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.

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.

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.

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.

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!