We’re technological laggards
Google, Apple and other so-called technology companies don’t look like much compared to the giants of a century ago
We’re told we live in The Internet Age, The Information Age, The Technological Age. The Internet Age? Certainly. The Information Age? Yes, if information is judged by access to it rather than its quality. The Technological Age? Certainly not, if by that we mean that our society has been advancing technologically in leaps and bounds, in ways previously unimagined. Most of those who are today lauded as technology giants — the Googles, the Apples, the Facebooks, the Amazons — are giants in business but not in technological prowess. History will look on them — and on our age — as wanting in breakthrough technological achievements, a time marked more by technological sizzle than steak.
The Internet has undeniably changed our lives, chiefly by speeding communications and allowing us to obtain an immense variety of goods and services online. But in most respects, we live much as our parents and grandparents did, relying on the same recognizable means of travel, enjoying the same recognizable forms of entertainment, employing the same recognizable types of appliances in our homes.
That could not have been said of our counterparts a century ago, whose lives were revolutionized by inventions we continue to depend on today. The automobile, and Henry Ford’s assembly line, launched one of the world’s greatest industries and fundamentally changed our living and travelling patterns. Edison, after perfecting the light bulb, installed the first electricity generating plant in J.P. Morgan’s home and launched another great industry that also immeasurably transformed the world. Alexander Graham Bell in that same era began what we now know as the telecom industry. The airplane, the radio, the phonograph, the motion picture likewise transformed the culture, soon to be followed by television, creating giants of industry that changed almost every aspect of how we how we worked and played.
In contrast, today’s technology giants appear awfully small. Google, perhaps the company most go gaga over, is stolidly in the advertising business, its genius coming not from a fundamental technological advance — search engines were in popular use before it won its monopoly — but through improvements in the efficiency of advertising. Google’s attempts to profit from innovations other than its search engine — the overwhelming source of its revenue — have mostly fallen flat, as Googling “Google’s failures” will attest. Neither has the Google brain trust been good at picking economically viable technological winners: Its many flounders include attempts at renewable energy, such as its $168-million investment in Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, which needed a $539-mil- lion federal bailout after needing a $1.6-billion federal loan.
Like Google, the immense worth of other “technology” giants such as Twitter and Facebook stems from their value to advertisers, not from path-breaking innovation. Amazon, also considered a technology giant, is but a Sears catalogue on steroids. Apple’s value is in its extraordinary design. The Internet itself is hardly new — it was conceived in 1934, in the same era of the revolutionary inventions, and then made practical by Vinton Cerf, considered the “Father of the Internet,” when working on a U.S. military project called ARPAnet in the 1960s. The computer dates back to Alan Turing’s 1936 Universal Turing Machine, the basis of his Enigma machine that famously broke the Nazi code during the Second World War.
In the robust technological age of the decades bookending 1900, inventions revolutionized our lives because, unlike technological playthings, they had immense economic value, ensuring their rapid ascent to mass markets. In 1877, Edison discovered how to record and playback sound. In 1878, he established Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., to sell his new invention. The invention of the movie was also brought to market quickly. In 1888, Edison directed his staff to develop “... an instrument which does for the Eye what the Phonograph has done for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion ....” He patented his motion-picture device in 1889, had a prototype by 1892 and the first movie studio by 1893.
In our generation, inventions are rarely inventive and rarely brought to market in a matter of a few years, partly because government directs research directly through grants and indirectly through its policies; partly because government regulations retard development; partly because political correctness numbs many of our best minds into conformity; partly because economics no longer rules in directing and disciplining invention. Solar technologies, despite billions in government research funds spent since the first UN-inspired Earth Day in 1970, remains an immature technology that is economic only in niche applications such as solar calculators and remote locations. Ditto for wind turbines. Ditto for carbon sequestration and the countless other climate-change-inspired technologies. Today’s sole game-changing energy revolution — hydraulic fracking, which first came into use in 1949 — has taken off because it became economic, unlike the renewables.
Today’s retarded pace of invention affects even government initiatives, which in the past rapidly achieved fruition, despite the mind-boggling immensity of the undertakings. The Manhattan Project began with a $6,000 grant in 1940; in 1945, the first nuclear bomb was detonated at a military base in New Mexico. In 1961, president John F. Kennedy astonishingly announced that the United States would that decade send a man to the moon. In 1969, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, announcing “a giant leap for mankind.”
Those magnificent, almost incomprehensible technological accomplishments — full of daring and a sense that there are no limits to man’s potential — are no more. The bold space missions are effectively on hold, as are the inventions we cannot conceive of. Today, there is no Edison, whose free spirit and inquiring mind blessed us with some 1,100 inventions. Instead, the inventors of today plod along safe, welltrodden fields, giving us better cars and better search engines, better things of all descriptions, including things that have no economic value. Unlike the inventions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the inventions of the late 20th and early 21st century are mostly all small steps, rather than giant leaps for mankind.
Today there is no Edison, whose free spirit and inquiring mind blessed us with some 1,100 inventions