The Committee to Nuke Elysium

As Gregory Clark has shown, for most of human history, as clever people have been inventing things, their new ideas could travel no faster than horses or ships could carry them. Research by Richard Duncan-Jones showed that information of major world events moved at an average of 1 mile-per-hour for most of the last 2000 years, from the Roman Empire to the early American empire, until the invention of the telegraph for the first time allowed complex information to move faster that people (speaking of disruptive!). In other words, if an “iPhone” fell through a worm-hole onto the head of some Spanish guy in 1000 AD, news of this incredible event wouldn’t even reach China for five months.

For this reason (and because there was no such thing as an airplane in the 18th century) the most famous inventions of the industrial revolution some took DECADES to gain a foothold in other countries. The cotton mill, invented in 1771, took 20 years to get to the United States, Clark writes. Watt’s steam engine took 30 years to get to India. The steam railway, invented in 1825, reached the U.S. by 1830, but history doesn’t show its adoption in Sweden or Portugal for another 30 years. Part of this lag was trade laws and a protectionist British government, which clung jealously to its tech talent. But even with spies lurking around the factories of London, it still took several decades for the most disruptive technologies in millennia just to cross the the English Channel and North Sea!

In other words, to praise the speed of the iPhone’s adoption is really to praise other disruptive technologies – the telegraph, the airplane, the intermodal container – that make the immediate worldwide adoption of new products possible. To call the iPhone the fastest most-disruptive technology in history is really just another way of calling it the most recent most-disruptive technology in history. No shame there, but let’s share the love with the other disruptors.