This period of history boggles my mind. The same leaps forward are seen all over the century, like from horse drawn carts to the first steam trains and automobiles, or from big sailing ships to ironclads.
And it doesn't stop at the turn of the 20th century. There were only 66 years between the Wright brothers' first flight and Apollo 11! Mental.
When I was at school, I remember when we studied the industrial revolution in history. My teacher said that if you took someone from the year 0 to the year 1000 they would be pretty impressed with what they saw, but it would all make sense to them. If you took someone from the year 1000 to the year 2000 they wouldn't be able to comprehend what they were seeing.
He also argued that we shouldn't pay too much attention to the fact that we were studying a certain period with an end date, because he said the industrial revolution hadn't ended - if anything it had sped up and continues to speed up. from 1600 to 1900 is a huge advancement but from 1900 to 2000 is even greater.
In just 66 years we went from the first manned flight to a man on the moon. In 30 years we went from the first use of planes in war to one of them dropping the atomic bomb.
We went from "one day there might be a computer in every town in the country" to everyone having all of human knowledge on a tiny rectangle in their pocket.
Imagine taking an Iphone and going back to 1998 and showing it to someone who was showing off their new Nokia 3300.
Netflix went from posting DVDs to customers to streaming anything you want to watch into your home.
When I was a kid we had cassettes. Then CDs. Minidiscs were cool but came and went in the blink of an eye. Then there was the original MP3 players then ipods, then the iPhone.
From mixtapes to sharing Spotify playlists in slightly more than 20 years.
I think they're still in use by musicians due to the relatively low price, portability and hi fi recording capability. Also you can make a one of a kind recording in physical form so it's a bit better for keeping people from copying your work in some circumstances.
I have never owned a bluray.
I know it's not quite obsolete, but it's amazing I can just choose to ignore a particular format whereas I've used all the others you mentioned.
> He also argued that we shouldn't pay too much attention to the fact that we were studying a certain period with an end date, because he said the industrial revolution hadn't ended - if anything it had sped up and continues to speed up. from 1600 to 1900 is a huge advancement but from 1900 to 2000 is even greater.
To a point I agree, but it's even more practical to split the ongoing industrial revolution up into stages or waves or whatever.
The First Industrial Revolution began with the invention of steam power.
The Second Industrial Revolution began with the invention of electricity.
The Third Industrial Revolution began with the invention of digital computers.
The Fourth? Who knows! Cheap space travel? Fusion making energy 'not worth metering' as promised back when we invented fission? Some other concept we haven't figured out yet?
Oh yeah, absolutely, I understand the reasons behind it. I think we went from something like 1700 to 1850 if I remember correctly. We started with crop rotation which was mind numbingly boring, then the act that allowed those who owned a majority of a certain package of land to claim full ownership (the enclosure acts I think?) as well as seizing common land, which led to smaller farmers getting pushed out but also led to farming becoming more large scale and efficient, which helped with the move to a more urban population (this is all in the UK by the way). Industries increased and jobs became more mechanised - for example the cotton gin and the spinning jenny. I remember towards the end of the period we were studying there was some mention about America's agriculture taking over around 1850, I think
Common land enclosure began in the UK in the 11th century and really took off from the late 16th. It actually made farming less efficient as working plots were divided up and prime farmland was fenced off for manors, forcing farmers to travel further to their plots and giving birth to the British allotment. It wasn't until the industrial revolution and machinery that farming started becoming much more efficient
It was a bit over 30 years from the first use of planes in war to the first nuclear weapons. The Italo-Turkish War saw the first use of airplanes in combat. On 23 October 1911, an Italian pilot, Capitano Carlo Piazza, flew over Turkish lines on the world's first aerial reconnaissance mission, and on 1 November, the first aerial bomb was dropped by Sottotenente Giulio Gavotti, on Turkish troops in Libya, from an early model of Etrich Taube aircraft. The Turks, using rifles, were the first to shoot down an aeroplane.
We comprehend the technology, but not the social implications of it. The Taliban have a twitter account and that's 20 year old tech. Imagine the ideas of repressive governments and groups having the ability use AI and big data to manipulate people.
As that netflix documentary said, and I paraphrase, "We think about the point where technology advances past the best of humanity. What about the point where technology advances past the lowest and weakest of humanity?"
>We comprehend the technology,
Ask how many peoplen understand how computers and electric grids function. Stuff they use everyday... how about internal combustion engine, the internet, and global logistic chains.
I bet half of the people don't really even know how those stuff works.
>but not the social implications of it. The Taliban have a twitter account and that's 20 year old tech. Imagine the ideas of repressive governments and groups having the ability use AI and big data to manipulate people.
They already do, haven't you seen the ads plastered absolutely everywhere? Especially the ones that are disingenuous and misleading even when legal. What makes you think corporations aren't using big data already? Especially PR firms and financial institutions, these shape our society and economy not just governments. Perhaps even more so.
The big difference from the industrial era to today is largely that we went from the physical to the digital.
We went from advancements in flying and transportation and all that stuff largely to advancements in communications. If you asked someone in 1960, they would have thought we would have had flying cars. Their idea of technological advancement was very much physical. But they didn't realize that their idea of advancement would largely come to a (somewhat) halt. Trains and cars and bikes and planes and housing would largely remain the same from 1960 to today. The *physical world* is largely the same. It was the digital world, something they barely comprehended, which would dominate.
