Yeah, could be. Could also be related to the car, or electricity adoption. They were both a little earlier, but things moved slower back then too… And they were perhaps more directly impactful to many, especially the middle class.
But I’m not sure whether those were actually financial bubbles… though I guess they might have inspired some kind of excessive technological optimism regardless. It would be super cool to see a time series of public faith in technology over time…
edit: now that I look at it - are those initial down-turns in electricity and autos (and the telephone) adoption between 1925-1930 indications of a bubble burst? I guess poverty probably drove them, but presumably there were factory ramp-ups before that that resulted in excessive production capacity?
this graph is neat because if i didn’t know what any of these are, i would presume Refrigerator is the most powerful and important invention every adopted, reaching ubiquity (>80% adoption) over the period from 1929 to 1945, ending the depression and winning WWII
Yeah, could be. Could also be related to the car, or electricity adoption. They were both a little earlier, but things moved slower back then too… And they were perhaps more directly impactful to many, especially the middle class.
https://medium.com/@kjirstecm/how-fast-does-technology-change-78d4185121a8
But I’m not sure whether those were actually financial bubbles… though I guess they might have inspired some kind of excessive technological optimism regardless. It would be super cool to see a time series of public faith in technology over time…
edit: now that I look at it - are those initial down-turns in electricity and autos (and the telephone) adoption between 1925-1930 indications of a bubble burst? I guess poverty probably drove them, but presumably there were factory ramp-ups before that that resulted in excessive production capacity?
this graph is neat because if i didn’t know what any of these are, i would presume Refrigerator is the most powerful and important invention every adopted, reaching ubiquity (>80% adoption) over the period from 1929 to 1945, ending the depression and winning WWII
Now that you mention it, it’s pretty wild that it kept climbing throughout WW2, when cars and clothes washers dipped.
Possibly there’s some artefacts in the data though, I guess. But yeah, definitely a cool graph with a lot of stories to tell.