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

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.