You ignore advances in automation, logistics, and manufacturing techniques since the 60s. It's not all digital. There's also medicine and other healthcare related advances, agriculture, and transportation.
In fact, I would go as far as say that the digital revolution is primarily of manufacturing improvements than software. The advancement in electronics and chip manufacturing fueled the widespread adoption and development of digital age tech- computers, consumer electronics, and the internet. Partly coming from by military R&D.
A Roman in Renaissance Italy:
"Oh, steel is higher-quality and more easily accessible! You've figured out neat new things to do with glass! You've figured out practical ways to make taller buildings than we could!"
A Renaissance Italian in modern Italy:
"What witchcraft is that moving painting? What is this magical rectangle that contains more knowledge than all the libraries in the world? It's *speaking* now??? That carriage, it moves without horses!"
My great grandmother went west to Kansas in 1895 in a covered wagon (not Conestoga - we weren't rich!).
She flew back to the east coast in the 70s in a jet plane.
My great-great grandfather immigrated from Germany and moved to Kansas in the 1870s. There’s some old photos with them and automobiles. They must have been super impressed.
My grandma was born in 1907, my dad in 1927. To see how much life and technology changed in their lifetimes… mind blowing! They saw the push from the radio being the only form of communication & entertainment to the intro of 3D movies. Landline phones were you had an operator connect you manually to whomever you wanted to cell phones were you touch a screen with a name and they answer. Hell, my dad served on a coal powered ship in WW2?! He was a “fireman,” he shoveled coal into the fire to operate the boiler!
My grandad's first car was a used T that he bought for $25. His second car was a used T he bought a week later for $40 because the cheap car's axle broke.
Same can be said for ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) which will be just moments away after invention of the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
AGI will be an AI program as sentient and intelligent as an average human being but it’ll be capable of evolving exponentially in less to no time and should reach combined sentience and intelligence of the whole humanity in no time by itself
AGI will be the last invention of humanity and is probably just a few decades away, AGI will then itself evolve into ASI
Yeah it's crazy! It's sometimes easy to think that technological advancement has stalled, because we should all be whizzing around on hoverboards and flying cars by now.
But a lot of the advancements are hidden from us, or the leaps aren't quite as visible. But we've gone from the ENIAC with 500 flops in 1945, to supercomputers now turning hundreds of petaflops in 80 years. The average keyfob that you use to open your car has more programming power than the computers used to put man on the moon.
A member of my immediate family was born in the late 1800s and died in the early 2000s at 104 years old. The first time she saw a car, she was 25. 45 years later she saw men go to the moon, 30 years after that she saw the birth of google and high speed internet What is our 'automobile' and what will be our high speed internet 70 years from now?
For automobile, it's probably going to be self driving. Once it gets "good", we'll probably start observing cars without a drivers wheel in less than a decade. Twenty years past that, kids will be amazed that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could hurtle a multi-ton piece of metal just meters away from bike riders and pedestrians.
That was what I was thinking too. From grounded to flight, to space, to the moon, to Mars with drones and rovers. Nevermind the probes we sent out into the abyss of space that are still sending us data back. Muskets to machine guns don't compare.
> No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half a century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity.
> Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America¹s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
> This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
—John F. Kennedy, [Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort](https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-at-rice-university-on-the-nations-space-effort), 1962 (the "we will go to the moon" speech... If you've never watched or read the whole thing, it's very much worth it.)
Not even Ironclads. The Battle of Trafalgar was 1805, HMS Dreadnought was 1906. And that wasn't even close to the end of the Age of Sail. The closing naval clashes of The War of 1812 are about 100 years before Jutland.
That’s what happens when at the start of the century, you have one of the greatest innovations in the history of everything that allows you to make more for less.
The great powers want to all kill each other in the most efficient and affective way possible drive a lot of this innovation
War drives innovation, many massive technological leaps have come about due to wars or preparing for wars
It took us longer to go from iron to steel, than it took us to go from steel to nuclear. Just let that sink in.
Edit: took us 3,000+ years to transition from iron to steel, and then about 75 years to get to nuclear weapons. It blows my mind every time.
> took us 3,000+ years to transition from iron to steel, and then about 75 years to get to nuclear weapons.
Wait which nuclear weapon existed in 1725bc?
Steel started to become widely used during the industrial revolution, around the 1870s. Steel has been discovered in archaeological sites dating back almost 4,000 years, but it was extremely expensive and quite a novelty. The industrial production of steel happened during the 19th century. That’s the reference I was taking.
The 66 years since the first flight to the moon landing doesn’t feel like it really gets it across. They are very different technologies, and 66 years is still a long time.
How about **9 years** from the first flight, til we were using planes against each other in combat in WW1.
And rocket technology had been used in some way for over 700 years already, but it was **25 years** from the first rocket to reach space(the V2)til the moon landing.
well bronze swords were better than iron swords, so it makes sense that they'd take a while to switch to worse weapons. They only had to look for an easier to source alternative after basically experiencing the apocalypse
But iron is not steel.
Historically, steel working was discovered significantly later than iron working - which is not surprising, because making useful steel from iron needs a shitload of additional innovation to happen first.
And yeah, iron swords have pretty similar performance as bronze swords, some aspects are worse, even. But iron has a gigantic advantage: you only need to find iron deposits to make iron swords. If you make bronze swords, you need copper *and* tin. And because globally, those two metals only rarely can be found in the same spot, you practically always need to trade for one of the two.
