Recently I got to thinking how crazy fast technology has progressed in the past few decades. With the first iPhone just coming out just 12 years ago, and it was amazing, and now practically everyone has a magic computer phone in their pocket, and we even have cars that can literally drive themselves.

 

But with only a couple decades of personal experience, I'm curious what it was like during the early 20th century, and earlier. We only learn about the big major discoveries in school, so it seems like in the past technology progressed randomly in big bursts, and then long periods of not much going on. But I'm sure that's not quite accurate.

 

Obviously this is a pretty vague and open ended question, so hopefully you can understand what I'm getting at. I guess another way of phrasing it, is has humanity always progressed at a speed that made people think "wow technology improves so fast" no matter what time period we were in?