Technological change sometimes seems to be the sudden appearance of a new device or chemical, transforming human behavior. But things rarely happen that way. Consider antibiotics. To individuals, their availability after the Second World War was often miraculous. Even the wealthiest families lost members to bacteria that are now routinely treatable; the namesake of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation was a student, about to enter Harvard, who died of a mastoid infection. Yet medical historians and demographers have noted a remarkably smooth downward slope in mortality from tuberculosis before a dramatic further plunge after the Second World War. The greatest reduction had already occurred before the introduction of penicillin. Gradual improvements in hygiene and living standards, and older therapies, had been saving lives quietly.
In fact, nearly always with new technologies, there’s a period of gradual change that can be harder to document than, say, patent filings. Take the introduction of eyeglasses in the later 13th century. It’s significant that they appeared in Northern Italy, with a high concentration of merchants as well as clerics. Here was the first market of people with the means to pay for skilled optical work that let them continue making money into middle age. The fact that we don’t have a name of the inventor suggests that a number of craftsmen were developing spectacles at the same time for this market. And at least some students of the history of optical technology believe that medieval illuminators and other artisans may have been using magnifiers that remained trade secrets; at least the level of detail of some late medieval illuminations would have been hard to achieve with the naked eye.
Look ahead a few centuries for what is still the paradigm of technological revolutions, printing from movable type. Historians of the book have been documenting the flourishing academic manuscript market of the late Middle Ages that rationalized the copying of texts for scholars and students. Carefully proofread master manuscripts (called exemplars) were divided into parts and lent to networks of scribes. Considering that the investment in printed books was costly–cutting punches, casting type, building presses and making paper by hand–there had to be a large existing market of readers. (Scribes had originally developed the “black letter” or “textura” face used by Gutenberg, not as the quaint relic it now seems, but as a modern time- and parchment-saving innovation lending itself to abbreviation.) And printing did not end manuscript book production; collections like the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington have many works that still circulated in manuscript into the 17th century. Up to a point, copying a number of books by hand took less work than setting a text for a printing press and returning every piece of type to its compartment. Similarly, Roman numerals were not banished instantly by the Hindu-Arabic numbers now in universal use. The Roman system was actually efficient when deployed on a Western-style abacus; indeed the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in England is named for such a counting board. Ultimately teachers of mathematics developed efficient pen-and-paper calculating techniques, but for everyday life (as opposed to science and wholesale commerce) Roman numerals remained practical for many people.
By the time inventors of sewing machine improvements combined patents and brought the first practical machines to market, U.S. entrepreneurs were already producing ready-to-wear clothing on an industrial scale, advertising in New York for up to 1,200 sewers at a time in the 1830s, although home labor rather than industrial workshops was the rule. The sewing machine was as much the product of the rise of a garment industry as a cause. There had to be enough potential customers to justify formidable legal expenses and tooling.
While a number of other European and American inventors were developing light bulbs at the same time, Thomas Edison succeeded in part because his conception of electric illumination was so deliberately conservative rather than revolutionary, based on familiar technology of gas distribution. Illumination of an early bulb matched that of a gas jet, about 20 or 25 watts, as I saw personally when appearing in a documentary about Edison taped about 10 years ago in part at the former Gage and Tollner restaurant in Brooklyn, which had kept its old gas system. Edison’s central stations and household meters were also based on gas distribution practice.
The American automobile industry also sprang from a well-established and flourishing structural pattern. The U.S. rail network, with competing routes between major cities and spotty service outside these lines, left many gaps that had to be filled by horse-drawn transport, and legions of urban horses were creating a noisome public health crisis. And while the automobile rapidly ended the carriage market, it was rooted in it. Before founding General Motors, William C. Durant of Flint, Mich., headed America’s largest manufacturer of carriages, with coast-to-coast distribution and the same strategy of multiple lines and price points later associated with his successor at G.M., Alfred P. Sloan. (Durant’s company produced 150,000 carriages a year at the turn of the century.) Meanwhile the rise of recreational bicycling not only helped develop vital parts like ball bearings; it also stimulated legislation for improved roads that ultimately benefited the automotive industry.
And what of the Internet? It only ratified and further amplified social changes apparent in the mainframe years of the 1960s and 1970s: the fragmentation of former newspaper, magazine and network television markets into special interests, abetted by cable, computerized direct-mail marketing and targeted catalogues: L.L. Bean and The
What’s coming next? I can’t say. But when it arrives, I’m certain we’ll be able to look back to 2009 and find that it was already apparent.
Edward Tenner is a visiting scholar in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information and the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center. He is the author of Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, Our Own Devices and is working on a new book on positive unintended consequences.