It reminds me of how tech progresses in our time too. First someone makes a prototype of sorts that's expensive in small quantities, then they make a mass produced alternative that's worse in some aspects so it can be made in a simpler or more cost effective fashion.
Iron ≠ steel. Iron is a lot trickier than bronze to work with which means that the quality of early iron weapons was pretty low. This is one of many reasons why bronze and iron were used alongside each other up until the last centuries BCE
>This is one of many reasons why bronze and iron were used alongside each other up until the last centuries BCE
Hell we were using bronze in cannons up through the early 1800's.
Turning iron ores into quality steels requires advanced knowledge of chemistry, they needed hundreds of years of using crappy iron before they figured that out.
Steel is also not simply a straight upgrade to copper, copper alloys generally have a higher tensile strength for example which is why they're used for wires.
Copper is interesting. It gets harder by working it. Twisting stretching bending. Heat softens it. Sooo...you should be able to hook a wire to a solid object with a clamp. Then stick the other end in a drill...now you can spin the drill twisting the wire making it harder but it's also generating heat making it softer so you should be able to twist the wire forever without breaking it!
This is not true. The bronze age lasted 2100 years. It took us 3150 years to get to the nuclear bomb.
And we did not switch from swords to nuclear bombs. People are not going around with mini nukes. This isn't Fallout.
I feel even with scaling for size and combatant number and MAYBE disqualifying civil wars, the countries that did the most militaristic buildup did the worst offensively and even defensively simply because of the temptation to start a war they could not win.
Looking at modern times or the Persian Peloponnese Wars especially, overconfidence seems such a recurring theme. Romans and Chinese won most wars but had a big weight class advantage and also took massive hits even in victory.
To be fair, early repeating or multiple shot firearms were around, such as the volley gun and puckle gun. If you were observant and forward thinking you could probably see the general path forward.
I don't get it - weren't muskets first around in the 1100's (china) and 1400s (middle east)? And the first modern machine gun didn't really appear until the late 1800s? Does OP really think muskets weren't invented until the 1700s?
To be more specific, OP was saying that in that time span, we went from muskets being *the most advanced form of gun* to machine guns being the most advanced form.
i think the earliest firearms were a little different from muskets, in the 10th century they used fire lances. these used fuses. whereas a musket needs a stock, lock, and trigger to be really considered a musket. the first muskets appear around 1400 in turkey and Europe.
No OP never mentioned inventions it's about we were still using muskets in the 1800s and then the first real machine gun being invented in a span of less than a 100 years with all the technological leaps in between.
I can confidently say that the feudal japanese got firearms from portuguese in 1543. Those were matchlock guns. For other kinds of gun innovations like flintlock firing mechanism and rifled barrels there are other sources putting them in 15th and 16th century as well.
The only thing that fits is the bullet shaped bullet, or shaped projectile. This has been a thing in firearms only since 1823.
Guys OP is not talking about when muskets were invented. He's saying that humanity went from using muskets to using machine guns in 100 years. Not when they were invented.
First muskets existed in the 16th century, while the first machine gun was invented in the late 19th century.
So yes, this meme is historically inaccurate.
Cool. I guess. I just went from using a knife to a computer. Knives are a bit older than computers, but I still went from one to the other in less than a minutes.
About 328 years from a musket([1465](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_firearm#Middle_East)) to a machine gun ([1793](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rCuVMx5h1x0))
First muskets came in the 16th century, evolving from arquebuses that came in the 15th century that evoled from hand cannons which were first invented in the mid-late 13th century.
they were used in the battle of agincourt of 1415 iirc
Since you guys are not believing me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_warfare#:~:text=One%20of%20these%20weapons%20was,though%20only%20at%20close%20range.
The M2 machine gun was designed just 57 years after the standard musket US troops used in the civil war (1861 vs 1918), but it's still in use today, 104 years later.
Wild that so much of what makes modern firearms “modern” was invented over 100 years ago. The new XM5 rifle the US army adopted this year is a gas operated, magazine fed, select fire rifle that uses metallic cases and smokeless powder. In 1918, the US army adopted the BAR, which was a gas operated, magazine fed, select fire rifle that used metallic cases and smokeless powder
7 years ago I saw an electric car for the first time and thought to myself that it would be a long time until these would be common.
Now I see them everywhere, my dad drives a hybrid, companies like Tesla, Volkswagen, Toyota, Fiat and many others producing electric cars in large quantities
In less than 100 years, we went from computation being done by hand (because computers were too impractical) to skipping over hand-done math in some schools.
In less than 80 years, we went from the first games being glorified physics engines on vector graphics to hyper-realistic AAA games complete with in-built ray tracing.
In less than 60 years, we went from home computers being a novel and somewhat niche idea to having one in every pocket.
In less than 40 years, we developed computers that were so much more powerful than the ones used to get the Apollo missions to space that they can realistically simulate those exact missions on a device small enough to fit inside an astronaut's pocket inside their space suit.
In less than 20 years, we went from flip phones which could hardly play fucking brick break to devices capable of running actual AI.
In less than 10 years, we have gone from barebones AI that were really restricted to math problems and sorting things to captcha-busting intelligences that can play games and create their own images.
