interactive.wsj.com
January 11, 1999
Think Big
What is the greatest technological innovation of the past 1,000 years? A hint: It's not just the thought that counts.
By BOB DAVIS
In the history of technology, Thomas Edison's laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J., established in 1876, is justly celebrated. How much darker, in many ways, the millennium would have been if Mr. Edison and his mechanics and engineers hadn't invented a practical system for lighting cities. (The Wall Street area was the first place illuminated -- technology invariably chases money.)
But compare Mr. Edison's efforts with those of a little-known predecessor, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. Around 1420, the Portuguese prince gathered cartographers, navigators and shipbuilders in a fortress in Sagres, Portugal, to invent navigation technology that European explorers would use to reach India, China and the Americas by ship. The interplay between these civilizations, through war and trade, came to define the millennium.
Will Crocker
One way to crown the top innovation is to figure out which technology, if it were never invented, would have halted the millennium's progress.
Whose research-and-development lab was greater, Mr. Edison's or Prince Henry's? Which technology was more important, navigation or electricity? Those are the kinds of questions we must ponder to answer an even tougher riddle: What is the greatest technological innovation of the past 1,000 years?
Let's admit upfront that, in some respects, the question is unanswerable, like deciding who's smarter, Galileo or Einstein. Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke dismisses the inquiry as another bit of millennium nonsense. "I have a very simple solution to your problem," he says from his home in Sri Lanka. "Just change the calendar" to skip the year 2000.
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But trying to crown the greatest innovation does teach some valuable lessons, especially technological humility and perspective. On a top-technology list, personal computers would rank lower than far simpler innovations. The invention of eyeglasses in the late 1200s greatly increased productivity by extending the working lives of skilled craftsmen. PCs have yet to produce any discernible productivity boost. Indeed, the rate of productivity growth has slowed substantially since 1973, around the time the PC was invented.
Missing Links
One way to crown the top innovation is to figure out which technology, if it were never invented, would have halted the millennium's progress. Let's call that the "what if?" method.
At the top of that list would have to be Johann Gutenberg's invention of movable type, around 1450. Before Gutenberg, printers generally carved an image in reverse on wood and then pressed it with color ink onto paper -- a slow and expensive process that made books so pricey that only nobles, priests and the wealthiest merchants could afford them. The printing-poor environment reinforced the power of society's elites.
Gutenberg invented a way to break a solid page of type into separate letters, which could be quickly reassembled to print different pages. Historian Daniel J. Boorstin, in his book "The Discoverers," writes that "Gutenberg's crucial invention was his specially designed mold for casting precisely similar pieces of type quickly and in large numbers."
Gutenberg used his technique to produce elegant Bibles for the wealthy. But Gutenberg's invention spawned a democratic revolution.
Books became cheaper to produce and own, and thus encouraged the spread of literacy. Laymen finally could study the Bible without the intermediary priests -- and many didn't like what they saw from the pews. Between 1517 and 1530, more than 300,000 copies of Martin Luther's condemnations of the Catholic Church were sold -- an unimaginable quantity before Gutenberg -- and stoked the Protestant Reformation. Protestant notions of self-sacrifice, argues sociologist Max Weber, later led to the rise of capitalism.
Douglas S. Robertson, a University of Colorado geophysicist and author of "The Next Renaissance," estimates that the invention of movable type expanded by a factor of one million the amount of information available to literate individuals. It also enabled scientists to publish their observations widely and to have colleagues critique or confirm the findings, an essential step in the scientific revolution. "The printing press is the key invention without which we wouldn't have modern civilization," says Mr. Rosenberg.
But the what-if method has flaws. It's biased toward the early part of the millennium. The railroad, dating from around 1800, greatly changed life around the world -- shrinking transcontinental travel to days instead of months, making habitable inaccessible parts of the Earth, shuttling food and fuel to markets. But railroads would never rate on a what-if list. If they had never been invented, the world still would have progressed mightily from the year 1000, and would have continued to advance using river and canal transportation.
Barroom Science
So let's try another methodology, which we'll call the "barroom brawl" technique. This time, we'll compare technologies mano a mano, irrespective of time, the way sports fans compare the 1990s' Mark McGwire to the 1920s' Babe Ruth.
