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I'm not dismissing it, just saying it's a "variation on a theme" just like the IBM PC or the smartphone or whatever. Goddard launches the first fueled rocket (
by Tloewald 11y ago
I'm not dismissing it, just saying it's a "variation on a theme" just like the IBM PC or the smartphone or whatever.
Goddard launches the first fueled rocket (1926) is the technological breakthrough. Man lands on the moon (1969) is a variation on the theme. The latter is certainly significant -- "variation on a theme" is a very arbitrary criterion to pick. Everything kind of is.
- abecedarius 11y agoWe can look at it that way, yeah. (I think Apollo's salient as the most spectacular example of the really large-scale planned development that was new to the mid-20th C., rather than a variation on the theme of rocketry.) On the other hand, going from the Apple ][ or even the PDP-1 to the IBM PC is not much like going from batteries, gaslights, fueled engines, and compressed air to an electricity utility. Not to argue about words, but that feels like more of a new thing to me. I'll bet it looked like a gamble at the time. Backing off from semantics, maybe we could quantify what we're looking for as something like the productivity growth rate in the world's then-current most-advanced economy? (This would try to rule out cases like postwar recovery as "not the leading economy".)