This is pretty amazing when you think about it. When I was a child, 200 years seemed like an eternity (I was born near the US bicentennial, and the founding of the US was like ancient history to me). Now, nearing 50, 200 years ago is just about 4 of my lifespans. In just 4 of my lifespans (and I don't even feel that old), we went from rudimentary electric motors to all the amazing technology we have at our fingertips today. Truly astounding.
In under 1.5 of them, humans went from first heavier than air flight to walking on the moon. In around another 1 of them, we flew a helicopter on Mars. It’s utterly bananas to think of the pace of progress in our lifetime and immediately prior.
I currently work on embedded software for medical delivery UAVs, and I often choose to use 30-40 year old technologies because it's the most "boring" solution. We're already making sci-fi drones, we don't need to make the software flashy.
I've previously worked on self driving cars, and spaceships. Over my career, it doesn't feel like anything's changed more than incrementally. A lot of the expensive technologies I worked with professionally are now starting to appear in consumer electronics, though, and that's really cool. It seems like modern breakthroughs come from "Elon Musking" existing technology into being cheaper and better, and then "Apple-ing" it into a mainstream commodity.
> […] and I often choose to use 30-40 year old technologies because it's the most "boring" solution.
There's a good chance that it will also be around for a while in regards to spare parts and such:
> The Lindy effect (also known as Lindy's Law[1]) is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy.
I've mentioned variations on this regarding music.
How much garbage is on the radio today? From the last decade? From the last generation?
Music hasn't gotten worse, but we're still listening only to the good stuff. Pantera will be around another generation at least, my grandchildren's grandchildren will likely still listen to The Beatles. And starship captians will undoubtedly invite the wives of dignitaries to onboard Mozart recitations en route to the boring interstellar negotiations of their husbands.
> And starship captians will undoubtedly invite the wives of dignitaries to onboard Mozart recitations en route to the boring interstellar negotiations of their husbands.
I hope gender roles will have progressed more by then, though technological progress is often more rapid than social change.
I was referring to a specific episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. There is no need to interject social wokeness into every conversation. You are causing attrition, not compassion.
> There is no need to interject social wokeness into every conversation
Your parent comment "interjected" gender roles into the discussion in a jarring and frankly outdated way. Not sure why an obscure TNG reference makes you immune from all criticism?
It's a good observation, but IMO this has been the lifecycle of many, many technologies. Take the jet engine. It was invented in the 30s, applied to exotic military applications in the 40s and 50s, available as transportation for the rich in the 60s and 70s, and finally became the dominant long distance transport mode for everyone by the 80s and 90s.
I totally agree. However, I do think there is and will continue to be massive breakthroughs in _biological_ technology.
Things like synthetic biological manufacturing. The decoding and understanding of the basic biologic software that runs our cells and bodies.
I'm convinced a huge breakthrough is on the horizon, that will nudge us down the correct path of building AGI, based on better understands of bioelectric computation.
"In under 1.5 of them, humans went from first heavier than air flight to walking on the moon. In around another 1 of them, we flew a helicopter on Mars"
Yeah, one of those is much less inpressive than the other. We landed a probe on mars before we landed people on the moon
In the first period Engineers and Industrialists were in charge of companies, and then we succumbed to financialisation and bean counters, and progress has stalled.
That's like the meme that when Harriet Tubman was born, Thomas Jefferson was still alive, and when Harriet Tubman died, Ronald Reagan was alive. The electrical engineering equivalent might be that Thomas Edison was born before Faraday died, and Gordon Moore was born before Thomas Edison died, and Gordon Moore is still alive.
The modern world is only an eyeblink old in the grand scheme of history.
The most shocking one to me is always going to be penicillin. There are still people alive who were born before it was discovered. 90 years ago you could die from an infected scratch and now we have the whole arsenal of modern medicine available.
For those interested in antibiotic history it's worth noting that sulfa drugs predate penicillin by a few years. Prontosil was the first practical antibiotic, developed in 1932; it's mentioned a few times in the All Creatures Great and Small books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prontosil
Last week my mom suddenly got very sick. She got pneumonia, one of her lungs collapsed. We expected the worst, she’s not that old but she has diabetes and other health issues. Thankfully the doctors got everything under control with the help of antibiotics. It was amazing to witness how she recovered very quickly. Today she’s back home, the whole family got reunited and we enjoyed a nice meal like nothing happened last week.
