Didn't say they were perfect, but when it comes to the speed of scientific and technological progress, nothing beats the late 19th- mid 20th century era.
This is kind of like saying that the first person harvesting an apple orchard is better than the people that come after because they get to pick the low hanging fruit.
If you dug them out of their graves and presented the scientific world as we have it now it's highly likely they'd see the predicaments we are in now and a whole lot of that technological progress would be different. Turned out running economies on leaded gas burns up atmospheres and brains. Turns out that physics didn't have unlimited secrets to divulge without ever increasing amounts of effort and energy being applied to discover them.
have a good point there: Einstein, Nikola Tesla, the Wright brothers, Edison, Ford (with his usage of mass production), Alexander Graham Bell, modern surgery techniques... and that's only after thinking for 20 seconds...
... although, "somewhat" agree with pixl97 that there was so much to learn and discover during that time period, that many ideas were discoverable by only one or two people (where as things like CRISPR took dozens of researchers decades of building off of each other work to invent reliable DNA editing).
