46. The onrush of cheap communications, powerful computers
and the Internet all explain why many people feel that, nowadays, change is
happening ever more rapidly as technological progress accelerates. Moore’s
law, that the power of microchips doubles every 18 months, has been tested and
found correct. This is what gives people the sense of a world shifting beneath
their feet. 47. Yet the implication that rapid change is a
new phenomenon is again misleading. If you measure the time it takes for a
technology to become widely diffused, today’s experience does not seem
unusual. Take the car. The basic patent for an internal combustion engine
capable of powering a car was filed in 1877. By the late 1920s-50 years
later-over half of all American households owned a car. 48.
The comparable dates for the computer are harder to tie down, but the first
big computer, based on vacuum valves, was built in1946. The transistor-the
first semiconductor device-was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1948. The first
patent for an integrated circuit was filed in 1959. Now, in 1999-50 years after
the first one was built-around half of American households own a computer. The
pace of introduction has been similar to that of the car. 49.
You have to cheat, choosing only the date for the personal computer, say
(mid1970s), or the Internet (ditto) to make it seem much more
rapid. Comparing its diffusion among private users is, you
might say, unfair to the computer, for that machine’s main use is in businesses.
On that measure, the best historical analogy is with electrification, and the
spread of the electric dynamo into factories. 50. According
to Paul David, a historian at Stanford University in California, the first
electricity-generating stations had been installed in New York and London in
1881, but it was well into the 1920s before the dynamo became widely used and
started to raise productivity. The adoption of the computer in business has
also been slow, and failed to have any measurable impact on productivity until
very recently.