This might be a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think that using antibiotics unless you [absolutely] have to - like when you get one prescribed - is a problem if you think long-term because of a higher chance of antibiotics resistance. Using antibiotics "just in case" should be avoided.
Here's an example of E. coli developing resistance to a _strong_ antibiotic within 12 days [0].
Unfortunately, I know more than a few people who take antibiotics even when they get common cold/flu, which doesn't make sense since viruses are not bacteria and they should get vaccinated instead.
I really hope that’s not an unpopular opinion on a site like Hacker News. Misuse (could even call it abuse, especially in the case of livestock) of antibiotics is a direct cause of antibiotics rapidly becoming less useful.
Unpopular? Antibiotic resistance is one of our more severe public health problems globally, and it's only getting worse.
It's not controversial that the two big drivers of this problem are the countries where antibiotics are available over-the-counter, and the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock.
These practices must end if we want to be able to keep using antibiotics to save lives in the future, and it is a question of policy alone.
Antibiotics must be used rationally. Bacteria evolve surprisingly quickly. They can and will develop resistance to the medication. Depending on which antibiotic it is, the bacteria might already be resistant. Staphylococcus aureus is ubiquitous and resistant to common penicillins. In this case, all it will do is kill off all the non-pathological bacteria that actively compete with the resistant bacteria for resources, allowing it to spread over a wider area.
I'm not going to weigh in on antibiotic cream--a lot of commentators are making good points about overuse of antibiotics leading to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but on the other hand most medical sites do recommend applying an antibiotic cream for a couple days after receiving a puncture wound so in fact it probably is a good idea to have some around in your first aid kit.
On home medicines in general, though, I'd like to add a PSA. Put an annual event on your calendar to check your inventory to make sure you have an adequate supply and nothing is expiring soon.
It really sucks to say fall off your bike and somehow sprain your entire left side, making most movement agony, and then find that you need to go to the store because you are out of ibuprofen and acetaminophen.
if you have a wound you can't clean and bandage yourself, you should probably seek medical attention. antibiotic cream is for anything that doesn't reach that level.
If you have a wound, even one that you can clean an bandage yourself, why would you put cream in it? You clean it and you put a sterile dressing on it.
Or, you could just keep some silver leaf around. Place it on the wound, and your chances of infection are greatly reduced. Apparently, many of the bacteria that cause us problems can’t tolerate being in contact with silver.
I think it's often taken for granted just how much humanity has kicked ass over the past 200 years, technologically speaking. Motors, antibiotics, airplanes, skyscrapers, computers, the moon landing.... It's just crazy compared with any other era of human existence.
We just take for granted the “moon landings” of previous eras. Things like cities with 100,000 people, running water, sewers, having a functioning economy over hundreds or thousands of miles… there are many accomplishments growing past complicated animals with pointy sticks to civilization.
Sewers and paved roads are what really boggles my mind, most in the last half-century. Or that China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century.
We're living in an era where things like the Great Wall of China or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon are created on a regular basis.
I just hope this progress isn't sigmoid shaped, or that we've more than passed the half-way mark.
Even prehistoric humans were trading metals and pottery (and other things that decomposed and left no evidence, surely) over thousands of miles. It's easy to forget that they were as intelligent as we are but did not have Isaac Newton's shoulders to stand on.
Most of this is due to progress, but part is due to the way Western European nations dominated the globe and destroyed some pretty advanced civilisations. Some pretty impressive progress was essentially wiped out by colonialism.
I often wonder if we’ve hit a plateau and are just waiting for some major breakthrough, or, if we’ve got about as good of a command of physics and chemistry as we can that it’s much slower progress from here on out.
This is what I come to HN for - inspiration and optimism (hasn’t been delivering lately :-)). The rate of progress is unbelievable and we are already getting serious about going to Mars.
It's been said that as you age, you appreciate history going back proportional to your age as being near your own time. As a rule of thumb it kinda makes sense:
- As a kid I thought the moon landing was in the distant past, being 11 years before me. Now I have friends who watched it.
- The war seemed even more distant, but I know concentration camp victims who lived through that.
- Pop music seems to fly past, but there's a familiarity to the old hits that I recognize from older people now.
- The wall being built and coming down was about a quarter century, felt like forever at the time. I remember things that happened a quarter century ago now.
Although we should also note that most men also didn't have the right to vote for a couple of those lifetimes [1]. If I understand correctly, only a minority percentage of property owning men could vote before 1918.
