19 ms·

The Miraculous 1880s

51 points by pross356 11y ago

bra-ket 11y ago
also - Lilienthal gliders developed in the 1880s that inspired Wright brothers to create the first airplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal - Heaviside's work on Maxwell equations - Boltzmann's work on thermodynamics - Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect and radio waves - Hollerith receives a patent for electric tabulating machine, one of the first computers - Design of rocket propulsion by means of explosives (a precursor for Project Orion): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kibalchich#Final_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kibalchich#Final_lette...
- akgerber 11y ago
  The 1880s also saw Chicago's population grow by 118% and New York's by 23%. Compare that to today, when we treat urban population booms of 5% a decade as 'breakneck growth' (e.g. San Francisco, from 777k to 815k from 2000 to 2011).
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    Chicago in 1880 was starting with a pretty small base, though...
    - mlinksva 11y ago
      1880: 503,185 1890: 1,099,850
      - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
        OK, bigger than I thought. Big enough that the comparison to SF is not totally invalid... Except that SF has the problem that almost nobody can afford to live there, so everybody commutes. So how big is the SF metro area? 7,000,000 in 2000 - though that includes San Jose and Oakland. Those are places that send commuters to SF, true, but a bunch of them don't go there too, and so it's getting really hard trying to figure out how to come up with validly comparable numbers...
        akgerber 11y ago
        Why does SF have that problem? To a significant degree, because more people can live in buildings like this: http://cache-graphicslib.viator.com/graphicslib/media/c8/very-busy-paris-streets-photo_1489864-770tall.jpg http://cache-graphicslib.viator.com/graphicslib/media/c8/ver... than buildings like this: http://c718756.r56.cf2.rackcdn.com/26000/93334/2010-08-25/35b9b123d2a5a4838c5cab39f69780ce.jpg http://c718756.r56.cf2.rackcdn.com/26000/93334/2010-08-25/35... yet it's illegal to replace the latter with the former in SF. Unlike, say, Chicago in the 1880s.
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        The bulk of Chicago isn't highly multistory buildings, and most of the early skyscrapers were office towers, not residential. What Chicago has that San Francisco hasn't is land. The city sprawled both north and south along Lake Michigan, and westward. San Francisco has less space in the city proper, yes, but it also wasn't filled out fully until the 1950s. Now, of course, it is fully built up, and the only way to add more people is to grow up rather than out. Chicago, though, also has highly developed suburbs, which were principally served until the 1960s by commuter rail, radiating out in all directions. Contrast with SF which had only one line south (CalTrain) through what remains a comparatively sparsely developed area (the Peninsula), and limited East Bay service (though the Key System did exist until the 1950s). It's simply easier to build out more metropolitan infrastructure in the midwest. Chicago is also within reasonable rail distance of much of the East Coast. By the late 1850s, it was less than two day's travel from New York, and well under one by the 1930s (about the same, by rail, as now). http://railroads.unl.edu/documents/view_document.php?id=rail.str.0241 http://railroads.unl.edu/documents/view_document.php?id=rail... San Francisco was four weeks' travel in the 1850s, and still 3-4 days by the 1930s. Today, California is increasingly practically limited by water access.
        mlinksva 11y ago
        In any case if we're comparing the 1880s to some recent decade using city growth, why is SF relevant? Plenty of cities have recently had or are having growth like Chicago and NYC of 100+ years ago. They're in Asia and Africa.
adventured 11y ago
In my opinion, the 1880s are no more impressive than the 1990s. - Hubble - International Space Station - World Wide Web - Human Genome Project - GPS becomes fully operational - Drones / UAVs - Large Hadron Collider project gets underway - Wi-fi (every bit as amazing as the coin operated vending machine) - Web / Internet search engines - Vast breakthroughs in understanding stem-cells - Streaming media, explosion of digital media - E-commerce - Consumer e-mail (far more important than the electric iron) - Instant messaging - Mass adoption of the graphical user interface - Digital cameras commercially available - Commercial lithium ion batteries - Protease Inhibitor, countless drug breakthroughs, advancements, vaccines - Cloning, eg Dolly - Vast numbers of breakthroughs around mobile phones, smartphones, PDAs, screens, touch, etc. - Linux - First robotic vacuum cleaner (again, every bit as impressive as the electric iron) - GMOs commercialized - Voice over IP becomes a commercial product Some of these things were obviously continuations, or built upon previous technology. That is true of many of the 1880s breakthroughs as well.
- splawn 11y ago
  I agree with your point exactly because (if James Burke's series "Connections" has taught me anything) all pieces of technology are continuations built upon previous technology.
- dalke 11y ago
  It's a bit odd to see "Large Hadron Collider project gets underway" in the same category as "Hubble [Space Telescope]", given that HST got underway in the 1970s. Also, Willadsen cloned mammals in the 1980s using embryonic cells. (Dolly was the first mammal cloned from adult cells.) And "consumer e-mail" was available already in the 1980s with Minitel, CompuServe and Prodigy, among other organizations, as well as from BBSes. That's not to say there have been no wondrous things in the 1990s, only that the details are hard to pin down. There's a belief that the rate of technological growth it itself advancing, so that the rate of growth now is much more than the rate of growth 100+ years ago. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change for people who believe this is the case. This essay is trying to counter-balance, or ground, that belief. The problem, described at http://www.innovationfiles.org/is-technological-change-speeding-up-how-can-you-tell/ http://www.innovationfiles.org/is-technological-change-speed... , is that it's hard to measure the rate of technological change. Among other things, we suffer from bias error because we forgot that some apparently simple things - my favorite example is the vertical file system, dating from the late 1800 - didn't exist until recently.
Tloewald 11y ago
