Technological revolutions

When one searches across the thresholds of technological revolutions throughout history, one finds shortsightedness or lack of foresight to be the norm, rather than an exception. Those steeped in a particular technology of the time have great difficulty in conceiving the “next big thing.” This probably stems from the human need to unlearn what is “known” before new learning can take place.

Technological Revolutions

Lack of foresight is not limited to any particular era or technology. In addition to general observations, one finds shortsightedness in business, science, transportation, communications, the military, and computer technology. No sector, at any time, appears immune to this limitation.

In school, perhaps the most famous short-sighted quotation is attributed to Charles H. Duell, the U.S. Commissioner of Patents who, in 1899 stated: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Watson (1977) nicely summed the historical inability to see past current technology. “Once our earth was the center of the universe, now it is an undistinguished planet. Once our creation was direct and divine, now some people believe it is the good luck of the primates. Once our intelligence was unchallenged, yet some day computers may laugh at us and wonder if biological processors could be really smart. Beware of those who think it can never happen. Their ancestors hassled Galileo and ridiculed Darwin.” Similarly, Leonard (1995) wrote: “Decisions about investments in new technologies often pit the new against the old in a skewed struggle. One reason for this, of course, is the new’s being disadvantaged in its infancy. People...galloping past broken-down automobiles, used to yell “Get a horse” as they left the newfangled mode of transportation literally in the dust.”

In business, survival depends on an ability to innovate and seize market share faster than the competition. Yet, as indicated by Simard (2001), history is filled with examples of short-sightedness in predicting the impact of innovations. RCA invented photocopying but didn’t know what to do with it, and Xerox was born. Xerox, in turn, invented the graphical user interface, the ethernet, and the laser printer but saw no application to photocopying. So, Apple became rich, and 3Com and Hewlett Packard were born. IBM saw no future in personal computers and only their sheer size enabled them to reinvent themselves after the PC market was captured by others. DEC was not so lucky; they were the world leader in minicomputers; today they are bankrupt. Bell Laboratories invented the laser, but couldn’t figure out how to use it in a telephone so they almost didn’t patent it. Encyclopedia Britannica scoffed when Microsoft purchased the rights to the content of third-rate Funk & Wagnalls. Today the encyclopedia industry is valued at about 2% of its former worth.

Science, despite the need for considerable foresight in picking important areas for research fares no better than businessmen. After Galileo invented the telescope, Aristotelian professors declared, in 1610, that “Jupiter’s moons are invisible to the [...] eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist.” Leaping forward, in 1895, the physicist Albert Michelson declared: “The most important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplemented by new discoveries is exceedingly remote.”

Transportation has been equally unable to see beyond initial struggles of revolutionary technology. In 1825, just prior to the production of the first railway locomotive, the Quarterly Review stated: “What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches? Advancing to the automobile, in 1889, the Literary Digest predicted that “The ordinary horseless carriage is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle.” Finally, in 1895, William Kelvin, creator of the Kelvin temperature scale starting with absolute zero declared that: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are not possible.” As recently as 1948, the Science Digest wrote: “Landing and moving around the moon offers so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them.” Please refer to page NEXT to the chicken soup. The communications sector is no more immune to lack of foresight than transportation. On the heels of the successful installation of the telegraph network, in 1876, a Western Union executive declared that “The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. In 1913, the US District Attorney stated: “De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public... has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company.” In 1926, Lee De Forest, having successfully given birth to commercial radio was equally shortsighted when he observed that : “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

It has been a classic military axiom, from the bow and arrow to smart missiles, that whoever brings new technology to the battlefield wins the next war. Yet, in 1901, H. G. Wells, whose prolific imagination gave rise to many classic science-fiction novels stated: “I must confess that my imagination, in spite of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.” More recently, US Admiral William Leahy declared, in 1943, that: “That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done... The [atomic] bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert on explosives.

One would imagine that by the computer revolution, the ability to see “around the corner” would have improved. Yet, in 1943, Thomas Watson, the first president of IBM is quoted as saying: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” In 1949, Popular Mechanics fared no better when they wrote that “Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” In that same year, John von Neumann, who created the theory that underlies modern computers, stated: “It would appear that we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.” In 1957, the editor of Prentice-Hall wrote: “I have traveled the length and breadth of the country, and have talked with the Best People in business administration. I can assure you on the highest authority that data processing is a fad and won’t last out the year.” Finally, in 1969, John Diebold observed: “When computers were in their infancy, it was estimated that twelve computers would be adequate to satisfy total U.S. demand. This estimate was latter raised to fifty.”

The era of the personal computer fared no better than its main-frame predecessor. In a 1977 speech, Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment stated: “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” In 1981, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft declared that: “640,000 bytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody.” Hamel and Prahalad (1994) reported that: “At one time IBM described the personal computer as an ‘entry system’ - the expectation that anyone buying a PC would move up to more powerful computers, and that PCs could happily coexist with mainframes.”

See also Information Revolution, Knowledge Revolution, Computer revolution, Digital Revolution Timeline: Technological Revolution 1945-1997 1945 · The atomic bomb invented. 1946 · The microwave oven invented by Percy Spencer. 1947 · British/Hungarian scientist, Dennis Gabor, developed the theory of holography. · Mobile phones first invented. Although cell phones were not sold commercially until 1983, AT&T came up with the idea way back. 1948 · Velcro invented by George de Mestral. · Robert Hope-Jones invented the Wurlitzer jukebox. 1950 · The first credit card invented by Ralph Schneider. 951 · Power steering invented by Francis W. Davis. · Charles Ginsburg invented the first videotape recorder (VTR). 1952 · The first diet soft drink sold. · Edward Teller and team build the hydrogen bomb. 1953 · The first musical synthesizer invented by RCA. · David Warren invented the black box - flight recorder. · Transistor radio invented by Texas Instruments. 1954 · The solar cell invented by Chaplin, Fuller and Pearson.

