progress

Tomorrow's children will become tomorrow's adults in a world where the sort of life taken for granted over the past half-century -- school until you're 18 (or 21, or 25...), a decent job at a living wage, and a retirement supported by pensions and Social Security -- will become as archaic as a nation of farmers is today.

You might be tempted to reject the notion of a future that looks radically different from our present, but recent history offers more than enough evidence of dramatic change from one generation to the next.

Someone born in 1800 might have lived to see their children become the first to travel on machines -- the locomotive or the steamship -- but someone born in 1900 might have lived to see their children travel further in an aircraft in one day than their parents traveled in a decade.

• "A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere." -- The New York Times , 1920.

The first rocket to accomplish this "impossible" feat was the German V-2 in 1944 , and the first American rocket to leave Earth's atmosphere went up two years later, in 1946 . The Times did not retract its claim until 1969, as Apollo 11 roared toward the Moon.

• "Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia." -- Early science writer Dr. Dionysius Larder , 1828 .

At this time, rail travel typically topped out at about 15 miles per hour . Passenger locomotives first reached speeds of 60 miles per hour by 1848, and first broke the 100-miles-per-hour mark in 1893.

• "There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom." -- Robert Millikan , winner of the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics, 1928.

German chemist Otto Hahn was the first to split a uranium atom, by bombarding it with neutrons in experiments beginning in 1934. The first controlled self-sustaining nuclear reaction  took place underneath a field at the University of Chicago, under the direction of Enrico Fermi, in 1942.

• "The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty -- a fad." -- President of the Michigan Savings Bank, to Ford investor and inaugural chairman Horace Rackham , 1903.

Some 11,000 automobiles were built in 1903 . A decade later, the industry built over 370,000 vehicles . By 1924, Ford dominated the auto industry, producing 1.7 million out of an estimated 3.6 million  vehicles. Rackham sold his shares back to Henry Ford in 1919 for $12.5 million (roughly $300 million today), netting a 250,000% gain on his initial $5,000 investment.

• "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."  -- Scottish mathematician and creator of the Kelvin temperature scale William Thomson, Lord Kelvin , 1895.

The Wright Brothers completed their first successful flight at Kitty Hawk a mere eight years later, in 1903.

• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olsen , founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977 .

The "big three" of the first personal computing era all went on sale in 1977. Over 700,000 personal computers were sold in 1980 , and by 1987 annual sales surpassed nine million machines. By the time Olsen retired from DEC in 1992, nearly 65 million personal computers  were in use in the United States alone.

The march of progress has been strong for over two centuries now, lifting billions out of a hardscrabble life largely indistinguishable from that of the first farmers. But technology also steadily improved before the Industrial Revolution, though at a rate slower than might be appreciated by those living in earlier times. Why has it taken so long to get to the point where we now take progress for granted? It's because progress accelerates. It took hundreds of thousands of years to get from fire to the farm, but only a few thousand years more to get from the farm to the aqueduct. Major leaps forward took less and less time. Aqueduct gave way to cannon, which gave way to printing press, which gave way to steam engine, which gave way to telegraph. Progress accelerates because it proceeds at an exponential rate.

[and on and on he goes.  This is probably the longest article I've ever seen at fool.com.  Practically a book..]