There’s an intuition that recent products and inventions are more incremental and that historical innovations are more revolutionary- in the sense of lacking pr

There’s an intuition that recent products and inventions are more incremental and that historical innovations are more revolutionary- in the sense of lacking precedence. But this is an effect of the simplification of history, and when you read the detailed technical histories you can see how remarkably incremental the old innovations were. We can easily see the precedents of recent innovations but not for older ones. This is pointed out in the book I am reading on the development of the turbojet, which only looks more unprecedented than it really was.