by Vaclav Smil
Creating the Twentieth Century
Creating the Twentieth Century
Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact
Vaclav Smil
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smil, Vaclav.
Creating the twentieth century : technical innovations of 1867–1914 and their lasting
impact / Vaclav Smil.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-516874-4
ISBN: 0-19-516874-7
1. Technological innovations—History—19th century. 2. Technological
innovations—History—20th century. I. Title.
T173.8.S615 2004
609’.034—dc22 2004054757
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Preface
This book has been on my mind for more than three decades. My first musings about the technically exceptional nature of the two pre-WWI generations go back to the late 1960s, before Eva and I escaped from a newly invaded province of the Soviet Empire to Pennsylvanian ridge and valley countryside. I worked on some of its topics (for other publications) during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, and I finally began to write it in 2002. In the words that my favorite composer used in dedicating his quartets, it is the result of lunga, e laboriosa fattica—and yet I wish that the task could continue. I have a selfish and an objective reason for this: further immersion in the world of pre-WWI innovations would bring more revelations, surprises, and confirmations, and I would also like more space as there are many topics that I addressed only cursorily, many reflections and considerations that I had to leave out. At the same time, I have always followed Faraday’s great dictum—work, finish, publish—and so here is my incomplete and imperfect story of one of the greatest adventures in history, my homage to the creators of a new world.
My great intellectual debt to hundreds of historians, engineers, and economists without whose penetrative work this volume could not have been written is obvious, and I must thank Douglas Fast for completing the unusually challenging job of preparing more than 120 images that are an integral part of this book. And I offer no apologies for what some may see as too many numbers: without quantification, there is no real appreciation of the era’s fundamental and speedy achievements and of the true magnitude of its accomplishments. Metric system and scientific units and prefixes (listed and defined below) are used throughout. Finally, what not to expect. This is neither a world history of the two pre-WWI generations seen through a prism of technical innovations nor an economic history of the period written with an engineering slant.
The book is not intended to be either an extended argument for technical determinism in human affairs or an uncritical exaltation of an era. I am quite content to leave its genre undefined: it is simply an attempt to tell a story of amazing changes, of the greatest discontinuity in history, and to do so from a multitude of perspectives in order to bring out the uniqueness of the period and to be reminded of the lasting debt we owe to those who invented the fundamentals of the modern world. Or, to paraphrase Braudel’s (1950) remarks offered in a different context, I do not seek a philosophy of this great discontinuity but rather its multiple illumination.
Contents
Units and Abbreviations
1 The Great Inheritance
2 The Age of Electricity
3 Internal Combustion Engines
4 New Materials and New Syntheses
5 Communication and Information
6 A New Civilization
7 Contemporary Perceptions
References
Name Index
Subject Index
Units and Abbreviations
1
The Great Inheritance
“You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert
one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted…”
“Is not that a rather large thing to expect us to begin
upon?” said Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.
“I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without
reasonable ground for it. You will soon admit as much as I
need from you…”
H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1894)
Imagine an exceedingly sapient and durable civilization that began scanning a bubble of space, say 100 light years in diameter, for signs of intelligent life about half a billion years ago. Its principal surveillance techniques look for any emissions of organized electromagnetic radiation as opposed to the radio frequencies emitted from stars or light that originates from natural combustion of carbon compounds (wildfires) or from lightning. For half a billion years its probes that roam the interstellar space have nothing to report from nine planets
FRONTISPIECE 1. Technical advances that began to unfold during the two pre-WWI generations and that created the civilization of the 20th century resulted in the first truly global human impacts. Some of these are detectable from space, and nighttime images of Earth (here the Americas in the year 2000) are perhaps the most dramatic way to show this unprecedented change. Before 1880 the entire continents were as dark as the heart of Amazon remains today. This image is based on NASA’s composite available at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html. that revolve around an unremarkable star located three-fifths of the way from the center of an ordinary-looking spiral galaxy that moves inexorably on a collision course with one of its neighbors. And then, suddenly, parts of that star system’s third planet begin to light up, and shortly afterward they begin to transmit coherent signals as two kinds of radiation emanating from Earth’s surface provide evidence of intelligent life.