And from all men being able to vote to all women being able to vote was a span of 10 years, so 0.2 of GP's lifetime.
The French Revolution and end of feudalism happened in the lifetime just before the electric motor. It's easy to forget that the middle class is a very recent invention.
The Roman Empire had a middle class. The middle ages had a middle class. In early civilization, during cattle culture, there was a middle class. But historically middle classes consisted of small landowners in the countryside.
What you are probably referring to is a large urban middle class consisting of landless skilled workers, which requires modernity, as all previous middle classes were built around rural land ownership, or going back to pre-agricultural periods, ownership of cattle. The key ingredient of the French revolution is the battle between rural and urban, between the farmer and the craftsmen, with the craftsmen gaining ascendancy over and eventually slaughtering the farmers.
Not OP but there are some interviews on YouTube called Voices from the Days of Slavery, where former slaves from the US talk about their lives as slaves.
The opening 30s of the interview with a former slave Fountain Hughes always sends shivers down my spine:
Well, sort of. Faraday invented the first thing that would sort of rotate given electrical power. It took another 33 years before someone built something that had useful torque at the output shaft. Along the way, coils and commutators had to be developed. It also took a while to realize that generators and motors are basically the same.
Rotating electrical machinery was considered a solved problem and kind of boring until about 20 years ago. Then people started using semiconductor switches to drive electric motors. Classic theory assumed you were driving motors with a sine wave. Motor controllers tried to make motors happy by providing a sine wave, or something close to one. Gradually it was realized that motors could be purpose designed for chopped waveforms. This broke all that beautiful closed-form math and charts on polar graph paper that goes back to Tesla. You have to simulate to design a modern electric car motor.
Interestingly electrostatic motors (albeit very weak ones) predate Faraday's invention by decades. Ben Franklin even designed one [1].
In the early days of electricity research, static electricity was more common than "current" electricity. There were early static-based telegraph experiments that predated Morse [2] and used a silk thread as a conductor. Before the electromagnet was invented, people didn't know how to build an indicator based on electric current - one concept was to use electrolysis and look for bubbles.
Ampere, Volta, Galvani, Ohm - so much of the modern world unfolding in just a few decades of discovery, when people still worked by the light of candles and oil lamps and it could take years for information to travel.
We were using SCR (silicon controlled rectifier) based motor drives in industrial settings at least 35 years ago. (I graduated as an Electrical Engineer in 1985 and were commonly using them then)
> Motor controllers tried to make motors happy by providing a sine wave, or something close to one. Gradually it was realized that motors could be purpose designed for chopped waveforms.
Marginally related: it was quite a shock to me when I first learned a rocket engine's thrust can be PWM-controlled.
it was quite a shock to me when I first learned a rocket engine's thrust can be PWM-controlled.
The thrust of the pistons of a steam locomotive is PWM-controlled. That's what all the elaborate levers and cranks on the side of the locomotive do. They control the "cutoff" point in the cycle, where steam is turned off. Look up "valve gear" if interested.
Sorry I may have misunderstood - is an electric car motor fundamentally different in some way from the one I learnt back in school? (I ask honestly as I find that my education may not have taught me everything)
It is likely that the Tesla motor has a clever geometry for achieving low torque ripple and high efficiency, but combining switched reluctance and permanent magnets in the same motor is nothing new.
This combination has been used for many decades in the so-called hybrid stepping motors, where "hybrid" means that both PM and SR are used.
In the case of stepping motors, the advantage of the combination is to provide in the same motor both very small steps and also a static torque, i.e. the motor can maintain a position even without the power supply.
If you only know about one type of electric motor, then yes a lot of motors are different than the one you learned about in school. Induction machines, synchronous machines, steppers ,bldc machines, small universal machines etc... There is a world of different motor windings and rotor configurations out there for all kinds of different purposes.
Depends what you were taught in school, but somewhat: they're different from the old DC motors with brushes and commutation that you might have had in childhood toys.
When were adequate insulators for wires developed? You need that for coils. From what I read, the first technology that used insulation was telegraphy, in the 1840s.
This is often repeated, but I think it's a misleading label. Faraday doesn't get nearly enough credit for his theoretical prowess -- probably because he didn't develop his theories mathematically. But I would say his mental model of nature was far more accurate than most of his peers, mathematical or not, and that understanding is what guided him to groundbreaking discovery after groundbreaking discovery. He developed his experiments to confirm his own theoretical predictions, often predictions that no theoretical physicsts were making at the time; for example, the Faraday effect (that magnetism can rotate the polarization of light in a material), Faraday's law (the electromagnetic one), and Faraday's law (the chemical one).