Don't get me wrong, I like the article, but it dismisses a whole bunch of silicon valley stuff as "variations on a theme" of microprocessors and parsing radio spectrum. Fair enough but including the invention of Coca Cola and Edison opening a power plant? That's like counting "Apple starts selling iPhones in China" as an innovation. The "safety" bicycle? (the chain drive was invented in 1879) First practical street railway? (It's like a railway, on a street.) The Wall Street Journal? It's always worth putting technological progress in context. It reminds me of a 1999 WIRED article where they asked people to pick which 20th century technology would most shape the 21st century, to which one expert replied (I paraphrase), "if I weren't restricted to 20th century technologies, I'd say the telephone" (pointing out that the majority of the world's population lacked access at the time). Someone (maybe the same person) nominated the bicycle as the most important technology of the 20th century.
- yahappynow 11y ago
  To address one point, the safety bicycle was the point in the development of the bicycle that made it possible for women to ride while wearing long skirts. This was a huge step for women's autonomy as it allowed women a way to travel independently. So yes, the safety bicycle was a big deal, though I agree that it's nonsense to try to rank decades. http://www.annielondonderry.com/womenWheels.html http://www.annielondonderry.com/womenWheels.html
  - AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
    I don't think it's really nonsense to try to rank decades, as long as you have some specified criteria. For inventions by lasting impact, some decades are clearly superior to others. The 1750s, for instance, basically had nothing. I can't find a single thing invented in the 1750s that we still use today or inspired further inventions directly. I'm sure there's a couple, but I would argue that since it's hard to find them they're relatively unimporant. The first decade of the 1800s? The first modernish battery, the arc lamp, morphine, the steam locomotive, the first automobile, the steamboat. Perhaps it's silly to rank decades, but I don't think it's nonsense.
Florin_Andrei 11y ago
Interestingly, Jules Verne (the then equivalent for technology- and exploration-worshipping hard sci-fi authors of today) was reaching the height of his output around that same decade (and the next), with some of his most significant works having been already published in the 15 years preceding it. It was definitely an age of great enthusiasm about technology and progress, and I think Verne's books capture that energy pretty well. If the 1880s were the miraculous decade in terms of technological breakthroughs, the first 3 or 4 decades of the 20th century were a radical fracture in terms of fundamental thinking across the whole culture: Einstein, Godel, quantum physics, post-modernism, dadaism, Picasso, Joyce's Ulysses. I think we have yet to fully comprehend the magnitude of that tectonic shift in how we think of and understand... well... everything. It was massive and it touched everything. And there's a common thread to that whole massive change. If I had to summarize it in one word, it would be 'relativity'. We've stopped thinking in absolute terms, and started to understand the value and validity and truth of the many different points of view. A century later, that kind of understanding is still percolating into politics, social mores, and daily life.
deleted 11y ago
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fleitz 11y ago
And how many stem cell treatments were available in 2005? There are lots of innovations in tech happening outside of microprocessors.
- dredmorbius 11y ago
  How much are stem cells improving quality of life? How much did clean water, flush toilets, and municipal waste removal improve quality of life and life expectancy? https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/MsQfdPAn_0XUdZUoReBfbg https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/MsQfdPAn_0XUdZUoReBfbg https://d324imu86q1bqn.cloudfront.net/uploads/asset/attachment/1468664/ello-xhdpi-281770e7.jpg https://d324imu86q1bqn.cloudfront.net/uploads/asset/attachme...
lordnacho 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... Happened 1887. A load of other things mentioned by other people here, too. I wonder if there was some sort of geographic centre to it. A lot of it sounds like it happened in the US.
panglott 11y ago
Coinciding with the Long Depression of 1873-1896? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression Those good old technological explanations for secular stagnation don't look great over longer timescales.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sytelus 11y ago
Question: If you can choose any 100-year span in human history to live, which one would you chose? My answer was 1869 to 1969. Imagine the world without cars, electricity, airplanes, telephones, skyscrapers... You start from there. And then within 100 years man lands on moon. You would have witnessed two biggest wars in human history, multiple cultural revolutions, art revolutions, medical revolutions... It would be the most interesting years in the human history to live. Now compare that to our time span :).
- sosuke 11y ago
  I am quite happy to be missing out on my share of world wars thought I read plenty about them. Otherwise I often think I was born too late, that I missed so many opportunities if I had just been a few years older. If I had only bought Google when I had the chance, if I hadn't been such a young fool, if I was in the work place during the boom I could have gotten lucky. Oh man the ifs go on forever. So I throw up my hands and look around to see if I can avoid an if today.
crystaln 11y ago
Biotech? Nanotech? Transportation? Software? Information accessibility? Social technologies? Genetic engineering? Space travel? Artificial intelligence? We do a lot more than processors these days.
CapitalistCartr 11y ago
This author doesn't seem to be familiar with Belle Époque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_%C3%89poque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_%C3%89poque The Gilded Age from 1871 until we screwed it all up with WW I is well known in history as an age of major advancement.
cbd1984 11y ago
This is pointless: If you let me define the terms, I can 'prove' that the Ancient Romans invented radio, computers, and whatever else, and nothing of note has been created since 500 CE. Picking out the 'first' of something is always an exercise in defining terms, meaning the person who does it gets to pick the winners by defining some key words correctly. (First computer: The rock. It enables partially-mechanized computation. The abacus is merely a variation on the theme of using pebbles to count, and nothing later counts at all.) (First radio: Using torches to send messages. After all, all light is in the electromagnetic spectrum, just like the modern FM band.)

