I would expand it to the last 100 years or so, but yes, from the late-19th century forward technological development became especially rapid, especially when compared to previous rates of technological change. Why? Two major factors are typically cited for this.

One is that in prior eras the "knowledge producers" (what we might call scientists) and the "craft workers" (what we might call technologists) were not generally the same people. This is true even through the periods we think of as the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment — the people who wanted to figure out how nature worked were not the same people as the people who wanted to make new things. And in fact much of that natural knowledge was just simply not yet at a state of producing useful applications, either (the capstone of early modern science, Newton's theory of gravity, gets you zero technological results by itself, for example). And the "craftsmen," as we might call them, worked under a very different set of circumstances, in very different places, etc., than the others — think guilds and tinkerers, not universities or industrial laboratories (the latter not yet really existing).

This started to change during the Industrial Revolution. Industry and universities started to have closer connections, started to work in something like a feedback loop. The German chemical industry of the 19th century is often cited as one of the first places this really came together — really tight relationships were formed that produced huge amounts of profits by creating things like synthetic dyestuffs. The profits were reinvested in more research to produce more products, and led to a booming industry of pharmaceuticals as well (e.g. Bayer).

So you have that on the one hand. The other factor is that governments become major sponsors of research and development. While there had been government patronage of science, and even technology, prior to the 20th century, it was pretty paltry by comparison with what came at that point (e.g., the sponsoring of agricultural research stations to develop better feedstock). The big impetus was war: the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 made it seem like the country with the best weapons would win (the Prussians — the Germans again! — stomped the French with much more sophisticated artillery, made possible by the tight links between German scientists, industry, and now the military), World War I seemed to show that fantastical new possibilities were available to nations who funded scientists, and World War II seemed to confirm this on an existential scale (radar, the atomic bomb, etc.).

None of this was universally obvious or agreed upon by all or instantaneous. But by the end of World War II it had become something of a truism that any country that wanted to be a "player" in the world was going to be spending some chunk of their GDP on research and development, for both civilian and military purposes. The US spent between 1 and 2% of its GDP on this — that's a pretty hefty chunk of cash, capable of sustaining a huge amount of work. This work, in turn, produced some real wonders. Pretty much every core technology in your iPhone was the result of Cold War American government or military funding, funneled either into government laboratories or into industrial contractors. This was the "engine" of rapid technological change of the 20th century: scientific research, industrial development, government funding.

This isn't to take away from the fact that industry had its own, non-governmental R&D projects. For awhile there were industrial laboratories that rivaled and even surpassed government and university labs (e.g. Bell Labs, which produced several Nobel Prize winning discoveries and innovations). These were supported, however, with a raft of government contracts. As were even the universities (during the Cold War, MIT was the largest non-industrial defense contractor). One might ask (esp. if one is of a free-market bent) why government funding seems necessary — it's because the very inefficiency of the government's approach to things is actually valuable when you're talking about high-risk projects. The free market only has so much tolerance for risk, and requires a pretty quick payoff; the government does not, and that "safety net" seems to allow the genesis of things that otherwise would get priced out of industrial research (unless, say, your industrial research lab, like Bell Labs, was making so much money from government contracts and effective monopolies that it could act like a government in this respect). (A wonderful story recently came out on the non-starter fully private space tourism industry — after a brief flush of success, it seems to have completely collapsed. Why? Because the costs and risks are prohibitively high for private companies, even well-run ones with a lot of technical skill. The repetitive theme of the article — cost, cost, cost — is exactly what government funding has traditionally been able to subvert.)

Anyway, that's coming a bit closer to the present than we're supposed to, but I just want to make it clear that this model is not natural, inevitable, or perpetual. It was the result of very specific circumstances — the coming together of many historical themes at the "right moment" (e.g., a moment where national prosperity and existential fears were both quite high). So it has not always been the case and there is no reason to suspect it will always be the case.

The above is quite a wide-ranging answer so giving specific references is, of course, difficult, but there is quite a nice literature on Cold War science and technology (Audra Wolfe's Competing with the Soviets is a nice overview) and its antecedents. McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History is a decent textbook about the "big trend" evolutions of science vs. technology (I use it when I teach survey courses on this).