[acjohnson55]

I think this is one of the least understood elements of technological advancement. We tend to think of it as linear, but often, the major visible breakthroughs are dependent on a whole bunch of less glamorous advancements being brought together.

The game Civilization was really great at representing this. Tech advancement is a DAG, rather than a chain or a tree. Reality is like this, but much, much more granular.

For instance, I'm acquainted with the inventor of the electret microphone. I'm sure that mic brought together a whole bunch of advancements, and once I was aware that miniaturizing microphones was nontrivial, it became clear that, for example, pocketable cell phones would not exist if not for tiny microphones.

I see this disconnect all the time in how we think about technology, and which innovations actually lead to major cultural changes. We get wowed by impressive inventions, like blockchain, but to date, it is largely not penetrating society outside of its own expanding hype bubbles. It's pretty clear to me that blockchain is not, of itself, transformative. Nor is it the final link in enabling a society-changing breakthrough. The question I'd ask is whether that's because other boring adjacent developments are missing? Or is it a relative dead end? I'm picking on blockchain, but a lot of other innovations could be chosen here.

In trying to predict the socio-technological future, it is important to become attuned to the boring, enabling technologies. And if I were an investor, I would also have to understand whether the economics of a potential enabling technology are attractive for achieving returns. I think of all the fiber that was laid in the 90s. Investors were right that it would eventually become really important, but they wrong that it would be lucrative for them to invest in.

[mandevil]

A great example of this is the Sagnac Effect. In 1913, French Physicist Georges Sagnac built a circular interferomter and found interference bands. He thought that this disproved Relativity and showed that an aether existed, but it turned out that German Physicist Max von Laue had predicted the existence of those interference bands under relativity two years earlier, so 10 points for Einstein. (Note that the named credit for the effect went to the experimental physicist who found it, even with a wrong theory, rather than the theoretical physicist who worked earlier and correctly predicted it.)

For the next 50 years Sagnac interferometery was a dead end, a minor curiosity in the history of physics. Then in 1963, Macek and Davis at the Sperry Gyroscope Co. figured out how to build this in a laboratory environment with the recently invented lasers. The coherent beam of a laser unlocked the usefulness of the Sagnac effect. Meaning that just another 30-odd years of work by hundreds of people around the world got to a situation where fiber-optic gyros are superior to mechanical gyroscopes and capable of things that mechanical gyros could never do. But all sorts of things with scary names like "anti-Shupe winding" had to be invented and then perfected to get these fiber-optic gyros to be so good, and that was the result of many people, who probably all knew each other through the conference circuit and in meetings, sharing ideas and then improving on each other's ideas. So who gets the credit for the Fiber-Optic gyros? Sagnac? Laue? Macek and Davis? Shupe? What about Ring-Laser, which is different in engineering but also based on Sagnac interferometry?

So, the Sagnac effect itself was worth nothing, and for a long time afterwards was just something that a few scientists even knew about. But a century later- and with the hard work of hundreds to thousands more people- the world depends on it.

In an alternate dimension, I got a Ph.D in this sort of stuff- I am truly fascinated by it. But I decided to try and be one of the engineers today rather than documenting what the engineers of the past did.