[troystribling]

I consider the graph of "Time Distribution of 100 recent major inventions" as evidence of a decrease in the rate of innovation highly questionable and subjective. To see an innovation as major will clearly take time since it will need to be exploited. It follows that it is unlikely that anything recent would be considered a major. Even as late as the early 90's I doubt that e-mail would have been considered a major innovation and that was 20 years after it was developed.

During the 80's through current day innovation drought just off the top of my head I come up with the following: Scanning Tunneling Microscope followed by the Atomic Force Microscope, Super String Theory, RNA Interference, Carbon Nanotubes, iPhone (a convergence of many technologies in chip development and manufacturing, power storage, display technology and software), Statistical Natural Language Processing, Acceleration of Universe expansion, ....