Are We Inventing the Wrong Stuff?
Between 1860 and 1900, inventors created the telephone, phonograph, moving pictures and air transportation. Thomas Edison tested the first practical lightbulb, Karl Benz built a workable internal combustion engine and David Edward Hughes transmitted the first wireless signal – and they did it during just one three-month period in 1879. The result was a golden age of economic growth from about 1900 through the 1960s, with a broad-based rise in incomes across the industrialized world.