51 points by pross356 11y ago

also - Lilienthal gliders developed in the 1880s that inspired Wright brothers to create the first airplane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal - Heaviside's work on Maxwell equations - Boltzmann's work on thermodynamics - Hertz discovers the photoelectric effect and radio waves - Hollerith receives a patent for electric tabulating machine, one of the first computers - Design of rocket propulsion by means of explosives (a precursor for Project Orion): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kibalchich#Final_letter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Kibalchich#Final_lette...

akgerber 11y ago
The 1880s also saw Chicago's population grow by 118% and New York's by 23%. Compare that to today, when we treat urban population booms of 5% a decade as 'breakneck growth' (e.g. San Francisco, from 777k to 815k from 2000 to 2011).
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Chicago in 1880 was starting with a pretty small base, though...
  - mlinksva 11y ago
    1880: 503,185 1890: 1,099,850
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      OK, bigger than I thought. Big enough that the comparison to SF is not totally invalid... Except that SF has the problem that almost nobody can afford to live there, so everybody commutes. So how big is the SF metro area? 7,000,000 in 2000 - though that includes San Jose and Oakland. Those are places that send commuters to SF, true, but a bunch of them don't go there too, and so it's getting really hard trying to figure out how to come up with validly comparable numbers...
      - akgerber 11y ago
        Why does SF have that problem? To a significant degree, because more people can live in buildings like this: http://cache-graphicslib.viator.com/graphicslib/media/c8/very-busy-paris-streets-photo_1489864-770tall.jpg http://cache-graphicslib.viator.com/graphicslib/media/c8/ver... than buildings like this: http://c718756.r56.cf2.rackcdn.com/26000/93334/2010-08-25/35b9b123d2a5a4838c5cab39f69780ce.jpg http://c718756.r56.cf2.rackcdn.com/26000/93334/2010-08-25/35... yet it's illegal to replace the latter with the former in SF. Unlike, say, Chicago in the 1880s.
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        The bulk of Chicago isn't highly multistory buildings, and most of the early skyscrapers were office towers, not residential. What Chicago has that San Francisco hasn't is land. The city sprawled both north and south along Lake Michigan, and westward. San Francisco has less space in the city proper, yes, but it also wasn't filled out fully until the 1950s. Now, of course, it is fully built up, and the only way to add more people is to grow up rather than out. Chicago, though, also has highly developed suburbs, which were principally served until the 1960s by commuter rail, radiating out in all directions. Contrast with SF which had only one line south (CalTrain) through what remains a comparatively sparsely developed area (the Peninsula), and limited East Bay service (though the Key System did exist until the 1950s). It's simply easier to build out more metropolitan infrastructure in the midwest. Chicago is also within reasonable rail distance of much of the East Coast. By the late 1850s, it was less than two day's travel from New York, and well under one by the 1930s (about the same, by rail, as now). http://railroads.unl.edu/documents/view_document.php?id=rail.str.0241 http://railroads.unl.edu/documents/view_document.php?id=rail... San Francisco was four weeks' travel in the 1850s, and still 3-4 days by the 1930s. Today, California is increasingly practically limited by water access.
      - mlinksva 11y ago
        In any case if we're comparing the 1880s to some recent decade using city growth, why is SF relevant? Plenty of cities have recently had or are having growth like Chicago and NYC of 100+ years ago. They're in Asia and Africa.