1956 · The first computer hard disk used. · The hovercraft invented by Christopher Cockerell. · Bette Nesmith Graham invented "Mistake Out," later renamed Liquid Paper, to paint over mistakes made with a typewriter. 1958 · The modem invented. · Gordon Gould invents the laser. · The integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. 1959 · The internal pacemaker invented by Wilson Greatbatch. · Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce both invent the microchip. 1960 · The halogen lamp invented. 1962 · The audio cassette invented. · The fiber-tip pen invented by Yukio Horie. · Spacewar, the first computer video game invented. 1963 · The first videodisc invented.

1964 · Acrylic paint invented. · Permanent-press fabric invented. 1965 · Astroturf invented. · Soft contact lenses invented. · NutraSweet invented. · The compact disk invented by James Russell. 1966 · Electronic Fuel injection for cars invented. 1967 · The first handheld calculator invented. 1968 · The computer mouse invented by Douglas Engelbart. · The first computer with integrated circuits made. · Robert Dennard invented RAM (random access memory). 1969 · The arpanet (first internet) invented. · The artificial heart invented. · The ATM invented. · The bar-code scanner is invented. 1970 · The daisy-wheel printer invented. · The floppy disk invented by Alan Shugart. 1971 · The dot-matrix printer invented. · The food processor invented. · The liquid-crystal display (LCD) invented by James Ferguson. · The microprocessor invented by Faggin, Hoff and Mazor. · VCR or videocassette recorder invented.

1972 · The word processor invented. · Pong invented by Allan Alcorn. 1973 · Gene splicing invented. · The ethernet (local computer network) invented by Robert Metcalfe and Xerox. · Bic invents the disposable lighter. 1974 · The post-it note invented by Arthur Fry. 1975 · The laser printer invented. · The push-through tab on a drink can invented. 1976 · The ink-jet printer invented. 1978 · The artificial heart Jarvik-7 invented by Robert K. Jarvik. 1979 · Cellular phones invented. · Cray supercomputer invented by Seymour Cray. · Walkman invented. · Scott Olson invents roller blades. 1981 · The first IBM-PC invented. · The scanning tunneling microscope invented by Gerd Karl Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer.

1983 · The Apple Lisa invented. · Soft bifocal contact lens invented. · Programmer Jaron Lanier first coins the term "virtual reality". 1984 · The CD-ROM invented. · The Apple Macintosh invented. 1985 · Windows program invented by Microsoft. 1986 · A high-temperature super-conductor invented by J. Georg Bednorz and Karl A. Muller. · Fuji introduced the disposable camera. 1987 · The first 3-D video game invented.

1988 · Digital cellular phones invented. · Doppler radar invented by Christian Andreas Doppler. · The first patent for a genetically engineered animal is issued to Harvard University researchers Philip Leder and Timothy Stewart. 1989 · High-definition television invented.

1990 · The World Wide Web created by Tim Berners-Lee. 1991 · The digital answering machine invented. 1993 · The pentium processor invented. 1995 · The Java computer language invented. · DVD invented. 1996 · Web TV invented. 1997 · The gas-powered fuel cell invented.

References

  • Aristotelian professors (c.1610), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • Diebold, John (1969) Man and the Computer. p48
  • Editor, Prentice-Hall (1957), in: Wiley Book of Business Quotations (Erlich, 1998).
  • Lee De Forest (1873-1961); Quote (1926), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • De Forest, Lee (1926), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • Dell, Charles (1899) U.S. Patent Office, in: Information processing Systems for Management (Hussain, 1985), Richard D. Irwin, Inc., Homewood, IL. p97
  • Gates, Bill (1981), in: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999). Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY. p170
  • Hamel, Gary and Coimbatore K. Prahalad (1994) Competing for the Future. Harvard Business School press, Watertown, MA. p30
  • Kelvin, William (1895), in: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999). Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY. p169
  • Leahy, William D. (1945), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • Leonard, Dorothy (1995) Wellsprings of Knowledge (1995). Harvard Business School Press, Watertown, MA. p40
  • Literary Digest (1889), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • Michelson, Albert A. (1895), in: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999). Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY. p169
  • Olson, Ken (1977) Speech to: Digital Equipment Corp.
  • Popular Mechancs (1949), in: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999). Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY. p169
  • Quarterly Review (1825), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • Science Digest (1948), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • Simard, Albert J. (2001) Science and Technology in a Wired World. Presented to: Canadian Forest Service Science Forum, Ottawa, ON (June 26) 1
  • US District Attorney (1913), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • von Neumann, John (1949), in: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999). Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY. p169
  • Watson, Patrick (1977) Artificial Intelligence. p252
  • Watson, Thomas J. (1943), in: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999). Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY. p169
  • Wells, Herbert G. (1901), in: The Book of Predictions (Wallechisky, 1981). William Morrow & Co.
  • Western Union executive (1876), in: The Age of Spiritual Machines (Kurzweil, 1999). Penguin Putnam, Inc. New York, NY. p169