Death by Innovation

Are people more afraid to die today than they were, say a century ago? And has this led to less innovation?

If you consider the number of groundbreaking inventions and discoveries during the short window between 1880-1920, especially in the hard sciences, it is nothing short of astounding. The telephone, automobile, airplane, penicillin, the lightbulb and organized electricity were all invented or discovered during that short four decade window. A man who used horseback for travel, letters for communication, and later died of diptheria at age 40 could never have imagined the world that was to come. If you extend the timeframe to include the first nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago in 1942 and then the first man on the moon less than two decades later, we can recognize a portfolio of extradirindary advancements for human kind.

These inventions were very different from the ones we are witnessing today in the early annals of the 21st century. Consider how radical change was from the handwritten letter to the telephone? Or riding horseback to flying in an airplane? Today's smartphone is an incredible tool, but is it no more than a combination of a pc and a telephone? These were leaps in innovation as compared to the incremental imporvamenets that we witness today - mainly focused on speed and size.

Many of these inventions occurred in the homes of their respective inventors or on University campuses. As Peter Thiel has written about thoroughly, there hs been a stagnation in innovaton around atoms and mechanical engineering.