Inventions don’t just come out of nowhere. The social environment present greatly affects the invention and therefore the advancement of technology. Why you might ask? The answer might be more obvious than you think.
For someone to be able to invent something they must have a combination of three things: Time, Money, and Resources. People who are working constantly to live are not people who have the free time and energy to not only think about a possible invention, but the ability to actually execute it.
Take a look at the silk industry. The only reason this industry was able to become what it was because a social environment of people with excess time and money allowed for it. The same thing is true for many other inventions that led to huge advancements in various industries. Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented the jacquard loom in the early 1800s, which helped boost the silk industry. The idea of a loom that used the concept of a punch card helped to inspire future inventors by demonstrating how information could be encoded, stored, and automatically executed by a machine. The punch cards operated on a binary system, the idea of hole or no hole, that mirrors what we see today with the digital system of either a 0 or a 1.
Similarities can be seen between this invention and the invention of the telegraph by Samuel Morse which transformed language into binary-like code (dots and dashes in Morse code) for long-distance communication. This system laid the foundation for digital communication networks that would eventually help to develop the internet. Other technological advancements came through the work of Alexander Graham Bell who invented the telephone in 1876.
By the 1900s, newer technologies like vacuum tubes came to be which boosted electrical systems to farther distances, but used a lot of power, heat, and were very bulky. Transistors came to replace these tubes eventually, because they were mass-producible, much smaller, and used less power. Moore’s Law allowed chips to get smaller and smaller while increasing the amount of information held on a single one. This development is what allows us to have the digital technologies we do today, such as pocket sized smartphones, and laptops.
All of the technological advancements that were involved in the journey to the digital world we live in today would not have been possible without the visionaries and inventors living in social environments that gave them the time and money to be creative and invent freely.