why didn’t humanity advance technologically for thousands of years when it comes to things like electricity and other electrical power devices like WIFI, but now humanity is advancing rather rapidly?
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We started making technology that made it easier to make more technology. And that kept happening
An abundance of fuel, first coal and then oil. Hard to make electricity when all you know about is wood.
Two words.
Global communication
Established in the early 20th century if you look at a graph of technology advancement prior and after it just sorta takes off from there
I forgot which of the founding fathers said something to the likes to: I’ll study military tactics so my children can study law and engineering, and their kids art and music (very very rough paraphrase).
So society has advanced enough to outsource “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” to intuitions and away from individuals. They somewhat automated processes like shelter and safety so that the individual doesn’t have allocate processing power for those tasks. They are free to study other things outside of capturing food, defending their territory, etc.
As populations increased the more people can fill those institutions and thus the more people are freed from those tasks and can ponder about innovations and such.
It took thousands of years to figure out that there was such a thing as magnetism and electricity. The ancient Chinese used naturally magnetic stones as the first compass, but they didn’t know what magnetism was or why those stones worked. Ancient people knew about lightning and electric eels, but didn’t know what electricity was. It’s just not readily apparent. It took many, many scientists performing many experiments to figure out that electricity and magnetism are linked. Once they tied those 2 phenomena together they also figured out that changing an electromagnetic field produces electromagnetic waves. No one knew that electromagnetic waves existed until that was accomplished (visible light was thought of as a different phenomena, not tied to electricity or magnetism). Heinrich Hertz was the first to produce electromagnetic waves, but even he didn’t see any use for them. It took many more scientists and engineers after him to better understand electromagnetic radiation and it’s uses. Our lives today wouldn’t be remotely the same without that understanding (Wifi uses electromagnetic radiation. So does radar, microwaves, radio, etc). There were many more scientists and engineers working to figure out how to harness electricity and make use of it. The real catalyst for all that we have today was to gain a good enough understanding of the underlying scientific principles so that future generations of scientist and engineers were able to make use of them. Things blew up from there, but it took a long, long time and many years of research and experimentation to get there. Add to that the invention of the printing press, so that information could be distributed to a much wider audience, and therefore involved far more people in the research, and the industrial revolution kicking off giving people access to more equipment and more time, and you get the kind of exponential growth that we’ve seen in the last 100 years or so. That growth has a whole lot to do with humanity building a deep enough understanding in one thing to be able to harness it’s potential: the electron. 100 years ago no one could guessed what would come of that. Try to imagine what the future holds if we can harness the power of the nucleus (in a non-harmful way that is), or the Graviton.
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