Agree. The guy pretty much invented field theory. Yes, Maxwell wrote the equations, but Faraday had the great conceptual insights. For more on how this evolved into modern gauge theory:
You have a point but I feel when people say "theoretical" they have specific (or, more narrower) meanings. As in, if you can't express it in mathematical models, it's not "theoretical". Probably "analytical" is a better name?
So, Faraday very likely had a very good mental model and "instinctive" feel about how these things work, as you said, just that did not count as theoretical prowess.
Einstein's major breakthrough in special relativity wasn't a mathematical discovery, but his intuitive mental model of the impossibility of racing against a light beam. The mathematical transformation that follows from that had already been put to paper by Lorentz. But anyone would still call Einstein a theoretical physicist.
Faraday had his own theory of physics, essentially the underpinning of field theory, which was held entirely in his head. He tried to describe it to his peers in letters, and they mosy just couldn't grasp what he was talking about because of the distance between his ideas and theirs. So instead he just demonstrated in one revolutionary experiment after another that his ideas made sense, and everyone else had to race to keep up.
But unlike Oersted, Faraday didn't stumble into his discoveries. He designed his apparatus to prove the behaviour he already had imagined must be there.
(Sometimes he'd stumble by trial and error into the materials he needed, but materials science is hard and he was pretty good at that too).
I would say that this definition is very modern. Before about the time of Maxwell, the majority of theory was far less mathematical. I would say that it wasn't until the 1960s and 1970s, when particle and cosmological theorists became the far cutting edge of physics, that only mathematical models would be taken seriously.
I was born in 1958 and it is amazing to me what has been invented even since then. But in the early 60's it seemed like the future was limitless. I distinctly remember the promise of flying cars, vacations on the moon, and electricity via nuclear power that would be "too cheap to meter". Even Arthur C. Clark's seminal science fiction classic was set in 2001 - hey, that's 20 years ago! I really wonder what kind of advances we'll see in 200 more years and what kind of society they will enable. With things like social media, AI, face recognition, a divided nation here in the USA, and all the complexities and complications from climate change, the future seems to be one massive challenge after another, with our species frequently making decisions that is not in its best interest. Does the future give us both better tools and improved judgement to use them for the common good?
Back then, advertisers and book dealers sold wild futurism because it made them money. Now media outlets new and old sell fear and uncertainty for the same reason.
This is very true and it makes me very sad. I wish we were forward-looking as a society pushing towards a great future but instead we’re looking backwards and holding onto the past
> I really wonder what kind of advances we'll see in 200 more years and what kind of society they will enable.
I _really_ hope I’m wrong, but I honesty think it’s probably a 50/50 chance we’ll make it that far. Besides what we’re doing to the planet and the lack of action we seem to be able to muster for that, our ability to create carnage (WMDs if you will) and them gradually falling into more hands seems high risk. (And what if something deadlier than Covid WAS developed in a lab and got into the wild?).
Again, I hope our ingenuity pulls us through. But the damage a few lunatics with a lot of resources could affect 200 years ago was pretty limited. Now some hacker in Moscow can knock out energy pipelines on the East Coast of the U.S.
To me, I always feel that the sci-fi authors of that era believed in progress being fueled by noble causes, i.e., improving mankind. In reality, it is rather driven by commercial interest and while this has undoubtedly lead to amazing inventions across many fields, it can at the same time be a limiting factor. But I think this fact is more or less inevitable given how our society and economy are structured.
Well, our species doesn't really make decisions. Individual and collections of individuals make choices that somehow end up accomplishing things. That there is anything at all is actually quite amazing.
To take an optimistic view, the next few years will see flying minivans (Lillium etc) and people going on vacation in a space hotel in Low Earth Orbit. The future seems to be coming right along at its own pace.
I'd suggest they're largely a terrible idea, wildly inefficient as a mode of transportation, and should not exist unless we come up with an extraordinary energy breakthrough that entirely remakes the planet. There are plenty of terrible ideas we've chosen not to pursue because they're irrational.
