Science Matters

The great age of invention

Boyce Rensberger

(7/2022) If you think we’re living in an age of amazing scientific and technological advances, take a moment to consider an era that existed more than a century ago. New discoveries and socially disruptive inventions were coming at the public from all directions.

Today, by contrast, most of the major innovations that make a big impact on society are the product of just three sets of related research fields. One is subatomic physics, which has given us nuclear power and nuclear weapons. A second is electronics, which has given us television, the computer, the Internet, and host of digital technologies. The third is biomedical science, which gave us antibiotics, vaccines and many useful pharmaceuticals.

As spectacular as today’s advances are, travel back in your mind to the 19th century, say to the lifetime of a person who lived during the 65 years from 1839 through 1903. This is the Victorian era of horse-drawn carriages, men in top hats and women in voluminous floor-length skirts. This era began before the Civil War and ended in the presidency of William Howard Taft when the United States had only 45 states. Everybody reading this column was born after that period.

One could argue that people living then witnessed a broader array of ground-breaking and socially disruptive changes than we have seen in a comparable period, say the six-plus decades, since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. For a taste of what I am talking about, think about how these six 19th century products of science and engineering changed people’s lives—the automobile and electric lights, movies and the phonograph, X-rays and aspirin.

Here are more examples in chronological order. (Of course, most advances are the culmination of years of prior steps. So, dates given here are only for the best known point of climax and the most prominent person responsible for it.) I’ve thrown in a few lighter innovations for context.

1839 – Daguerre’s photography captures the first realistic images of people and scenes.

1844 – Telegraph systems send Morse-coded messages between cities.

1845 – Singer’s sewing machine makes clothing less costly.

1845 – Morton’s anesthesia makes surgery painless.

1852 – The gyroscope makes navigation at sea more accurate.

1850s – Lister’s antiseptic methods make surgery safer.

1853 – Otis’s elevator safety brake allows construction of skyscrapers.

1855 – Bessemer invents steel, further making tall buildings possible.

1859 – Darwin sets forth a new understanding of how living species came to be.

1864 – Pasteur’s heating method kills harmful microbes in milk.

1866 – The U.S. and Britain communicate instantaneously using the first undersea telegraph cable.

1858 – The internal combustion engine is invented.

1866 – Tin cans preserve food indefinitely.

1866 – The typewriter.

1867 – Nobel’s dynamite makes it easier to blast tunnels through mountains.

1867 – The paper clip.

1872 – Ward’s first mail-order catalog gives rural families access to countless products.

1872 – Asphalt paving makes roads smoother and eliminates muddy ruts.

1876 – Bell’s telephone lets people miles apart converse in real time.

1877 – Edison’s phonograph brings professional music into homes.

1878 – Edison’s early movies open a new realm for entertainment.

1879 – Edison’s first practical light bulb extends the day beyond sunset.

1882 – The first electric power company.

1885 – Benz develops the first practical automobile.

1886 – Coca-Cola

1886 – Sprague invents the DC electric motor

1888 – Tesla develops the AC motor and transformer.

1891 – The escalator

1893 – London opens the world’s first subway system. Boston follows in 1897.

1895 – Roentgen’s x-ray technology lets doctors look inside the intact human body.

1895 – Marconi invents radio, wirelessly transmitting messages in Morse code.

1898 – Thompson discovers the electron, taking science into the subatomic realm.

1899 – Bayer company develops aspirin, relieving pain for untold millions.

1903 – Wright brothers invent the airplane.

In 1896 an essayist at Scientific American magazine took stock of the pace of progress.

The country, he wrote, was living through "an epoch of invention and progress unique in the history of the world." He characterized it as "a gigantic tidal wave of human ingenuity and resource, so stupendous in its magnitude, so complex in its diversity, so profound in its thought, so fruitful in its wealth, so beneficent in its result that the mind is strained and embarrassed in its effort to expand to a full appreciation of it."

To be sure, for all the technological wizardry, America was a nation deeply divided between the haves and have-nots. This was an age of urban squalor, rural poverty, robber barons, the industrial exploitation of workers including children, and deep political corruption. Worst of all was the repression of Blacks, beginning with slavery and continuing with segregation enforced by widespread lynchings.

In the first decade of the 20th century these ills would lead to many attempts at progressive reforms such as President Theodore Roosevelt's trust busting, the beginning of meat inspection, the first child labor laws, creation of the precursor of the Food and Drug Administration. The so-called Progressive Era was underway, but progress itself had been racing ahead for more than a century.

Boyce Rensberger retired to New Midway after more than 40 years as a science writer and editor, mostly for The New York Times and The Washington Post. Write him at boycerensberger@gmail.com.