Why has infrastructure and technology developed so quickly in the passed century but not so much before?

Question

Why has infrastructure and technology developed so quickly in the passed century but not so much before?

In: 3

Answer 1

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.