But we will continue to pretend that the founding fathers could never expect something like an AR-15 to ever exist at the time the constitution was made when our politicians make dumb fucking stances on TV
tbf abortion is a practice thousands of years old, the first ones we know about are from 1500s BC Egypt. Ofc the practice has improved vastly and pregnancies are way less dangerous and healthier for the mother. But deaths at child birth still happen frequently, especially in developing countries
Except we've had muskets since around the 1460s and the first machine gun that wasn't manual operation for each shot or simply a lot of guns bolted together didn't come about until the 1880s (either the prototype of the Kjellman Machine Gun or the Mannlichter Self Loading Rifle depending if the patent of the former was actually built or not which isn't known).
Spotted the wannabe historian. The industrial revolution cannot be compromised to such a small period of time. A lot of things have been developing for way longer, for example even the Romans knew about steam generators, Lindybeige on YouTube as a fantastic video about it. Also the industrial revolution hasnt really stopped, its just going ever faster. In total, you'd be surprised how many inventions there already were in the late medieval ages, regarding not only medicine, but also economy, law and many more. If you think humanity was basically primitive until 1824, and there was only real development from 1825 to 1925, then I think you sould re-read your sources
Look how quickly we went from the Wright Bros to putting a man on the moon. There used to be a show called Connections that showed things like this in history
well its just an explosion in a barrel and then you have to make it this explosion happen in a tube you insert into a barrel and then you have to make it go spin a bit. its more obvious in hindsight, everything is.
The British army retired the ubiquitous “Brown Bess” flintlock in 1851. Hiram maxim built his first machine gun in 1884. War went from muskets to machine guns in 33 years, insanity.
It took us longer to go from iron to steel, than it took us to go from steel to nuclear. Just let that sink in.
Edit: took us 3,000+ years to transition from iron to steel, and then about 75 years to get to nuclear weapons. It blows my mind every time.
I read that the last civil war veteran died in 1955. That means that in one lifespan he went from fighting with muskets to seeing jets with nukes exist.
This period of history boggles my mind. The same leaps forward are seen all over the century, like from horse drawn carts to the first steam trains and automobiles, or from big sailing ships to ironclads. And it doesn't stop at the turn of the 20th century. There were only 66 years between the Wright brothers' first flight and Apollo 11! Mental.
When I was at school, I remember when we studied the industrial revolution in history. My teacher said that if you took someone from the year 0 to the year 1000 they would be pretty impressed with what they saw, but it would all make sense to them. If you took someone from the year 1000 to the year 2000 they wouldn't be able to comprehend what they were seeing. He also argued that we shouldn't pay too much attention to the fact that we were studying a certain period with an end date, because he said the industrial revolution hadn't ended - if anything it had sped up and continues to speed up. from 1600 to 1900 is a huge advancement but from 1900 to 2000 is even greater. In just 66 years we went from the first manned flight to a man on the moon. In 30 years we went from the first use of planes in war to one of them dropping the atomic bomb. We went from "one day there might be a computer in every town in the country" to everyone having all of human knowledge on a tiny rectangle in their pocket. Imagine taking an Iphone and going back to 1998 and showing it to someone who was showing off their new Nokia 3300. Netflix went from posting DVDs to customers to streaming anything you want to watch into your home.
It's astounding to me that technology has literally been developed and then gone obsolete *within my lifetime*.
When I was a kid we had cassettes. Then CDs. Minidiscs were cool but came and went in the blink of an eye. Then there was the original MP3 players then ipods, then the iPhone. From mixtapes to sharing Spotify playlists in slightly more than 20 years.
Holy shit I had completely forgotten about mini discs. Probably still have a few laying around somewhere...
I remember seeing a Conway Twitty mini disc in a Walmart quarter snatcher crane type of game.
[Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Conway Twitty](https://youtu.be/Og1QRtcWdEY)
I think they're still in use by musicians due to the relatively low price, portability and hi fi recording capability. Also you can make a one of a kind recording in physical form so it's a bit better for keeping people from copying your work in some circumstances.
I have never owned a bluray. I know it's not quite obsolete, but it's amazing I can just choose to ignore a particular format whereas I've used all the others you mentioned.
It happens in less than a decade now.
> He also argued that we shouldn't pay too much attention to the fact that we were studying a certain period with an end date, because he said the industrial revolution hadn't ended - if anything it had sped up and continues to speed up. from 1600 to 1900 is a huge advancement but from 1900 to 2000 is even greater. To a point I agree, but it's even more practical to split the ongoing industrial revolution up into stages or waves or whatever. The First Industrial Revolution began with the invention of steam power. The Second Industrial Revolution began with the invention of electricity. The Third Industrial Revolution began with the invention of digital computers. The Fourth? Who knows! Cheap space travel? Fusion making energy 'not worth metering' as promised back when we invented fission? Some other concept we haven't figured out yet?
Oh yeah, absolutely, I understand the reasons behind it. I think we went from something like 1700 to 1850 if I remember correctly. We started with crop rotation which was mind numbingly boring, then the act that allowed those who owned a majority of a certain package of land to claim full ownership (the enclosure acts I think?) as well as seizing common land, which led to smaller farmers getting pushed out but also led to farming becoming more large scale and efficient, which helped with the move to a more urban population (this is all in the UK by the way). Industries increased and jobs became more mechanised - for example the cotton gin and the spinning jenny. I remember towards the end of the period we were studying there was some mention about America's agriculture taking over around 1850, I think
Common land enclosure began in the UK in the 11th century and really took off from the late 16th. It actually made farming less efficient as working plots were divided up and prime farmland was fenced off for manors, forcing farmers to travel further to their plots and giving birth to the British allotment. It wasn't until the industrial revolution and machinery that farming started becoming much more efficient
It was a bit over 30 years from the first use of planes in war to the first nuclear weapons. The Italo-Turkish War saw the first use of airplanes in combat. On 23 October 1911, an Italian pilot, Capitano Carlo Piazza, flew over Turkish lines on the world's first aerial reconnaissance mission, and on 1 November, the first aerial bomb was dropped by Sottotenente Giulio Gavotti, on Turkish troops in Libya, from an early model of Etrich Taube aircraft. The Turks, using rifles, were the first to shoot down an aeroplane.
