Suburbs where prices have been rising by $1k a day over five years
A Visualization of the History of Technology: 1,889 Innovations Across Three Million Years
Open Culture: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So holds the third and most famous of the “three laws” originally articulated by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke.
Even when it was first published in the late nineteen-sixties, Clarke’s third law would have felt true to any resident of the developed world, surrounded by and wholly dependent on advanced technologies whose workings they could scarcely hope to explain.
Naturally, it feels even truer now, a quarter of the way into our digital twenty-first century. Indeed, for all we know about how they really work, our credit cards, our smartphones, our computers, and indeed the internet itself might as well be magic.
To best understand the technology that increasingly makes up our world, we should attempt to understand the evolution of that technology. Those smartphones, for example, couldn’t have been invented in the form we know them without the previous developments of chemically strengthened glass, the multi-touch screen interface, and the camera phone. Each of those individual technologies also has its predecessors: follow the chain back far enough, and eventually you get to the likes of the mobile radio telephone, invented in 1946; the phased array antenna, invented in 1905; and glass, invented around 1500 BC. These and countless other paths can be traced at the Historical Tech Tree, an ambitious project of writer and programmer Étienne Fortier-Dubois…”