adventured 11y ago

In my opinion, the 1880s are no more impressive than the 1990s. - Hubble - International Space Station - World Wide Web - Human Genome Project - GPS becomes fully operational - Drones / UAVs - Large Hadron Collider project gets underway - Wi-fi (every bit as amazing as the coin operated vending machine) - Web / Internet search engines - Vast breakthroughs in understanding stem-cells - Streaming media, explosion of digital media - E-commerce - Consumer e-mail (far more important than the electric iron) - Instant messaging - Mass adoption of the graphical user interface - Digital cameras commercially available - Commercial lithium ion batteries - Protease Inhibitor, countless drug breakthroughs, advancements, vaccines - Cloning, eg Dolly - Vast numbers of breakthroughs around mobile phones, smartphones, PDAs, screens, touch, etc. - Linux - First robotic vacuum cleaner (again, every bit as impressive as the electric iron) - GMOs commercialized - Voice over IP becomes a commercial product Some of these things were obviously continuations, or built upon previous technology. That is true of many of the 1880s breakthroughs as well.

splawn 11y ago
I agree with your point exactly because (if James Burke's series "Connections" has taught me anything) all pieces of technology are continuations built upon previous technology.
dalke 11y ago
It's a bit odd to see "Large Hadron Collider project gets underway" in the same category as "Hubble [Space Telescope]", given that HST got underway in the 1970s. Also, Willadsen cloned mammals in the 1980s using embryonic cells. (Dolly was the first mammal cloned from adult cells.) And "consumer e-mail" was available already in the 1980s with Minitel, CompuServe and Prodigy, among other organizations, as well as from BBSes. That's not to say there have been no wondrous things in the 1990s, only that the details are hard to pin down. There's a belief that the rate of technological growth it itself advancing, so that the rate of growth now is much more than the rate of growth 100+ years ago. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change for people who believe this is the case. This essay is trying to counter-balance, or ground, that belief. The problem, described at http://www.innovationfiles.org/is-technological-change-speeding-up-how-can-you-tell/ http://www.innovationfiles.org/is-technological-change-speed... , is that it's hard to measure the rate of technological change. Among other things, we suffer from bias error because we forgot that some apparently simple things - my favorite example is the vertical file system, dating from the late 1800 - didn't exist until recently.

Tloewald 11y ago

Don't get me wrong, I like the article, but it dismisses a whole bunch of silicon valley stuff as "variations on a theme" of microprocessors and parsing radio spectrum. Fair enough but including the invention of Coca Cola and Edison opening a power plant? That's like counting "Apple starts selling iPhones in China" as an innovation. The "safety" bicycle? (the chain drive was invented in 1879) First practical street railway? (It's like a railway, on a street.) The Wall Street Journal? It's always worth putting technological progress in context. It reminds me of a 1999 WIRED article where they asked people to pick which 20th century technology would most shape the 21st century, to which one expert replied (I paraphrase), "if I weren't restricted to 20th century technologies, I'd say the telephone" (pointing out that the majority of the world's population lacked access at the time). Someone (maybe the same person) nominated the bicycle as the most important technology of the 20th century.

