Historical graph showing the adoption of new technologies in the United States (designed by Nicholas Felton that I found via the New York Times). For example look at percentage of households that had telephones over the last 100 years and compared this to the time it took for cellphones to be adopted.
{Click on the image to take a closer look}
Technorati Tags: consumption, technology, United States
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Great stuff
Why is the market penetration of radio higher than the penetration of electricity between about 1934 and 1947? What were the other 3% of radios running on?
It would be interesting to see technologies that died, like trash compactors on the graph.
Also, any idea what’s next? PVR. iPhone. HDTV. …?
Where’s the source for this data? Nick Felton doesn’t say his source.
@Martin (who asked about penetration of electricity and radio): 1934 to 1947 was wartime, so I guess a lot of people used portable radios then. I checked the census (census.gov): In 1947 the US had around 39.000 households, so 3% were about 1,200 households who used radios, but didn’t have electricity yet. Quite realistic, don’t you think?
The graphs create only an illusion of faster adoption rate for new technologies because we are not comparing like with like. Once people are used to phones a better kind of phone is quick to be taken up, but the cell phone is a tiny step in comparison to the whole phone thing. Each decade of bandwidth is worth nearly a decade less per baud. To understand this, just think about what a single transatlantic morse line was worth to an arbitrageur competing with a guy using letters on a fast steamer.
An early radio used no power at all. On the 200KHz long wave band a 10 meter aerial 200 KM from a 1MW transmitter can drive headphones just from the aerial energy. Now we can buy am FM radio that winds up with clock work.
I would guess that the biggest contributor has been lower costs. The global industrial complex, over the last 100 years has become more interconnected and sophisticated. Lowering costs significantly reduces early-adopter risks.
This is super.
What is the source of Nicholas Felton’s technology adoption data?
Thanks!
Unfortunately, I don’t know but the article the graph came from was a op-ed written by W. Michael Cox chief economist and Richard Alm senior economics writer at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
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