1870-1920. Electric light, automobiles, aircraft, radio, paved roads. Railroads everywhere in the developed world. Electric mass transit (trolleys, subways) in major cities. Tractors and combine harvesters on farms. Refrigeration. X-rays.

In computing, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording company (later IBM) produced the first printing tabulator, the beginning of commercial data processing.

Those 50 years held the greatest lifestyle changes in history.

In terms of pure impactful science I'd say 1920-1960 or so. Quantum mechanics and everything it led to (modern chemistry, in particular) is the big one, but there was also relativity, the modern evolutionary synthesis, huge advances in statistics, the math of computing, and so much more.

The push for innovation is probably the greatest right now. However, I like to think the greatest innovations are those that make my own life simpler. There's: airplanes, cars, electricity, GPS and others. Innovation today, while technically impressive, is mostly making my life more complex, not more simple.

The printing press, and its proliferation a few hundred years ago.

Without it, the cost of copying information is enormous. When you can't copy stuff cheaply, you end up copying only a few things. Like what whoever is in power likes. Or whatever the accepted wisdom of the day is.

With it, you can have ideas, spread them, and get feedback from a lot of people. That goes for social ideas like liberalism, religious ideas like Protestantism, scientific ideas like gravity, and technological ideas like all the ones on HN.

You also get away from authority. If you have some new thoughts about how government should be organised, it's a lot harder to stop you telling everyone.

In practical terms of impacting the greatest % of the population, some data that I'd like to have seen here are around life expectancy:

- Life expectancy, men/women

- Infant mortality

- Accidental death

- Death by illness/disease

- Death by military conflict

For example:

- Life expectancy (US, men & women average)

1870: 35.1 years

1920: 54.1

1970: 70.9

2012: 78.7

The most years gained were 1870 - 1920.

As for military conflict, innovation happens in politics and diplomacy as well as technology. I'd like to see how innovations in politics and diplomacy have impacted death by military conflict as military technology become increasingly lethal.

You're living it.

The future of innovation is micro, not macro - genomics and biotechnology, apps and on-demand entertianment, miniaturization and nano technology, etc.

The past always seems better than the present, probably we're not good at assessing our progress, but only retrospection can we.

Probably depends on what constitutes innovation and the time scale. It could be argued that language, agriculture, money, etc. have changed people lives than more dramatically than recent technology.

Hopefully getting the Internet in the hands of many non-technical people with Smartphones and tablets will get us to another Era of Innovation. Many people started using the Internet that wouldn't have it it was only available on PCs.

The "born after the iPhone" children will get old enough next decade to do their own thing and new ideas will spread :)

Across human history, it's probably 10,000 BC to the present era. Within that period, the sliver of time occupied by the Second Industrial Revolution, as a catalyst for accelerating growth and progress henceforth, hasn't yet been bettered by any other period for the scale of its impact.

750–950 The Islamic Golden Age. Most relatable to HN was the work of al-Khwarizmi who was one of the fathers of algebra and whose name rendered as Algoritmi in Latin led to the term "algorithm".

I didn't rtfa but if I recall correctly, patents per capita peaked in the 1860s

200000 years ago? The invention of language.

As I should have suspected from the context, this concerns Robert Gordon's epic The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which I've read and am trying to synthesize a review.

The article here suffers from much one of the book's major faults: it's an epic romp through the details of technological advance, and their impacts, both of which are admittedly interesting, but lacking in the backbone of theory and a model to explain both what technology is, specifically (one definition, from Gordon, is "the sum of our ignorance", though that requires further explanation ;-), and how it impacts everyday life.

Don't get me wrong: Gordon's grasp and exposition of history is masterful, detailed, and extensively researched. Unlike much of economics, he looks pointedly at every-day impacts, and strongly questions many (though not all) the often-questionable interpretations of economists.

I also agree strongly with Gordon's conclusion that technological progress hit an apex prior to 1920. More specifically, and Neil Irwin does a huge disservice in not mentioning this, Gordon specifically distinguishes rate of change and impacts. While technology has changed markedly in his third era (the book is divided in three parts: 1870 - 1920, 1920-1970, and 1970-2015, nearly 50 years each), the impacts have been quite limited. Little in household appurtenances, particularly kitchens, has changed since 1970, other than introduction of the microwave. Transport's pretty constant. Medicine, for all the expense poured into it, has delivered virtually nothing, particularly contrasted with 1900-1950 (and, for what it's worth, earlier). Work and manufacture has changed, but only modestly, and productivity as measured by economists (dollar output per worker hour) has increased at best modestly.

And, sorry, HN, but Gordon's quite harsh on information technology -- it delivered, somewhat, from 1994 - 2004, but little 2005 - 2015.

That's all covered in the book, and missing from Irwin's article.

What Gordon himself misses is IMO even more interesting.

His core thesis is what's called "the Solow Residual" -- what's left over in regression analysis after accounting for economic growth using capital and labour. (Gordon was a student of Robert Solow's). What bothers me, greatly, is that Gordon all-but-answers his own question -- he points at the 99% growth in worker productivity 1920-1950, and the 133% increase in horsepower and kW per worker over the same period. On numerous grounds, power makes sense to consider in transformational activity.

Gordon completely dismisses it.

Several other researchers have dug into that in depth. Robert A. Ayres (apparently it's a rule for all economists in this saga to be named "Robert") is one, there've been other analysis, including Hall and Klitgaard, and a recent item I've seen. Solow and Ayres had a correspondence according to Solow's archive at Duke University, though I don't know the upshot of it.

Another element missing from Gordon's analysis is some sort of theory of technology -- what it is, how it operates. He describes this to some extent, but it's quite insufficient. He mentions the real-world, everyday-life impacts of many early technologies, but doesn't think to reference Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, another lacking point.

Along with that is a metric of technological impact. Gordon's is GDP and especially GDP/worker. This is actually and area of some disagreement in various circles, but a concept of energy throughput has been proposed by Leslie White, known as White's Law.

I could also quibble with some economic discussions and considerations, though most are quite secondary to his point and if anything would, corrected, strengthen his basic thesis.

But yeah, today's got nothing on the 1880s, progress-wise.

Now.

The golden quarter..

https://aeon.co/essays/has-progress-in-science-and-technolog...