You often hear people nowadays talking about how fast technology is moving, but in the nineteenth century it moved just as quickly or, in a more fundamental sense, much faster. Most of today’s new technologies are incremental; mobile phones, for example, have been around since the 1970s, and have spent the last 50 years simply getting smaller and more sophisticated, merging with computer technologies to become the smartphone in the early 90s via the Personal Digital Assistant (who remembers PDAs?)
The inventions of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, were life-changing. The train, the camera, the sewing machine, the telegraph, the revolver, the telephone, the stock ticker (pictured), moving pictures, automobiles, gaslight, electric light, elevators, escalators, zippers—these nineteenth-century developments transformed people’s lives in ways twenty-first-century people would find hard to imagine.
The pace of change increased rapidly in the late nineteenth century, moving the United States and many European countries from an agriculture-based society to the industry-based society we know today. We take international travel, easy communications, sophisticated medicine, large corporations, and abundant year-round food for granted, but none of these facilities existed in 1800.
Photo credit H. Zimmer - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3961718