The long-term perspective that this chart provides makes it clear just how unusually fast technological change is in our time. During this period, technological change was faster, but it was still relatively slow: several thousand years passed between each of these three inventions.įrom 1800 onwards, I stretched out the timeline even further to show the many major inventions that rapidly followed one after the other. I needed more space to be able to show when agriculture, writing, and the wheel were invented. To be able to visualize the inventions in the more recent past – the last 12,000 years – I had to unroll the spiral. It took 2.4 million years – 12 turns of the spiral – for our ancestors to control fire and use it for cooking.
2 Each turn of the spiral then represents 200,000 years of history. The first use of stone tools, 3.4 million years ago, marks the beginning of this history of technology. The timeline begins at the center of the spiral. The big visualization offers a long-term perspective on the history of technology. For recent generations, it was common for technologies that were unimaginable in their youth to become common later in life. In stark contrast to those days, we live in a time of extraordinarily fast technological change. Technological change was extremely slow in the past – the technologies that our ancestors got used to in their childhood were still central to their lives in their old age. One insight I take away from this long-term perspective is how unusual our time is. We can remind ourselves that our own future might look very different from the world today by looking back at how rapidly technology has changed our world in the past. Similarly, it is hard for us to imagine the arrival of all those technologies that will fundamentally change the world we are used to. In their childhood, our grandparents would have struggled to imagine a world connected by smartphones and the Internet. Switching on an electric light would have been unimaginable for our medieval ancestors. Technology can change the world in ways that are unimaginable, until they happen.
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