Revolutionary Laws
Over the last couple of days we’ve talked about the Microprocessor Revolution and the Internet Revolution. Before I continue on to the Mobility Revolution, I want to pause and reflect on the so-called “laws” associated with technology revolutions.
These observable phenomenon reflect the forces driving each revolution forward. These forces, combined with the new capabilities enabled by new technologies, make the ultimate outcome of each revolution almost inevitable.
In my book, The Power of Mobility¹, I went back much further than the current digital age to understand how technology has fundamentally changed how we, as individuals, interact with the world around us, and how businesses operate and compete.
I started with the Gutenberg Press in the mid-fifteenth century, which introduced three innovations to dramatically improve the cost and speed of disseminating information. The three innovations were alphabetic movable type, thicker ink that would stick to the press, and improvements in the materials used in making the type.² The law that I associate with the printing press wasn’t formulated until late in the 16th century by Sir Francis Bacon and has become known as Bacon’s Law. It is the now common axiom that “knowledge is power.”
Prior to Gutenberg’s Press, knowledge was largely the monopoly of the church, with most books being hand copied by monks, and the earliest universities being formed in monastic abbeys. The church also exerted tremendous power over the hearts and minds of the people, and often significantly influenced the political rulers. Before Gutenberg’s invention, there were only about 30,000 books in Europe.³ By 1500, 1,000 printing presses were in operation throughout Western Europe and had produced 8 million books.⁴ Over the next 100 years, another 150–200 million books were printed. Between 1450 and 1517, 25 new universities were opened in Europe driven by the availability of books and the demand for education to be able to read them.
But Martin Luther is probably the best example of how the technology revolution unleashed by the printing press was accelerated by the “knowledge is power” observation captured in Bacon’s Law. Luther’s writings, challenging the centralized power of the Roman Catholic Church, were broadly distributed across Germany and then all of Europe thanks to printing presses that could quickly crank out hundreds of copies. The people, long oppressed by the abuses of many in the church, were hungry for direct access to the truths of scripture. The printing press fueled their demand for the Bible and other writings in their own language, education so they could read those works, and reform in the church.
Continuing through history, the next major technology revolution was the Industrial Revolution. In 1712, the first practical steam engine was invented by Thomas Newcomen, and in the 1760s, James Watt significantly improved on that machine with his own invention. The steam engine redefined many industries and arguably restructured society. As one quick snapshot of the changes wrought by this mechanization of industry, the population of London grew from about 700,000 in 1750 to 2,362,000 in 1850.⁵
Prior to this shift, most farm land was owned by wealthy landowners and farmed by tenant farmers. The economy was mostly local and most work was done in and around the home, often involving multiple members of the family. The industrial revolution changed all of that, enabling greater mobility, opening distant markets, and creating clear distinctions between work and home life. Industrialization also required significant capital to build factories. The London Stock Exchange opened in 1801 as a reflection of this shift.
The law that I most strongly associate with the Industrial Revolution is the second law of thermodynamics which states “the entropy of an isolated system not at thermal equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.” This is a complex topic that has been wrestled with for centuries, but one way to think about it is “heat flows from hot places to cold places.” It is this theory that enabled the development of the steam engine and that has driven further improvements in industrial machinery over the centuries.
The increasing efficiency enabled by this mechanization created wealth that spread throughout society, enabled population growth, and fueled the flow of manpower to places (cities) where they could be put to work.
I would identify telecommunications as the third major technology revolution that changed how we interact with the world around us and how business gets done.
In 1791, two French brothers demonstrated the first practical optical telegraph system, but it wasn’t until Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph in the 1830s that long distance telecommunications became a possibility. In 1861, the first transcontinental telegraph line was completed cutting the time to send information from coast to coast from 10 days down to minutes, making the Pony Express obsolete. International routes were also completed around the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to telegraphy, a message from London to Bombay and back would take 10 weeks, but by 1870 this had been reduced to four minutes.
The telegraph effectively enabled the growth of very large businesses with centralized hierarchical command-and-control management styles. It dramatically increased the pace of all kinds of business decisions and fundamentally impacted many industries. It also changed society. Prior to the telegraph, almost all news was local news, and any national or global news would be weeks or months old by the time it reached most people. Telecommunications helped people feel more connected to the world around them and “breaking news” became a thing.
So, what is the law that drove such broad and rapid adoption of this new technology? Writing in 1748, Benjamin Franklin observed that “time is money.” To this very day, businesses invest to shave milliseconds off of the flow of information to gain competitive advantage and make better decisions.
Which brings us up to the digital age and the Microprocessor Revolution. As I noted on Wednesday, in 1965, Gordon Moore observed that every year or so chip density doubles while the price shrinks by half. In 1965 there were very few computers and they were so expensive that they could only be used to perform very valuable tasks. As the availability of processing power has increased and the cost has fallen, computers can be put to work in more and more places to do more and more things. Today, microprocessors are in almost everything and are used to do the most mundane tasks. That reality, unimaginable at the time, is the natural outcome of the observation captured in “Moore’s Law” over 50 years ago.
The Internet Revolution has been powered by an observation known as Metcalfe’s Law. Robert Metcalfe is best known as the inventor of Ethernet, but it is his observation that “the value of any network increases exponentially with the number of participants” that I want to focus on. At one point in time, the easiest way to explain “Metcalfe’s Law” was with fax machines. Having the only fax machine in the world is worthless. Having one of two has some value. But the value increases non-linearly as more and more fax machines exist.
Today, machines that can send faxes have become ubiquitous and yet faxing has become largely obsolete mainly because of the one network that Metcalfe’s Law effectively predicted. As the value of a network increases, and the cost of connecting to that network decreases, there’s a natural moment in time when the cost-benefit ratio dictates that everyone who can join will join that network. Arguably that happened in the late 1990s with the Internet. And as the capabilities of that one network have increased, it has subsumed and made obsolete many of the networks that preceded it.
With that as background, next week we will be ready to proceed with the Mobility Revolution and the law that drove it.
Sources:
¹McGuire, Russell. The Power of Mobility How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the next Technology Revolution. Hoboken, N.J: J. Wiley & Sons, 2007.
²Kreis, Steven, 2000. “The Printing Press,” The History Guide : Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History. www.historyguide.org/intellect/press.html. Copyright 2000 by Steven Kreis.
⁴E. L. Eisenstein: “The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe”, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 13–17, quoted in: Angus Maddison: “Growth and Interaction in the World Economy: The Roots of Modernity”, Washington 2005, p.17f.
⁵Hitchcock, Tim, and Robert Shoemaker, 2003. “Gender in the Proceedings,” Old Bailey Proceedings Online, www.oldbaileyonline.org (June 17).
