Why has infrastructure and technology developed so quickly in the passed century but not so much before?
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There were some pretty serious discoveries and developments regarding the use of oil, how to build and control airplanes, how to make machines that could make smaller machines with more accuracy than humans could in the past, transistors, engines to harness and transfer electrical power.
All these things helped accelerate our research and development of other things that made it possible to research and develop things even faster. Up until then we didn’t have a lot of those things.
I know it may bother some people but it’s true the discovery of fossil fuel help build the modern society we have today. It’s responsible for countless conveniences we have.
To be fair. If one is considering just “inventions” the 1800s is the single greatest century of inventions. Just look at how many things were conceived in the 1800s
Just like the 1930’s… new methods were developed… just as with technology today over the past 20yrs technology has exploded !!
Things should also be safer and studier with the technologies!!
90% of all scientists who have ever lived, are alive today, and a few hundred years ago half of all people worked in food production, now it’s a few %. Mechanization and synthetic fertilizers freed up enormous amounts of labor, some of which went towards inventions improving agricultural output even further, in a self-perpetuating loop.
This is like a hella long post, of multiple overlapping developments, that requires *more* time than you assume.
The Industrial Revolution, the change from massive labor required just to produce *food* to massive labor using machines required to produce *anything else* cannot be understated.
Almost every thing else that follows can be directly or indirectly attributed to shifting labor from food production to industry. Call that ballpark early to mid 1800s in the US.
The ability to produce *structural steel* allowed the construction of high rises, leading to cities as we know them today. You can see the difference between older buildings, typically limited to around 4 floors maximum height before this.
The first “generally affordable” automobile was sold in 1908, Ford’s Model T. All of a sudden the average person had significant mobility.
First Flight was 1903, with first commercial flight 1914, and aerial combat in WWI a few years later.
Never mind the rise of electricity over gas, Edison’s light bulb in 1880 allowing for longer shifts, which then led to other developments.
The invention of the computer, and then the transistor, which allowed size reduction of said computers allowed for increased complexity, and increasingly complex computation. Hell, they were still doing complex calculations *by hand* for a significant portion of space flight during the 1960s.
Thats just various applications of engineering.
Significant advancements in medicine, allowing for better outcomes usually follow wartime developments. IE battlefield medicine from the Civil War, chemical weapons in WWI, and “modern” antibiotics in WWII. Development of “modern” anesthetics and surgical procedures across that time greatly attributed to survival of things that would otherwise be fatal.
Nevermind things like the discovery and production of insulin in the early 1900s to treat diabetes, which has been known since Antiquity (ancient Greek for example).
The creation and enforcement of the FDA, giving rise to standards in food, medicine, cosmetics also cannot be understated.
You also have the rise of Public Health – vaccinations, sanitation, etc.
I’m getting a bit too longwinded, I can tell, so to sunmarize:
TL;DR – the reduction of labor required to feed a population frees up time and effort to further enhance the welfare of the population, which allows for more technological advancement, which further enhances this cycle.
So the overarching difference is two things
Scientific method and mass education.
Before science, knowledge was never approached from a system unified way. The result was scattered random learnings by random people with the same things rediscovered multiple time and many things already invented unknown to most of the world. While the process developed over years, it was only near the turn of the 20th century that it really became firmly entrenched as standard throughout much of the world. As a result innovation is now a systematic and unifed international process.
Before mass education only a limited few were able to be scholars and actually learn that scattered knowledge.
In the last century however we suddenly have basically everyone being educated to a level that used to be seen by less then 1%. The amount of people capable of contributing to advancement is now hundreds of times more than ever before multiplying the speed of development many many times over.
Exponential growth. The more technology you have, the easier it is to use that to invent *more* new technology.
Eg 200 years if an inventor had an idea, they had to draw possible designs on paper and construct possible parts and prototypes by hand out of wood or metal. Then one of the things someone invented was computers, then CAD software, then 3D printers. Now any averagely-smart person can have idea for an invention, draw and optimize the design on the computer, and then have the physical part 3D printed and in your hand that day without even needing any building skills.
So the more tech there is, the easier it is to make more. It’s a self-accelerating feedback loop.
Also there’s more feedback loops related to this. The more technology gets applied to the essentials like farming, the more time is saved and the less time and people are needed in farming, freeing them to do to other things…like invent new technology.
Eg 500 years ago most average people didn’t have much free time. Many people couldnt even read. Gathering enough food, making and mending clothes, securing shelter and heat, all the “chores of staying alive” took up a lot more time than they do now. Then the more labour-saving devices get invented, the more free time people have to read, learn non-essential skills, invent more labour-saving devices… once again it’s self-accelerating feedback.
Basically, oil and liquid hydrocarbons. That’s the short answer.
It allowed us to go farther and faster in cars and planes and develop the internal combustion engine. It allowed us to burn it for producing energy for electricity. It allowed for the creation of plastics which are necessary for modern microchips and computing hardware.
We’d be SOL without oil
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