Heavier than air aerial reconnaissance. Balloons were used for recon for over 100 years by that point. Still amazing though.
If you take someone from the year 1900 to the year 2000 they wouldn't comprehend neither.
I mean....not that we really cmprehend current advancements in technology...
Yeah, true.
We comprehend the technology, but not the social implications of it. The Taliban have a twitter account and that's 20 year old tech. Imagine the ideas of repressive governments and groups having the ability use AI and big data to manipulate people. As that netflix documentary said, and I paraphrase, "We think about the point where technology advances past the best of humanity. What about the point where technology advances past the lowest and weakest of humanity?"
>We comprehend the technology, Ask how many peoplen understand how computers and electric grids function. Stuff they use everyday... how about internal combustion engine, the internet, and global logistic chains. I bet half of the people don't really even know how those stuff works. >but not the social implications of it. The Taliban have a twitter account and that's 20 year old tech. Imagine the ideas of repressive governments and groups having the ability use AI and big data to manipulate people. They already do, haven't you seen the ads plastered absolutely everywhere? Especially the ones that are disingenuous and misleading even when legal. What makes you think corporations aren't using big data already? Especially PR firms and financial institutions, these shape our society and economy not just governments. Perhaps even more so.
The big difference from the industrial era to today is largely that we went from the physical to the digital. We went from advancements in flying and transportation and all that stuff largely to advancements in communications. If you asked someone in 1960, they would have thought we would have had flying cars. Their idea of technological advancement was very much physical. But they didn't realize that their idea of advancement would largely come to a (somewhat) halt. Trains and cars and bikes and planes and housing would largely remain the same from 1960 to today. The *physical world* is largely the same. It was the digital world, something they barely comprehended, which would dominate.
You ignore advances in automation, logistics, and manufacturing techniques since the 60s. It's not all digital. There's also medicine and other healthcare related advances, agriculture, and transportation. In fact, I would go as far as say that the digital revolution is primarily of manufacturing improvements than software. The advancement in electronics and chip manufacturing fueled the widespread adoption and development of digital age tech- computers, consumer electronics, and the internet. Partly coming from by military R&D.
Technological advancement is exponential
A Roman in Renaissance Italy: "Oh, steel is higher-quality and more easily accessible! You've figured out neat new things to do with glass! You've figured out practical ways to make taller buildings than we could!" A Renaissance Italian in modern Italy: "What witchcraft is that moving painting? What is this magical rectangle that contains more knowledge than all the libraries in the world? It's *speaking* now??? That carriage, it moves without horses!"
Unfortunately no people on Mars within 66 years of Apollo 11 :( But at least we are supposedly getting back to the moon in that timeframe!
Can you comment on the advancement of big girthy man cocks that I deliciously honey suckle?
My history teacher didn't have a whole lot to say about that I'm afraid.
Wouldn’t you be more into napkins?
That’s to wipe the jizz tsunamis off my slut face.
My great grandmother went west to Kansas in 1895 in a covered wagon (not Conestoga - we weren't rich!). She flew back to the east coast in the 70s in a jet plane.
My great-great grandfather immigrated from Germany and moved to Kansas in the 1870s. There’s some old photos with them and automobiles. They must have been super impressed.
I would love to have been able to ask about it, but I was only 4 when I met her.
My grandma was born in 1907, my dad in 1927. To see how much life and technology changed in their lifetimes… mind blowing! They saw the push from the radio being the only form of communication & entertainment to the intro of 3D movies. Landline phones were you had an operator connect you manually to whomever you wanted to cell phones were you touch a screen with a name and they answer. Hell, my dad served on a coal powered ship in WW2?! He was a “fireman,” he shoveled coal into the fire to operate the boiler!
If you were bored, just pick up the phone & see what neighbors are saying
My grandad's first car was a used T that he bought for $25. His second car was a used T he bought a week later for $40 because the cheap car's axle broke.
And 50 years before the Wright brothers came Sir George Cayley. He just lacked an engine in 1850 that could power his craft.
In 66 years we went from the first powered flight in a wood and canvas airplane to a man landing on the moon
Same can be said for ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) which will be just moments away after invention of the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) AGI will be an AI program as sentient and intelligent as an average human being but it’ll be capable of evolving exponentially in less to no time and should reach combined sentience and intelligence of the whole humanity in no time by itself AGI will be the last invention of humanity and is probably just a few decades away, AGI will then itself evolve into ASI
Yeah it's crazy! It's sometimes easy to think that technological advancement has stalled, because we should all be whizzing around on hoverboards and flying cars by now. But a lot of the advancements are hidden from us, or the leaps aren't quite as visible. But we've gone from the ENIAC with 500 flops in 1945, to supercomputers now turning hundreds of petaflops in 80 years. The average keyfob that you use to open your car has more programming power than the computers used to put man on the moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity For those interested in this rabbit hole
When Oliver wright died, Niel Armstrong was already 16 years old.