A closer approach of the probes would reveal an organized pattern of nighttime radiation in the visible (400-700 nm) and near-infrared (700-1,500 nm) part of the electromagnetic spectrum produced by electric lights whose density is highest in the planet’s most affluent and heavily populated regions (see the frontispiece to this chapter). And from scores of light years away one can detect a growing multitude of narrow-band, pulsed, modulated signals in frequencies ranging from less than 30 kHz (very low radio band) to more than 1 GHz (radar bands). These signals have their origins in fundamental scientific and technical advances of the 1880s and 1890s, that is, in the invention of durable incandescent electric lights, in the introduction of commercial generation and transmission of electricity, in pro
duction and detection of Hertzian waves, and in the first tentative wireless broadcasts. And all of these capabilities became considerably developed and commercialized before WWI.
That was the time when the modern world was created, when the greatest technical discontinuity in history took place. This conclusion defies the common perception of the 20th century as the period of unprecedented technical advances that originated in systematic scientific research and whose aggressive deployment and commercialization brought profound economic, social, and environmental transformations on scales ranging from local to global. The last two decades of the 20th century witnessed an enormous expansion of increasingly more affordable and more powerful computing and of instantaneous access to the globe-spanning World Wide Web, and they have been singled out as a particularly remarkable break with the past. This is as expected according to those who maintain that the evolution of our technical abilities is an inherently accelerating process (Turney 1999; Kurzweil 1990).
This common impression of accelerating technical innovation seems to be borne out by a number of exponential trends, perhaps most notably by the fact that the number of transistors per microchip has been doubling approximately every 18 months since 1972. This trend, known as Moore’s law, was predicted in 1965 by Intel’s cofounder, and it continues despite repeated forecasts of its imminent demise (Intel 2003; Moore 1965). In 1972 Intel’s 8008 chip had 2,500 transistors; a decade later there were more than 100,000 components on a single memory microchip; by 1989 the total surpassed 1 million, and by the year 2000 the Pentium 4 processor had 42 million transistors (figure 1.1).
Given these realities, it is not surprising that many people believe that this acceleration has already amounted to a technical revolution that had ushered in the age of the New Economy dependent on machines capable of extending, multiplying, and leveraging our mental abilities (Banks 2001; Litan and Rivlin 2001; Donovan 1997; Kurzweil 1990). As a result, it is only a matter of time, perhaps as early as 2040, before the thinking machines cut loose, develop hyperintelligence, and engineer our demise (Moravec 1999; Kurzweil 1999). Younger readers of this book will have a chance to verify the fate of this charming forecast, but my concern is with the past—and here the verdict is clear: those commonly held perceptions of accelerating innovation are ahistorical, myopic perspectives proffered by the zealots of electronic faith, by the true believers in artificial intelligence, e-life forms, and spiritual machines.
FIGURE 1.1. Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder and later the chairman of Intel Corporation, predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every year. Later he revised the rate to every 18 months, and the actual doubling time between 1971 and 2001 was almost exactly two years. This rate is not based on any laws of physics, and it can continue for years, but not for decades. Plotted from data in Moore (1965) and Intel (2003).
One of the best quantitative confirmations of this judgment concludes unequivocally that the New Economy has not measured up to the truly great inventions of the past (Gordon 2000). Indubitably, the 20th century was exceedingly rich in innovations and microelectronics has expanded immensely our capacities for problem analysis and information transfer. And yet many techniques whose everyday use keeps defining and shaping the modern civilization had not undergone any fundamental change during the course of the 20th century. Their qualitative gains (higher efficiency, increased reliability, greater convenience of their use, lower specific pollution rates) took place without any change of basic, long-established concepts.
In this book I demonstrate that the fundamental means to realize nearly all of the 20th-century accomplishments were put in place even before the century began, mostly during the three closing decades of the 19th century and in the years preceding WWI. That period ranks as history’s most remarkable discontinuity not only because of the extensive sweep of its innovations but also because of the rapidity of fundamental advances that were achieved during that time. This combination makes it a unique event—but one with kindred precedents as the process of incremental gains that has dominated the course of technical change throughout the human history is recurrently, but infrequently and unpredictably, interrupted by concentrated spurts of astonishing creativity. These two processes can be seen as just the most recent, historical, demonstrations of a dichotomy present in the grand pattern of the biospheric evolution, namely, the contrast between phyletic gradualism and punctuated equilibrium (Simpson 1983; Eldredge and Gould 1972).
