amazing.

Which is also why the future of innovation is important.

Ryan Fenton

Start of WWI to end of WWII

[tomhath]

The world went from the horse and buggy age to the jet/atomic age in 30 years. Huge innovations in electronics, transportation, medicine, everything, in one generation.

WWI and WWII

[Morpeth]

Sad but I think true. The burst in technological, medical and scientific discovery during huge conflicts has been pretty remarkable. Humans, we are a strange beast.

The biggest improvements involve the past sucking

[Kjella]

Sorry, but you could live quite okay in 1980 without the PC, Internet, cell phones and whatnot. Go back and consider what life was like before you had phones, TV, cars, electricity and so on and you'll find many aspects of life sucked or was incredibly inconvenient. If I compare computer games made in 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2015 what will be the biggest difference? The first decade, of course. Cassette/LP to CD was a much bigger leap than CD to MP3/AAC, VHS to DVD was bigger than DVD to BluRay and so on. No internet to dial-up was bigger than dial-up to fiber. It's nice that we make things even better and more efficient and convenient, but there's a diminishing return. Which is not to say I feel we're done and won't make much more progress, but for the most part we're swapping out something that worked quite okay already for something better.

You have to name times AND places

[Applehu Akbar]

A surge of innovation occurs when sociopolitical conditions, infrastructure, education and sources of wealth mesh in just the right way. Victorian Europe was one such time, when Britain, French and Germany blasted into the industrial age by feeding on each other's inventions. The US from 1865 to 1914 and 1942 to 1970 is another example. In these cases, war pushed technological development which nourished a generation of peace and civilian development to follow. Right now, it's China. Will India be next?

Re:The invention of the iceless refridgerator

[phantomfive]

toilet paper beats that, I'm telling you.

Although to be honest, the one thing I can't figure out how to do without in case of the fall of civilization, are toenail clippers. I don't think people used knives to clip them.

I would have a hard time but

[kilodelta]

I'd have to say the invention of the transistor was the most transformative thing to happen to society. Prior we had vacuum tubes sure but they were power hungry devices that made portable electronics impossible.

The transistor changed everything. It also allowed the device on which I'm posting to come about. A device admittedly a bit dated already but still enough to allow me to multi-task, listening to music, watching video, etc. And to continue the line of thoughts - the computer has invaded every aspect of life itself. All because of the invention of the transistor.

Re:Industrial revolution

[ganv]

Yes, but that is maybe a bit too easy. The scientific thinking and economic arrangements that allowed the industrial revolution are continuing to spread around the world and to transform our lives. The commonly labelled 'industrial revolution' of 1760-1830 produced machine made cloth, readily available power from water and steam, and the beginnings of railroads, but it is prominent for the derivative of the economic growth rate and not the maximum value. Without question, growth measured by economic measures has never been higher than in China from 1980 to 2010. But innovation? That is somewhat nebulous. Does innovative painting count? Maybe I come back to agree with you though. Almost nothing has been as revolutionary or innovative as the transformation in how we conceive of the workings of the universe between 1687 and 1960. Arguably the most rapid period of scientific innovation was between 1800 and 1900 when most of our understanding of thermodynamics, basic chemistry, fluid dynamics, geology, evolution, electricity, magnetism, and optics were placed on solid phenomenological and empirical foundations. Cool stuff happened in the 20th century, but relativity, quantum mechanics, and detailed computational chemistry have been much less transformational than electromagnetism, basic chemistry, and evolution have been.

Re:1890 to 1914

[Anne Thwacks]

My grandfather, in the late 1960's, said to me "the changes we saw between 1896 and 1914 were amazing. We looked back at time before then and thing 'that was the last century'. When (if) you get to 2014, you will look back on 1996 and say ;that was the last millenium; the changes will appear 10 times bigger!".

In 1896, transport was horse drawn. There were no cars or aeroplanes, no radio, and few people had even seen a phone.

For those who can't remember, in 1996, few people had seen a computer (yes, I saw one in 1956, but I am talking about most people), no Internet (I had been using it since the 1980's, but few people knew about it), No mobile phones (I had one - it was the size of a car battery - cos it had one in it).

If anyone I had a device in my hand that would allow me (in the UK) to see and talk to almost anyone in Africa, allow people in Africa to "virtually" attend weddings of family members in the UK, allow me to navigate the streets of Lagos (Nigeria) using visual moving maps with spoken instructions, hear music from anywhere in the world, and any time since before 1900, for nothing, get training on how to do almost anything for nothing, or even compute complex maths without me even having to touch the keyboard, then I would ask them for something of what they were smoking!

Mobile phones with multi-core processors, touch screens, Skype and Youtube may appear obvious to us, but they surely were not in 1996 - when even land-line phone calls were so expensive we rarely called anyone, anywhere, if we could go there or write!

Yes, I have used Google Maps in Lagos, and attended a wedding in London which relatives attended from Zimbabwe and America by Skype. I have drawn pictures on my screen with a mouse and used the results to cut parts from wood with a Laser - like something from a James Bond film!

I remember solving differential equations using a mechanical calculator that, to divide, you wound a handle round to do repeated subtraction for each decimal place, and in 1996, I had seen military "moving map" displays, and had a good idea what they cost! I remember discussions of whether it was physically possible for memory to cost less than 1 cent per bit, and mainframes with a CPU clocked at one MHz! I remember watching the Beatles play live using 30 Watt amplifiers (1963), and going to the disco in 1970's clothes (look at the clothes in Soul Train videos).

My grandfather's prediction may not be absolutely accurate, but, emotionally, it is pretty close!

I am still waiting for my hover-board. Sharks with lasers, I can do without. Drones? I had a model plane in 1963 that flew by remote control. (Listening to DooWap as I write this).

Slow Rise, Sudden Collapse

[Ferocitus]

500k BCE: 1st hominid catches on fire while dancing.
1931: Electric guitar invented.
1997: Zenith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
2016: The End: Clinton, Trump, Radiohead.

The Italian Renaissance

[IHTFISP]

...when western civilization collectively pulled its head out of its ass from the superstitious dark ages and entered the age of reason.

Early 20th C

[tsotha]

My grandfather didn't see a car until he was full grown, and before he died we had transistors, nuclear weapons, antibiotics, and had landed a man on the moon. It's not even close. People in the 1950s and 1960s thought we'd have ray guns and FTL ships by now because they were projecting from the state of innovation in their time.

We're jaded

[grasshoppa]

Obviously we're jaded; were we not, we'd recognize that since the advent of the internet, our ability to share data has revolutionized the world and our own capabilities. There is no real end to this in sight.

Our greatest days are in front of us, not behind, as people truly begin to leverage the communication capabilities of the internet.