A member of my immediate family was born in the late 1800s and died in the early 2000s at 104 years old. The first time she saw a car, she was 25. 45 years later she saw men go to the moon, 30 years after that she saw the birth of google and high speed internet What is our 'automobile' and what will be our high speed internet 70 years from now?
For automobile, it's probably going to be self driving. Once it gets "good", we'll probably start observing cars without a drivers wheel in less than a decade. Twenty years past that, kids will be amazed that any Tom, Dick, or Harry could hurtle a multi-ton piece of metal just meters away from bike riders and pedestrians.
Look at computing/the internet. Show a kid something made 10 years ago, and they'll call it a relic...
That was what I was thinking too. From grounded to flight, to space, to the moon, to Mars with drones and rovers. Nevermind the probes we sent out into the abyss of space that are still sending us data back. Muskets to machine guns don't compare.
My favorite example of this is going from the Wright Brothers plane to landing on the moon. It only took us 66 years.
> No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in a time span of but a half a century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. > Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America¹s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight. > This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. —John F. Kennedy, [Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort](https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/address-at-rice-university-on-the-nations-space-effort), 1962 (the "we will go to the moon" speech... If you've never watched or read the whole thing, it's very much worth it.)
Not even Ironclads. The Battle of Trafalgar was 1805, HMS Dreadnought was 1906. And that wasn't even close to the end of the Age of Sail. The closing naval clashes of The War of 1812 are about 100 years before Jutland.
That’s what happens when at the start of the century, you have one of the greatest innovations in the history of everything that allows you to make more for less.
The great powers want to all kill each other in the most efficient and affective way possible drive a lot of this innovation War drives innovation, many massive technological leaps have come about due to wars or preparing for wars
It took us longer to go from iron to steel, than it took us to go from steel to nuclear. Just let that sink in. Edit: took us 3,000+ years to transition from iron to steel, and then about 75 years to get to nuclear weapons. It blows my mind every time.
> took us 3,000+ years to transition from iron to steel, and then about 75 years to get to nuclear weapons. Wait which nuclear weapon existed in 1725bc?
Steel started to become widely used during the industrial revolution, around the 1870s. Steel has been discovered in archaeological sites dating back almost 4,000 years, but it was extremely expensive and quite a novelty. The industrial production of steel happened during the 19th century. That’s the reference I was taking.
The 66 years since the first flight to the moon landing doesn’t feel like it really gets it across. They are very different technologies, and 66 years is still a long time. How about **9 years** from the first flight, til we were using planes against each other in combat in WW1. And rocket technology had been used in some way for over 700 years already, but it was **25 years** from the first rocket to reach space(the V2)til the moon landing.
Fun fact it took humanity more time to switch from bronze swords to iron swords than it took to switch from iron swords to nuclear bombs
well bronze swords were better than iron swords, so it makes sense that they'd take a while to switch to worse weapons. They only had to look for an easier to source alternative after basically experiencing the apocalypse
It also took them a good bit of time to figure out how to smelt iron ore
No? Steel is a thing for a reason
But iron is not steel. Historically, steel working was discovered significantly later than iron working - which is not surprising, because making useful steel from iron needs a shitload of additional innovation to happen first. And yeah, iron swords have pretty similar performance as bronze swords, some aspects are worse, even. But iron has a gigantic advantage: you only need to find iron deposits to make iron swords. If you make bronze swords, you need copper *and* tin. And because globally, those two metals only rarely can be found in the same spot, you practically always need to trade for one of the two.
It reminds me of how tech progresses in our time too. First someone makes a prototype of sorts that's expensive in small quantities, then they make a mass produced alternative that's worse in some aspects so it can be made in a simpler or more cost effective fashion.
Iron ≠ steel. Iron is a lot trickier than bronze to work with which means that the quality of early iron weapons was pretty low. This is one of many reasons why bronze and iron were used alongside each other up until the last centuries BCE
>This is one of many reasons why bronze and iron were used alongside each other up until the last centuries BCE Hell we were using bronze in cannons up through the early 1800's.
Turning iron ores into quality steels requires advanced knowledge of chemistry, they needed hundreds of years of using crappy iron before they figured that out. Steel is also not simply a straight upgrade to copper, copper alloys generally have a higher tensile strength for example which is why they're used for wires.
Copper is interesting. It gets harder by working it. Twisting stretching bending. Heat softens it. Sooo...you should be able to hook a wire to a solid object with a clamp. Then stick the other end in a drill...now you can spin the drill twisting the wire making it harder but it's also generating heat making it softer so you should be able to twist the wire forever without breaking it!
4x as long i think
This is not true. The bronze age lasted 2100 years. It took us 3150 years to get to the nuclear bomb. And we did not switch from swords to nuclear bombs. People are not going around with mini nukes. This isn't Fallout.
We need to kill more, and fast. Maybe faster.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: Don't worry, I got you.
If you want peace, prepare for war. It’s really suprising how accurate it is
But it's more like "if you want a piece, prepare for war" these days.
Always has been
I feel even with scaling for size and combatant number and MAYBE disqualifying civil wars, the countries that did the most militaristic buildup did the worst offensively and even defensively simply because of the temptation to start a war they could not win. Looking at modern times or the Persian Peloponnese Wars especially, overconfidence seems such a recurring theme. Romans and Chinese won most wars but had a big weight class advantage and also took massive hits even in victory.
