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 n the 20th century, a revolution in how work is organized, the development of new materials, and the diffusion of information technology have altered what workers produce and how they work. Advances in transport and communications have kept people on the move and in touch and have fulfilled the human impulse to cross new frontiers, even in space. New sources of energy, from gasoline to nuclear fission, have provided the power. New products and industries have allowed consumers to fill their homes and occupy their leisure time. And the creation of powerful drugs, diagnostic tools, and medical procedures has reduced mortality and enhanced the quality of life. It all makes predicting the future both challenging and hazardous.
Innovation can be an uneven process in which the benefits accrue slowly. Thomas Alva Edison flicked the switch to electrify Pearl Street in lower Manhattan in 1882, and it was nearly 30 years before electric appliances were widely marketed to homemakers. Still, the pace of innovation indisputably picked up in this century—and continues to do so. While the U.S. by no means has a monopoly on inventiveness, it has been the main hotbed since the 1930s. Both Western Europe and Japan focused on post-World War II rebuilding; later, economic rigidities in Europe constrained innovation, while the pace of innovation accelerated in Japan as new technologies and new methods of production were refined. In the U.S., a fortunate confluence of factors has prevailed since the 1930s: ample natural resources, a mass market, a large workforce, an influx of brilliant scientists from Europe and the rest of the world, a unique interplay between private-sector and university research, and a hefty dose of federal dollars funding university work.
Innovation in the 20th century has been spurred by two overriding impulses. The first was the desire to conquer time and achieve speed in every activity. The second was an obsessive preoccupation with scale—be it the most efficient size of an enterprise, the largest market for a product, or the smallest storage space for information.
Cutting travel time is the clearest demonstration of the will to achieve speed. The Wright brothers skimmed the ground at Kill Devil Hills, N.C., flying their fragile biplane at 6.8 mph in 1903. Forty-four years later, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier flying the X-1 test plane high above the Mojave Desert at 670 mph. Speed, though, is not only a matter of moving faster but also of making things faster, selling faster, buying faster, and processing information faster.
Henry Ford embodied the view that time is money. By speeding up production to slash costs, his assembly line permitted Ford to cut car prices and raise wages. That's where scale changes the face of society: The German auto manufacturers were selling cars in the 1890s, well before Ford, but for many years they viewed their potential market as small and elite.
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