The millennium ends today. Let’s review it.
A thousand years ago, life was nasty, brutish, and short. People could neither read nor write and never traveled further than they could walk unless the Pope told them to take Jerusalem from the infidels, which they couldn't. Best invention of the 1200s — the flue, which made indoor heating possible. Try living without it.
The invention of movable type in the 1400's, originally conceived to expand the production of Bibles, paradoxically allows the Reformation and breaks the monopoly in the religion industry without intervention by the Justice Department. This, in turn, allows broader perspectives on the world, and alternative centers of power, to emerge. Meanwhile, mercantile Venice invents banking and becomes the Silicon Valley of the 1500s and before you know it, improved navigation and the discovery of pitch from pine trees — which stops boats from leaking when they cross oceans — allow an age of discovery, trade, and colonization to emerge.
Credit, trade, markets, more widespread literacy, arithmetic, and rationality, and newly-plundered natural resources from faraway places all raise the European standard of living to something other than dire poverty. Unfortunately, Europe's trees are cut down to make pitch and to heat indoor spaces using the flue, which leads to the use of coal, which leads to water seeping into coal mines, which leads James Watt to invent the steam engine so you could pump the water out. And, in 1793, a bunch of businessmen sitting under a buttonwood tree form the New York Stock Exchange. So the world now has investors and something to invest in.
In 1800, people lived in an agrarian society and communication traveled at the speed of horse. By 1900, people lived in an industrializing society with rail transportation, communication by telegraph and soon telephone, mass production and as a result mass marketing, electric lights, widespread literacy, and plenty of broke farmers looking for work.
A handful of guys in garages with tools no better than your Craftsman set change the world: Edison, Bell, Ford, the Wrights, Marconi, that sleepy Swiss patent clerk what's-his-name, and so on. Radio gets better, telephony smoother, and engines more powerful, culminating in a man landing on the moon, which used a computer less powerful than your kid's videogame. Meanwhile, Noyce and Kilby invent the integrated circuit at Bell Labs and Eckert and Mauchley the computer at Sperry Univac, all using tools much better than your Craftsman set, some guys at Xerox invent the mouse and icon-driven computing but don't realize what it's worth, but Steve Jobs does, and so the guys in garages become great commercializers instead of inventors. Thanks to them, the more complex computers get, the easier they are to use, unlike my VCR. McLuhan was almost right — the world didn't become a Global Village by watching itself on TV, but by talking to itself on the Internet, and by using those computers to trade the stuff invented long ago by the Venetians and the guys under the buttonwood tree.
And so, the awards. May I have the envelope, please. Best social transformation of the millennium: the Reformation. Most unrelenting force for progress: technology. And best invention: indoor plumbing. Try living without it.
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