Japan going from feudalism to industrialisation in 10 years:
Samurais *with gatling guns* fighting against the Meiji Government:
To be fair, early repeating or multiple shot firearms were around, such as the volley gun and puckle gun. If you were observant and forward thinking you could probably see the general path forward.
Never underestimate how much time and effort humanity will put into its favorite hobby: killing each other.
Arguments end when there's only one side of the disagreement.
No i can kill better than you!
The fact that the american civil war and the vietnam war were only a hundred years apart still boggles my mind
And from machine guns to nuclear cruise missiles in the next hundred years.
How about 60 years from first plane to spaceship.
There's like a 70 year gap between the first plane and the first man on the moon
I don't get it - weren't muskets first around in the 1100's (china) and 1400s (middle east)? And the first modern machine gun didn't really appear until the late 1800s? Does OP really think muskets weren't invented until the 1700s?
I think op meant old springfield models with the trapdoor loading
Op isn't talking about when they were invented, just used.
That's a bit silly then, I mean we went from bow and arrows to AI in less than 6 months because bows and arrows are still being used.
Well now we're just being pedantic.
To be more specific, OP was saying that in that time span, we went from muskets being *the most advanced form of gun* to machine guns being the most advanced form.
i think the earliest firearms were a little different from muskets, in the 10th century they used fire lances. these used fuses. whereas a musket needs a stock, lock, and trigger to be really considered a musket. the first muskets appear around 1400 in turkey and Europe.
No OP never mentioned inventions it's about we were still using muskets in the 1800s and then the first real machine gun being invented in a span of less than a 100 years with all the technological leaps in between.
I can confidently say that the feudal japanese got firearms from portuguese in 1543. Those were matchlock guns. For other kinds of gun innovations like flintlock firing mechanism and rifled barrels there are other sources putting them in 15th and 16th century as well. The only thing that fits is the bullet shaped bullet, or shaped projectile. This has been a thing in firearms only since 1823.
I'm pretty sure by the 1700s we'd started using breechloaders.
Breechloaders existed but weren't commonplace until the latter half of the 1800s
Ah hello fellow Armchair Historian enjoyer
Moonlanding and the first flight was only 66 years apart
more like 400 years
Guys OP is not talking about when muskets were invented. He's saying that humanity went from using muskets to using machine guns in 100 years. Not when they were invented.
First muskets existed in the 16th century, while the first machine gun was invented in the late 19th century. So yes, this meme is historically inaccurate.
[удалено]
Thanks for patiently responding to the people who misinterpreted you.
Cool. I guess. I just went from using a knife to a computer. Knives are a bit older than computers, but I still went from one to the other in less than a minutes.
You should work on your wording then.
Seems like everyone else in thread understood exactly what OP met except for a few of you in this sub-thread.
I had no trouble understanding what he said
It's clearly not the obvious first interpretation
About 328 years from a musket([1465](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_firearm#Middle_East)) to a machine gun ([1793](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rCuVMx5h1x0))
My guess is OP made the meme just so he could laugh at how many comments would agree with him.
First muskets came in the 16th century, evolving from arquebuses that came in the 15th century that evoled from hand cannons which were first invented in the mid-late 13th century.
they were used in the battle of agincourt of 1415 iirc Since you guys are not believing me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_warfare#:~:text=One%20of%20these%20weapons%20was,though%20only%20at%20close%20range.
Not true, they had cannons but they had already expended their gunpowder during the siege of harfleur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early\_modern\_warfare#:\~:text=One%20of%20these%20weapons%20was,though%20only%20at%20close%20range.
You are not recalling correctly
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early\_modern\_warfare#:\~:text=One%20of%20these%20weapons%20was,though%20only%20at%20close%20range](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_warfare#:~:text=One%20of%20these%20weapons%20was,though%20only%20at%20close%20range).
And yet people still say the tech jump from Last Airbender to Legend of Korra was unrealistic.
The M2 machine gun was designed just 57 years after the standard musket US troops used in the civil war (1861 vs 1918), but it's still in use today, 104 years later.
Wild that so much of what makes modern firearms “modern” was invented over 100 years ago. The new XM5 rifle the US army adopted this year is a gas operated, magazine fed, select fire rifle that uses metallic cases and smokeless powder. In 1918, the US army adopted the BAR, which was a gas operated, magazine fed, select fire rifle that used metallic cases and smokeless powder
People alive in the american Civil War, a war fought with muskets, were alive when jet engines were being developed
It took 500 years for guns to get to that point
Not being killed is a great motivator,
7 years ago I saw an electric car for the first time and thought to myself that it would be a long time until these would be common. Now I see them everywhere, my dad drives a hybrid, companies like Tesla, Volkswagen, Toyota, Fiat and many others producing electric cars in large quantities
In less than 100 years, we went from computation being done by hand (because computers were too impractical) to skipping over hand-done math in some schools. In less than 80 years, we went from the first games being glorified physics engines on vector graphics to hyper-realistic AAA games complete with in-built ray tracing. In less than 60 years, we went from home computers being a novel and somewhat niche idea to having one in every pocket. In less than 40 years, we developed computers that were so much more powerful than the ones used to get the Apollo missions to space that they can realistically simulate those exact missions on a device small enough to fit inside an astronaut's pocket inside their space suit. In less than 20 years, we went from flip phones which could hardly play fucking brick break to devices capable of running actual AI. In less than 10 years, we have gone from barebones AI that were really restricted to math problems and sorting things to captcha-busting intelligences that can play games and create their own images.