Gradualism is a process marked by even and slow transformations that take place over all, or a very large part, of the ancestral species range, with new organisms arising as modified descendants of original populations. In contrast, the other phylogenetic process entails rapid development of new organisms that appear by the splitting of lineages in a very small subpopulation of the ancestral form and in a restricted, often peripheral, part of the area. Existence of these two different patterns is well documented in the fossil record, and it belies the claims of those who maintain that technical progress is “the continuation of evolution by other means, and is itself and evolutionary process. So it, too, speeds up” (Kurzweil 1999:32).
The idea of accelerating evolution implies the existence of a grand evolutionary trend, as well as a tacit assumption of a purpose and a goal. None of these conclusions can be justified by studying the evolutionary record. Moreover, there has been nothing inevitable about the course the biosphere’s evolution during the past 4 billion years (Smil 2002). From a paleontologist’s perspective, evolution has been a
staggeringly improbable series of events, sensible enough in retrospect and subject to rigorous explanation, but utterly unpredictable and quite unrepeatable…Wind back the tape of life…let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay. (Gould 1989: 14)
And there is yet another critical consideration. Although during the past 50,000 years our species has undoubtedly experienced a rapid mental development (seen as a key example of accelerating evolution that culminated in the cognitive powers of Homo sapiens), the fundamental precondition of our existence has not changed. Our survival still depends irrevocably on incessant functioning of biospheric services that range from decomposition of wastes to pollination of plants. Bacteria, archaea, and fungi do the first set of those tasks, and insects the second. None of these organisms has shown any accelerated evolution, and recently decoded genomes show that bacteria and archaea closely resemble their ancestors that lived billions of years ago (Smil 2002).
Technical analogies of evolutionary gradualism can be illustrated by numerous examples documenting slow improvements in the efficiency and power of waterwheels, in greater maneuverability of sails, or in higher productivity and lower use of fuel in metal smelting (Smil 1994). Basalla (1988) argued that this continuous and cumulative process of technical change contrasts with scientific advances that are characterized by discrete events or, as Kuhn (1962) concluded, by abrupt shifts in fundamental paradigms. But the evolution of technical capacities does not consist merely of these gradual changes, as long periods of incremental improvements are punctuated by spells of relatively rapid advances. During these spells, the innovating societies improve their technical abilities and expand their productive capabilities far beyond the prevailing norm, and do so in historically very short periods of time.
Students of long waves would claim that such accelerations come at surprisingly regular intervals. Mensch (1979) is the leading proponent of the idea that major innovations will appear in clusters during the depression phases of long economic waves, and his decadal analysis for the years 1740–1960 shows distinct peaks for the 1760s, 1830s and 1840s, 1880s, and 1930s. Marchetti (1986) used these findings to support his conclusion about 50-year pulsation in human affairs. But Mensch’s conclusion that capital will be risked on new innovations only when the profits of used-up techniques are unbearably low was criticized by Clark, Freeman, a
nd Soete (1981) as contradicting all economic theories as well as the evidence of case histories of innovation. I do not see these statistical studies based on long lists of items as particularly useful. Although the intended aim may be to include only major advances, extensive lists will inevitably mix marginal and fundamental items.
The ballpoint pen will have obviously different socioeconomic impacts than the continuous casting of steel, and the world economy would miss diesel engines a great deal more than the absence of watertight cellophane; all of these items are from Mensch’s undifferentiated list, which, by the way, does not include the synthesis of ammonia from its elements—as I will demonstrate in this book, this was perhaps the most far-reaching of all modern technical innovations. That is why my approach to singling out the periods of truly epochal innovations with enormous long-lasting impacts—be they artistic or technical—is guided primarily by qualitative considerations rather than by considering statistically outstanding concatenations of undifferentiated advances.
Artistic examples of these saltations are generally better known than the technical leaps. Periclean Athens (460–429 B.C.E.) and Florence of the first decade of the 16th century are perhaps the two most outstanding examples of such advances. Just to think that in 1505 an idler on the Piazza della Signoria could have in a matter of days bumped into Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Botticelli; such an efflorescence of creative talent may be never again repeated in any city. My second, modern choice, of an extraordinary concatenation of artistic talents would be the fin de siècle Paris—where Emile Zola’s latest installment of his expansive and gripping Rougon-Macquart cycle could be read just before seeing Claude Monet’s canvases that transmuted the landscape around Giverny into images of shimmering light and later the same day hearing Claude Debussy’s intriguing L’Après-midi d’un Faune.