Quote:
Originally Posted by mikesouth
Whats more interesting to me is how quickly we advanced ourselves with modern technology in less than 150 years we have made more technological advancements than we did in our first 10,000 and we seem to accelerate by orders of magnitude now.
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It is pretty amazing. What triggered that change is an interesting story. Though inventions people mentioned like wheels, axles, and roads were important, those all existed thousands of years ago. What happened around 150 years ago was industry.
Until then, most people worked feeding themselves, either farming crops or, in England, raising sheep. Craftsmen made things for trade in their shops, but most peple farmed, as they had for thousands of years. A guy noticed that farmers in England had little to do during the winter, and sometimes they were hungry during the winter months. His idea was that he'd put up money to buy raw wool, then pay the farmers to process the wool during the winter, when they had nothing better to do. That worked great - he sold the yarn at a nice profit and the farmers earned money in their off-season. More people started doing it and cottage industry was born.
He had invented two related things. First, he invested CAPITAL - he put up the money to buy the materials. Second, he HIRED people to do the work. Before that, craftsmen owned their own one man shop, maybe with an apprentice. Investing capital and hiring people made it possible to build factories, and invest in expensive machines to aid the work. (That's when the steam engine comes in. A one man shop could neither build a steam engine nor afford to buy one.)
Imagine if there were no datacenters, no hosting companies. Each webmaster had to buy their own server and learn how to run it before the could build their first web page. It's so much better when Brad can invest millions in Mojohost, hire server admins, and build racks and racks of servers protected by a $50,000 UPS system. Then you can just get hosting from him. He does that, of course, for the same reason the wool agents invested - to reap profit by providing a valuable service. More to the point, how many of us could ever build a car? We all have cars because Henry Ford invested CAPITAL to build a factory and HIRED people. Those are the twin inventions of the industrial revolution - capitalism and employment.