Tech took off in the Victorian era!
Approximately in order: batteries, telegraph, B&W photos, fax, electric light, gas mantles, colour photos, radio telegraph, neon lights, fountain pen, ball-point pen (packing cases), voice phones, mechanical TV, cinema, electrical hearing aids based on phone technology, home voice recording on cylinders (apart from Edison), disc records (inc audio books) PA amps using compressed air and diaphrams, live plays by shared telephone, typewriters, stencil duplicators, cars etc using all of battery-electric (nickel-iron), steam, diesel and petrol. Photolithographic printing, including colour. Steam turbines on ships and for electricity. Submarines, diving suits, airships, (first practical powered aircraft in 1905), radio remote control. Cathode ray tube simultaneously in UK & Germany. First plastics. Maxwell's equations that proved speed of light in a vacuum was a constant. Einstein's hero and he said Maxwell was a hair's breadth from relativity. Mercury vapour vacuum pumps, aluminium.
Voice public broadcasts about 1921. Demos from about 1905.
Electronic TV described in 1905. Commercial by 1935. Colour TV demos in 1924.
First computer by Konrad Zuse in 1939. Better ones secret in 1940s in Blechley Park.
Liquid Hydrogen/Oxygen rocket motors in 1930s.
Radio remote control of a plane before 1918.
Inertial navigation in 1930s
Teletypewriters 1928. Almost unchanged as computer I/O in 1970s. See also Telex.
Microwave oven still uses the cavity magnetron invented in 1940. Magnetrons before that in late 1920s till 1939 were poorer than Kylstrons.
Gunpowder in Europe from 14th C. Maybe 500 years earlier in China.
Jet aircraft flew before WWII in 1938 or 1939.
WWII V1 flying bomb was a kind of jet propelled cruise missile (modern ones usually flip open wings and use a jet engine).
WWII V2 was a regular rocket powered missile. More people died making them than at targets. Supersonic.
Both had analogue computers for guidance.
Radar and Sonar before WWII.
The 18th C. was the steam age and rapid introduction of standard threads and machine tools. Also programming add-on to machine weaving. Jacquard. Luddites were not against machines, but wanted better working conditions. Cloth made by machine replacing hand-made gave up to 100x profit increase for mill owners, but workers paid less, longer hours and poorer accomodation.
The 19th was the start of Electrical Age.
20th C the Communications Age, with Computers in public from 1946.
Transistors proposed in 1920s. Bell labs was first in 1948 purely due to haveing purer Germanium than rivals. A working one almost the same time in France.
So real technology time line rules out our tech from Roswell Aliens.
|