14 household innovations from the past that look more than strange today

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Just fifteen years ago, you would have been the coolest in the class with the Nokia 3310. But time flies, and along with it, technological processes accelerate, new innovations appear. Today we live in a world ruled by touch screens, face recognition and computer learning, and the omniscient uncle Google, who lives in our smartphone, can answer any question. All the more strange against this background are the technologies of the past centuries. The following are the most advanced innovations of the past, which today look, to put it mildly, very eccentric, and in some places even ridiculous and wild.

We currently have in our own pocket a small personal computer capable of storing gigabytes of information and capable of replacing any public library. Just imagine what this technology was like a century or two ago! World science has made a giant leap forward in its development in this short time.

In order to fully appreciate what we have today, let's go on a real historical roller coaster. There we will see what ancient technologies determined our future a hundred years ago.

It has everything from the sellers of motorized inline skates, also known as the proud ancestors of modern hoverboards, to giant mechanical tricycles from the 19th century and orgone batteries from the 1950s. All the most interesting of these retro devices.

Some of them were truly incredible, others looked cool, and looking at the rest I wanted to ask: "What the hell were they thinking when they did THIS?"

It is hard to imagine now that only three decades ago smartphones did not exist. The first smart phone was Simon Personal Communicator, released in 1994. Whereas a little over half a century ago (the first Altair personal computer was developed in 1974), no one in the house had a computer. Just let yourself be aware of it. It feels like technology is accelerating at such a tremendous pace that we cannot keep up. We just got used to something, and this is already "yesterday". Reality is changing at an incredible rate.

According to Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity Is Near, the acceleration of technology is not just a sensation, but a reality. It turns out that "the pace of technological progress, especially information technology, accelerates exponentially over time, because they are driven by a common force." In other words, each generation of technology improves much faster than the last, as it reaches a certain level of progress.

If you take two separate innovations from different eras, from the birth of the first modern car in 1886 to the beginning of the era of self-driving cars in 2012, every step of progress from one version to the other accelerates.

This is explained by the fact that the more effective the technology, the more attention it receives. Much more resources are devoted to improving it. Budgets are increasing, the best talented specialists are involved in the development. Therefore, further development is happening at such an accelerated pace.

Understanding this aspect, it is simply scary to imagine how technological innovations will look like in a couple of decades. I suspect that it is very different from what it is today. They may not be the flying cars we saw in retro-futuristic films and other fictions, but I think it's pretty close. For example, artificial intelligence that looks and speaks to you like a real person. Oh wait, we don't have to wait that long as it already exists!

The world of science fiction writers and the plots of Hollywood blockbusters have long entered our reality with many mundane things. For example, read our article on what is fiction and what is true in the blockbuster "Armageddon", or how the miners helped NASA to conquer the moon.