The Speed Of Technology Has Increased Dramatically One of the things which fascinates me is the speed in which technology is increasing. While it is hard to really notice in some areas, once we go back in time and see how many years passed before inventions came about, then we can readily see what I am talking about. I have to wonder how long it took humans after throwing the first rock in anger to invent the spear. I am willing to bet it was many thousands of years. If we look at the apes for example they never progressed after they threw the first rock. There is a sort of unofficial estimate but it doesn’t make sense if you believe modern humans are only about 400,000 years old. It states it took 500,000 years. The only reason I am even mentioning this is whatever the time period it is in hundreds of thousands of years. After we invented the spear, we invented the atlati or throwing lever. One would place the back of the spear in it and it gave much more power to the throw because it acted as a sort of a force multiplier. This invention is placed at 17,000 to 20,000 years ago when it was found mentioned in a French Cave. That means there was a difference of hundreds of thousands of years between the invention of the spear and the atlati. It does make one wonder how so many years could have passed, doesn’t it? Another invention does seem to have come before the atlati and that is the bow and arrow. Arrow heads have been found dating back about 72,000 years and that is also hundreds of thousands of years after the spear. One would think there had to be someone who even by accident could have come up with something after the first spear. I know life must have been very harsh with the lifespan said to only be about 30 years or so, so I know people were very preoccupied with staying alive, but one would think they would try making hunting easier and not rely on the same spear for so long. One invention which seems to go back to those very early days of man is fire. Perhaps this is one of the all time most important things they could have done. Not only was it useful for cooking food, but it was also useful in keeping the wild animals away and giving heat in the cold. It took hundreds of thousands of years to progress from fire to the oven. The earliest evidence of ovens dates them back to around 29,000 B.C. As you can see it took a really long time to progress to that point. If we move along to within ten thousand years ago or so, it is believed the wheel was invented somewhere around 4,500 to 3,300 B.C. in the form of a pottery wheel. It is said horses were also domesticated at this time and they were trained to pull carts. These dates are not solid and some believe the wheel is about 2,000 years older. At first wheels on carts were attached to an axel and the axel would turn with the solid wheel attached, but the invention was improved upon and the axel became unmovable and the wheels moved. That took around 2,000 years to get to that point. The crossbow was invented by the Chinese. It took from 72,000 years until 400 B.C. for the invention of the crossbow. I think you can see my point, which is there was a very long time between inventions in those days or even improvements on them. Fast forward to the 20th and 21st centuries. I think we all remember or at least know about the invention of the VCR. That was a video recorder which recorded to tape. It was actually invented in 1956 and took a few years to get popular. If things would have went the same way as they did thousands of years ago we would still had the VCR maybe for a few more thousands of years, but something else was invented and it was the compact disk and then the DVD. It allowed recording to disk and came out just about the beginning of the 21st century. That was only about 39 to 40 years later. Here is the funny part of all this, many people no longer use recording machines because of the invention of the streaming services which allow you to watch their movies and shows on line. The first streaming service was YouTube and came out in 2005 only 5 years later. Can you see how fast technology improved in this instance? Let’s go back and look at the invention of the automobile. The first modern car was invented by Benz and patented in 1886. There were all sorts of automobiles coming out a few years later. Some were powered by gasoline, some by electric, and some by steam. By the early 1920s it seemed gasoline cars had cornered the market and they had really improved over those earlier models. As time went by they kept getting better and faster, until today when our cars are actually rolling computers capable of driving themselves in some instances. All this happened in only about 137 years. I am old enough to remember when the first cell phone came out. It came out in 1983 and was a brick. It actually weighed 4.4 pounds. Cell phones started to lose weight and kept getting smaller. Then in 1992 IBM invented a phone which could send and receive emails and faxes. The phone also had a touch screen and was considered the first smart phone, but look at where we are already today. We have a powerful, do almost everything computer in the form of a light smart phone we carry on our person. All this happened in about 40 years. Is technology advancing faster all the time? It sure seems that way.
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