yahappynow 11y ago
To address one point, the safety bicycle was the point in the development of the bicycle that made it possible for women to ride while wearing long skirts. This was a huge step for women's autonomy as it allowed women a way to travel independently. So yes, the safety bicycle was a big deal, though I agree that it's nonsense to try to rank decades. http://www.annielondonderry.com/womenWheels.html http://www.annielondonderry.com/womenWheels.html
- AnkhMorporkian 11y ago
  I don't think it's really nonsense to try to rank decades, as long as you have some specified criteria. For inventions by lasting impact, some decades are clearly superior to others. The 1750s, for instance, basically had nothing. I can't find a single thing invented in the 1750s that we still use today or inspired further inventions directly. I'm sure there's a couple, but I would argue that since it's hard to find them they're relatively unimporant. The first decade of the 1800s? The first modernish battery, the arc lamp, morphine, the steam locomotive, the first automobile, the steamboat. Perhaps it's silly to rank decades, but I don't think it's nonsense.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

Interestingly, Jules Verne (the then equivalent for technology- and exploration-worshipping hard sci-fi authors of today) was reaching the height of his output around that same decade (and the next), with some of his most significant works having been already published in the 15 years preceding it. It was definitely an age of great enthusiasm about technology and progress, and I think Verne's books capture that energy pretty well. If the 1880s were the miraculous decade in terms of technological breakthroughs, the first 3 or 4 decades of the 20th century were a radical fracture in terms of fundamental thinking across the whole culture: Einstein, Godel, quantum physics, post-modernism, dadaism, Picasso, Joyce's Ulysses. I think we have yet to fully comprehend the magnitude of that tectonic shift in how we think of and understand... well... everything. It was massive and it touched everything. And there's a common thread to that whole massive change. If I had to summarize it in one word, it would be 'relativity'. We've stopped thinking in absolute terms, and started to understand the value and validity and truth of the many different points of view. A century later, that kind of understanding is still percolating into politics, social mores, and daily life.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

fleitz 11y ago

And how many stem cell treatments were available in 2005? There are lots of innovations in tech happening outside of microprocessors.

dredmorbius 11y ago
How much are stem cells improving quality of life? How much did clean water, flush toilets, and municipal waste removal improve quality of life and life expectancy? https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/MsQfdPAn_0XUdZUoReBfbg https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/MsQfdPAn_0XUdZUoReBfbg https://d324imu86q1bqn.cloudfront.net/uploads/asset/attachment/1468664/ello-xhdpi-281770e7.jpg https://d324imu86q1bqn.cloudfront.net/uploads/asset/attachme...

lordnacho 11y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper... Happened 1887. A load of other things mentioned by other people here, too. I wonder if there was some sort of geographic centre to it. A lot of it sounds like it happened in the US.

panglott 11y ago

Coinciding with the Long Depression of 1873-1896? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Depression Those good old technological explanations for secular stagnation don't look great over longer timescales.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

sytelus 11y ago

Question: If you can choose any 100-year span in human history to live, which one would you chose? My answer was 1869 to 1969. Imagine the world without cars, electricity, airplanes, telephones, skyscrapers... You start from there. And then within 100 years man lands on moon. You would have witnessed two biggest wars in human history, multiple cultural revolutions, art revolutions, medical revolutions... It would be the most interesting years in the human history to live. Now compare that to our time span :).

sosuke 11y ago
I am quite happy to be missing out on my share of world wars thought I read plenty about them. Otherwise I often think I was born too late, that I missed so many opportunities if I had just been a few years older. If I had only bought Google when I had the chance, if I hadn't been such a young fool, if I was in the work place during the boom I could have gotten lucky. Oh man the ifs go on forever. So I throw up my hands and look around to see if I can avoid an if today.

crystaln 11y ago

Biotech? Nanotech? Transportation? Software? Information accessibility? Social technologies? Genetic engineering? Space travel? Artificial intelligence? We do a lot more than processors these days.

CapitalistCartr 11y ago

This author doesn't seem to be familiar with Belle Époque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_%C3%89poque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_%C3%89poque The Gilded Age from 1871 until we screwed it all up with WW I is well known in history as an age of major advancement.

cbd1984 11y ago

This is pointless: If you let me define the terms, I can 'prove' that the Ancient Romans invented radio, computers, and whatever else, and nothing of note has been created since 500 CE. Picking out the 'first' of something is always an exercise in defining terms, meaning the person who does it gets to pick the winners by defining some key words correctly. (First computer: The rock. It enables partially-mechanized computation. The abacus is merely a variation on the theme of using pebbles to count, and nothing later counts at all.) (First radio: Using torches to send messages. After all, all light is in the electromagnetic spectrum, just like the modern FM band.)