We could make flying garbage trucks. Who doesn't want hovering garbage trucks. So futuristic! It's a terrible idea. We could make buses that can fly. It's a terrible idea. We could all try to live in underwater cities. It's a terrible idea. We could all try to live in orbit around the planet. It's a terrible idea.
The lack of flying cars isn't a failure. It's the ideal outcome (for now).
I don't get the appeal of low quality fantasy ideas that were obviously absurd. I don't get why people dwell on mediocre ideas from the past as an indictment of the present. It seems like a cheap excuse to lash the present for not being good enough. Electricity too cheap to meter was obviously not going to happen at scale, it was an incorrect premise that wasn't thought through at all (as though nuclear power plants, infrastructure, maintenance, replacement, labor were also going to be free or nearly so). I'd call it a very foolish notion by the person that suggested it.
Just because someone comes up with a fantastic premise and floats it out there (what if I could take a pill and live forever!), that doesn't mean the present failed by not realizing it. Sometimes they're just bad ideas or otherwise a false premise, supported by poor reasoning (if supported by anything).
The promise of flying cars was in the 1960s, according to GP. You can see flying cars through the lens of 2021 and find that they don't make sense, but you can't say the same if you were looking through the lens of 1960s.
> wildly inefficient as a mode of transportation
Energy was plentiful in the 1960s. Gasoline was cheap. The oil crisis was in the 1970s. people hardly ever thought that there was a need to conserve energy. Plus, widespread cheap nuclear energy was on the horizon.
> should not exist unless we come up with an extraordinary energy breakthrough that entirely remakes the planet
Nuclear was such an imminent breakthrough back in 1960s.
With solar and storage becoming cheap, we are in many ways in the beginning of a cheap energy revolution.
Think of that jet pack dude. Those things are about 5% efficient thermodynamically, and they use jet fuel which costs about 5-15 cents per chemical kWh of energy, so the cost per useful mechanical kWh is about $1-3. For electric power, you can use off-peak electricity at 5 cents per kWh (or solar power utility scale which is half of that and falling) and the efficiency is more like 80-95%, for a useful energy cost of between 3 and 6 cents per mechanical kWh. Plus, electric motors and batteries cost less than those microturbines. And the motors are comparable in specific power, even.
So the ingredients are there for new modes of transport enabled by MUCH cheaper and more abundant mechanical energy. Which we are, in fact, seeing in the form of Urban Air Mobility vehicles. But it may take quite a while for all these things to make it through society. The 21st Century is the century of the lithium battery like the 20th Century was the century of the internal combustion engine.
Brushless motors with high energy rare earth magnets are a big part of this new energy revolution. 200 years after Faraday invented the first electric motor.
Flying cars' most significant hurdle is not energy, but safety. Commercial air travel is only safer than automobile travel because of the high levels of coordination and regulation that exist around it. Think of all of the humans (nevermind software) and their cooperation involved in planes taking off and landing safely. Then add in the fact that planes are constantly being maintained by mechanics, on much more frequent intervals than automobiles. Compare what is considered a safe distance between two moving automobiles, and two moving planes. When these safe distances are violated by planes, even when no actual collision occurs, investigations occur.
Inherent to the success of flying cars is widespread adoption by the masses. If they're only available to multimillionaires, why would they be any more attractive than private jets, which are already available to those same people? Thus, the success of flying cars would require similar levels of coordination and regulation, only for many many more times the number of aircraft. If instead, its every pilot for themselves, as it is with automobiles, flying cars will end up being far more deadly than autos, given that low speed car accidents don't often result in deaths, whereas an aircraft collision of any kind can be catastrophic. More aircraft in the air will also mean higher density of aircraft in the air, making coordination even more critical than it already is.
The easy answer to all of this is to say that software will replace all of these currently human roles. But just think of how far away level 5 autonomy is for cars. In the case of a car, most dangerous scenarios can be mitigated by slowing down or stopping. The aircraft equivalent of stopping is to land, which is obviously not as simple as decreasing speed, and is also not feasible without a runway of some kind.
The Secret Life of machines is a great series for someone that was born in the "digital" age. It's great to see the progression from mechanical parts to electric parts and easy to see why electric is the future due to lack of moving parts and thus greater reliability. Think internal combustion engine with all lubrication and gaskets vs. an electric motor.
I get goosebumps just thinking about improvements to day-to-day life I have experienced first hand since early 90s.
I see my two children growing up and there's almost nothing in common between their childhood and mine. Like things that existed, games being played, schooling etc., etc.,
