Born in 1890, my great-grandfather had great-uncles who fought in the Civil War. He saw the invention of the automobile, the airplane, two world wars, and saw the Apollo 11 moon landing a month before he died.
I was born in the 80s, I have been trying to take stock of how much life has changed since then. Cable television? Satellite television? Cell phones to smartphones? The internet? Life hasn’t seemed to have made much progress. When we get down to it life isn’t radically different now than it was in 80s. Just hoping there is more that I’m simply not noticing
Well, I disagree with the premise.
But perhaps one of the more obvious physical examples are Blue and White LEDs (1992). Small gadgets used to always have red LEDs, maybe green ones, or an unlit 7 segment display, everything else was too expensive or too energy consuming for battery powered devices. And not only that, RGB Diodes also saw the end of pretty much all cathode-ray tubes.
You see kids, back in the olden days before white LEDs, the only way to get blue light was to throw high energy electron ray on a phosphor coating. So anything blue or white before the 90s was made with that technology, from car radios to TV screens.
I’d personally also keep an eye out what the cheap electric motor will do next. From “hoverboards”, civilian drones, e-scooters and the modern e-bike, it’s only a matter of time before the new use case will emerge.
The story behind blue LEDs is actually super interesting. They were developed by a single Japanese engineer who refused to stop working on his project even after the company had pulled the rug out from underneath him multiple times. He had to completely rethink the way LEDs were made up to that point. And he only had the technical skills to do so because the company refused to fund him, and he was forced to repair his own machine from an old scrapped one. So he knew the machine inside and out, and was able to modify it in ways that other companies hadn’t thought to do. His name is Shuji Nakamura, and his story is definitely worth a read, if you have the time to google it.