Creating the Twentieth Century.

martin green
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

A short twitter back and forth between @TaylorPearsonMe, @arjunblj, @nic__carter, and I on historical periods that perhaps frame the current era prompted me to dust off an excerpt from an letter I wrote to my limited partners 6 years ago.

“A short book report if you’ll indulge me: if you haven’t had a chance to read “Creating the Twentieth Century” by Vaclav Smil, it is a captivating book on the technical innovations over the period from 1867–1914. Here are some of the innovations from that amazing time:

1867: 2nd law of thermodynamics, open-hearth steel making furnaces, sulfite pulping process for paper, and dynamite.

1870s: Telephones, typewriters, chemical pulp, reinforced concrete and the electrical system.

1880s: Steam turbines, dynamos, transformers, incandescent lights, gramophones, popular photography, 4stroke Internal combustion engine, motorcycles, cars, aluminum production, crude oil tankers, air filled tires, pre-stressed concrete, steel skeleton skyscrapers.

1890s: Diesel engines, x-rays, wireless, telegraph, radioactivity, periodic table, movies, and aspirin. Fossil fuel (coal, crude and natural gas) overtakes wood as the world’s majority energy source.

1900–1914: manufacturing assembly lines, airplanes, tractors, radio broadcasts, vacuum diodes, neon lights, tungsten incandescent lights, halftone printing, stainless steel, hydrogenated fat, air conditioning, the atomic model, Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis papers and the multi-stage rocket.

Those innovations lit up the world, heated and cooled our environment, enabled us to better communicate with one another over great distance, gave us local propulsion and global mobility, broadened our understanding of the universe and perhaps the greatest ever technical achievement for humankind: increased farm productivity to support a tripling of the world’s population over the subsequent 100 years while avoiding Malthus’ predicted catastrophe.

Aside from being a well researched and fascinating read, Prof. Smil’s book is a powerful reminder that 1) innovation is inherently a process of of trial and error 2) innovation is iterative within a system and connected to innovation in adjacent systems and 3) it takes time for innovation to fully scale.

While we can plainly see that innovation scales far more rapidly today, seeing how previous technologies went from conception to improvement and scale is a great reminder that value is created by inspired teams over time periods seldom measured in a quarter, and certainly not in a continuous and linear fashion. Impatient public market investors would be wise to take heed from history.”

martin green

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tech investor. blockchain curious, meebo (google), cnet (cbs). husband. dad. runner. motorbiker. cocktailer.