While the barroom brawl method is riddled with problems -- hence the name -- it does lead to some surprising insights. For instance, the printing press would no longer be the obvious top choice. Television arguably has sparked a revolution as profound as Gutenberg's. TV broadcasts images of U.S. and European consumer society around the world -- for better or worse -- and instantaneously reports on political unrest anywhere on the globe. That has homogenized culture, raised expectations in poor nations about living conditions and reinforced doubts in communist ones that their leaders were delivering on promises of a better life under socialism. What Luther was to Catholicism, "Dallas" and CNN may have been to Marx.
Now, how to decide what brawlers are up to the contest? At the risk of being a bit arbitrary, inventions shouldn't be considered for the top slot if they were rejected by major civilizations. (Barroom translation: If an invention is so important, how come it got dumped?)
That principle knocks out gunpowder, even though admittedly it came to dominate warfare everywhere. Europeans learned to compact gunpowder (a Chinese discovery) into musket balls, bullets and cannonballs, which helped them subjugate less-advanced native cultures in the Americas and more-advanced cultures in Asia. But the Japanese actually banned guns in the early 17th century, even though they made some of the world's finest. Japan's rulers despised how guns equalized warriors and commoners, and wanted to reassert the special status of sword-wielding samurai. Japan chose feudalism over modernity and showed they could live -- for a few centuries, anyway -- without advanced technology.
That's also the case with new navigation and ship-building technology used by Henry the Navigator, Columbus and others to travel to and plunder the Americas, China and other places. While ships capable of traveling faster and farther reshaped the world by making it smaller, isolationist China was itself in no hurry to reach Europe and scoffed at the technology. China banned new shipbuilding techniques by 1500, and half a century later even made it a crime to go to sea on ships with multiple masts.
So, having disqualified some of the most significant technologies of the millennium, what's left? The winner should have: 1) greatly changed the lives of people since its invention; 2) fundamentally reorganized society; and 3) not been repealed or rejected by major civilizations.
Charles Rosenberg, a University of Pennsylvania science historian, makes a strong case for medical technologies. From the 1860s to 1900, scientists learned how to purify water through filtration, chlorination and aeration technologies. That reduced the incidence of death through cholera or waterborne parasites, a particular hazard in warm climates. Millions of people were spared debilitating diseases. No nations were foolish enough to reject the improvements.
Similarly, the development of antibiotics from the 1920s to the 1940s greatly improved the ability of patients to fight off infections and, in particular, saved the lives of many wounded soldiers during World War II. Life improved world-wide as such diseases as pneumonia, diarrhea and infections lost their terror. Through such improvements in medical technology, people lived longer and healthier lives than they had since the beginning of history. "It meant that a kid wouldn't die, and that surgery could be done routinely," Mr. Rosenberg says.
Factory Model
But another technology deserves first place on the barroom list; it affected the lives of millions as deeply as medical technology and also thoroughly revolutionized society: the factory system.
Invented in Britain in the 1700s to make cotton textiles, the factory model was adapted by entrepreneurs to mass-produce guns, tools and other foundations of modern life. Britain considered the textile factory so critical to its economic advancement that it tried to hoard the technology, unsuccessfully, by blocking the emigration of artisans and the export of machine tools.
In vast buildings powered first by steam, and later by electricity, factory managers organized workers so they were responsible for only a part of production, a mind-numbing but efficient division of labor. That brutally changed the nature of work from the seasonal requirements of farm life to the day-after-day drudgery of the assembly line. For workers, the results initially were devastating and gave rise to Marxist predictions of revolution and organized-labor promises of reform. (In "Electrifying America," historian David E. Nye writes that Henry Ford, who is credited with perfecting the modern assembly line, doubled the pay of auto workers in 1914 not because he was generous, but simply to try to keep so many from quitting the stultifying jobs.)
Eventually, the great productive capacity of factories -- tempered by government rules on pay and working conditions -- led to an unprecedented rise in wages and living standards. Factory-based mass production also assured that inventions such as telephones, radios, automobiles and televisions could be made at prices affordable to average buyers. "The middle class was made rich by the factory," says Thomas Hughes, a University of Pennsylvania technology historian. "It was a momentous transformation of society."
This millennium may well be best remembered for industrialization. And what about the next? One thousand years is far too long to predict, but Prof. Robertson, the University of Colorado geophysicist, figures that the PC will finally come into its own in the next century.
He calculates that the ubiquity of computers and computer networks will produce a 100 millionfold increase in the information available world-wide compared with the precomputer era. That's a far greater information leap than the one that followed the invention of the printing press, and ought to have similarly revolutionary consequences. Says Prof. Robertson, "It's a new level of civilization." |
