What’s with the massive boom of technology and invention over the last century and a half compared to the slow advancement of the many centuries before?
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It’s due to a principle called Accelerated Change. Each advancement of technology forms a brick. When the next person comes along to do further research and advance that piece of technology, they now have a brick to stand on. When they die, and the next person comes along, they now have 2 bricks to stand on.
The more bricks in your foundation, the faster you can advance. In the last century and a half, the world’s population has become more dense and organized. Instead of individuals like Tesla and Edison experimenting in their living rooms, we now have entire organizations and corporate entities carrying out research around the clock, increasing productivity to heights that our forefathers could only dream of.
Technology begets technology. More people freed up from subsistence work puts more minds to work on innovation, and so you see a somewhat exponential growth of technology over the millennia.
Look at the course of history
A million years to go from nothing to stone tools
100,000 years to go from stone tools to agriculture
5,000 years to go from agriculture to metalworking
2,000 years to go from metalworking to steel
Then the race is really on, and we race through late antiquity and the middle ages developing weapons and technologies at a rapid pace. 1000 years from romans building stone arches to ships armed with cannons sailing the globe.
440 years after the first circumnavigation we land on the moon.
In the previous 75 years we had the telephone, radio, airplane and cars, some would argue those are the biggest leaps in technology.
An excellent question!
More humans, with more prosperity, with longer lives, who know how to read, leads to more innovation. Humans invent things, so more humans living in better conditions leads to more inventions.
We build technology on top of technology.
We could not invent the car before discovering the wheels, we could not send then get something back from space before discovering rocket fuel.
Since industrialization it went a bit crazier than before.
1. More people. Between 1700 and now the number of humans has gone from 600 million people to almost 8 billion people. The change in urban population (ie, the people who meet lots of new people) has changed even more drasticly.
2. Those people are also doing more technical jobs. Before the agricultural revolution some 90-95% of society worked in agriculture. Which is tough work and does not leave you with a lot of time to sit and think. About a billion people work in agriculture. Which means that 7 billion people do not work in agriculture, with a disproportional number of those non-agriculture people being in rich countries where people DO have time to sit and think for a significant portion of the day (ie, very few people have 12 hour shifts and no free weekends).
So there is a lot more thinking and networking going on, both from a pure “there are lots of people on earth” and a “Those people have a lot of free time to spend thinking on stuff”.
We also have heated and bright houses (tends to help with thinking) and cheap books (so that you can learn things and make sure that you’re not solving a problem that someone else has already solved) and computers (which can help you with math problems. And for the last 30 years computers also feature the internet. Which is often for porn, but is also a faster way to check if you’re thinking about something that someone else already solved).
None of the answers offered before this one is really correct. The real answer to your question is energy, specifically coal. You need to put some energy in to get some energy out. In the case of human labor, this means how much work you can get from the food a person eats. For animals this is higher, but still not much. Burning coal however, producing steam to run machines (and later turbines to produce electricity), provides vast amounts of energy compared to the work needed to mine and burn it. The oil ratio is even better. It’s all this “surplus” energy that allows technology to advance. If you look at the history of coal usage, it tracks quite closely with the boom of technology.
While I think the general answer of ‘technology begets technology’ is the core reason, it is also important to acknowledge that the relative levels of worldwide peace and political stability from the last century were critically important to the advancement of civil technologies. This is for a couple reasons.
1. Fewer people in militaries means more people (and government budgets) can freed up to focus on other activities, including technological advancement.
2. Conflict stalls advancement by disrupting peoples lives and leads to small and large migrations as well as the destruction of critical infrastructure. In recent memory, consider how the events in Ukraine are disrupting their technological development e.g.
3. War prevents collaborations and the sharing of information between technological innovators as governments seek to prevent information leaking to their enemies.
even the last 40 years has had a huge leap in technology
The world is much more connected thanks to the internet and people can share designs, ideas and collaborate much easier
Other comments have mentioned that all advances are made on the shoulders of others before.
The computer was invented and created by hand and from there, those computers were improved. Those new computers were used to create more efficient manufacturing techniques, which in turn made more efficient components
Increase in communication causes exponential progress. We’re a species whose defining characteristic is out ability to communicate very abstract ideas effectively.
In the old days, almost everything would have to be reinvented because different communities couldn’t share ideas. One tribe figures out metal tools, but they can’t tell the rest of humanity. That means only people from the same tribe can improve on that. You have to hope you get lucky and have someone else who’s good with that kind of stuff in your tribe, so progress is really slow. Maybe over generations knowledge is lost.
Over time communication improves, but is still slow and not easily accessed by anyone. Education is also limited. This leads to a situation like Newton and Liebnitz both inventing calculus at once. They both happen to be part of the upper class, able to get education and be part of the ‘circle’ of mathematicians so are kinda up to date with what’s going on in the field. But communication is still too slow such that they both spend years doing the same thing, wasting effort. Knowledge isn’t really lost anymore because there’s enough people around the world who can keep and share it.
Skip to now. We can almost instantaneously transmit messages to anyone/everyone across the whole globe, and education is much more accessible (in some places at least), so the pool of people working together on a single problem, and their level of collective skill and coordination is so much higher.
With that context, it’s easier to understand why progress used to be so much slower.
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