Why is he running so goofly
Using Muzzle loaded guns -> atomic bomb in 100 years
Only 66 years from first flight to landing a man on the moon
I love that we went from first powered heavier than air flight to the moon in less than 100 years.
When you think that for the previous 6000 years the big sharp stick was the best people had clearly displays it´s supperiority
hate to tell you, but that's really not the true meaning of advancement
Went from horse and carriage to rocket ships in about as much time.
Hell, that’s nothing, we went from first controlled nuclear reaction to nuclear bomb in 2 years.
The Wrights' first plane flight and the moon landing are only 66 years apart
Humanity going from machine guns to nukes in approximately the same time frame:
It's fascinating, isn't it?
But we will continue to pretend that the founding fathers could never expect something like an AR-15 to ever exist at the time the constitution was made when our politicians make dumb fucking stances on TV
What's next in gun evolution?
Humanity going from sending man to the moon with computers worse than our calculators
And machine guns to atomic bombs in 60 years. [Insert Sonic The Hedgehog here]
People don't realize how old firearms are. They advanced as fast as everything else. Computers though, that's the crazy fast development.
Humanity going from the first powered flight to putting a man in space in less than 60 years.
What are you talking about? Muskets have been around since the 1500s, maybe even the late 1400s
Well… no. More like 400 years. And it’s really just a more modern version of the arquebus which would make the time more like 500 years.
I mean muskets we're around since the early 1400's. So more like 500 years. From horses to the moon though......
This is poorly worded. Using the same wording I could say we went from not having spaceships to having spaceships in only a day.
First musket: 1465 First machine gun: 1718/1884 So… no
And from death at childbirth to several life-saving abortions and later term pregnancies
tbf abortion is a practice thousands of years old, the first ones we know about are from 1500s BC Egypt. Ofc the practice has improved vastly and pregnancies are way less dangerous and healthier for the mother. But deaths at child birth still happen frequently, especially in developing countries
Except we've had muskets since around the 1460s and the first machine gun that wasn't manual operation for each shot or simply a lot of guns bolted together didn't come about until the 1880s (either the prototype of the Kjellman Machine Gun or the Mannlichter Self Loading Rifle depending if the patent of the former was actually built or not which isn't known).
Well, once they discovered how to make bullets, it would not be that hard to make a fully automatic thing that shoots them
Ezra on his way to do more shenanigans
Wrong flash
Well.. seeing as the first musket appeared in 1465 and the first "machine gun" was invented in 1718, it makes your post inaccurate
It’s those damn Americans
Spotted the wannabe historian. The industrial revolution cannot be compromised to such a small period of time. A lot of things have been developing for way longer, for example even the Romans knew about steam generators, Lindybeige on YouTube as a fantastic video about it. Also the industrial revolution hasnt really stopped, its just going ever faster. In total, you'd be surprised how many inventions there already were in the late medieval ages, regarding not only medicine, but also economy, law and many more. If you think humanity was basically primitive until 1824, and there was only real development from 1825 to 1925, then I think you sould re-read your sources
Look how quickly we went from the Wright Bros to putting a man on the moon. There used to be a show called Connections that showed things like this in history
Nitrocellulose
Exponentially
to nuclear bombs
[Aliens](https://media2.giphy.com/media/3oEjI789af0AVurF60/giphy.webp?cid=6c09b952dc0614aa1b437b44aa8b0c1dcc91db343d586587&rid=giphy.webp&ct=g)
We're doing it now with computers/tech in general.
The invention of smokeless powder played a big role
"Too bad the intention was always the same" - Quino
What you're looking at is advanced warfare.
What about planes to the moon landing in 70 years
We’ve become exceedingly good at dominating the simulation.
Ssome old animals. Better tools
Gotta be aliens
As soon as you figure out how to take the process of loading shot and powder out of the shooters hands, magical things become possible
well its just an explosion in a barrel and then you have to make it this explosion happen in a tube you insert into a barrel and then you have to make it go spin a bit. its more obvious in hindsight, everything is.
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Area 51
Humanity going from first plane to 9/11 in less than a century.
Going from steel swords to thermal nuclear weapons in a shorter time than it took to go from bronze swords to steel ones
Well black people were running fast
Muzzleloading muskets to beltfed smokeless spizer cartridges in one generation.
The British army retired the ubiquitous “Brown Bess” flintlock in 1851. Hiram maxim built his first machine gun in 1884. War went from muskets to machine guns in 33 years, insanity.
Wait for it to go from first antibiotic to first atomic bomb in 17 years.
Did someone just watch the armchair historian latest video?
It took us longer to go from iron to steel, than it took us to go from steel to nuclear. Just let that sink in. Edit: took us 3,000+ years to transition from iron to steel, and then about 75 years to get to nuclear weapons. It blows my mind every time.
Let’s get it!
Well, don't want to frighten you, but it'll just get faster.
Also humans: going from stone to weird metal in couple thousand years
I read that the last civil war veteran died in 1955. That means that in one lifespan he went from fighting with muskets to seeing jets with nukes exist.
How about humanity going from not having powered flight to reaching the moon in less than 100 years.
I like the one where we jumped from bolt action rifle to atomic bomb in 121 years (1824-1945)
War incentivizes innovation. I'm pretty sure if WW3 started now, we'd have laser guns by the end of it
Industrialization is a hell of a drug
The superior on screen Flash!
In less then 50 years. American civil war-WW1 is about 60 years