The miraculous 1880s

According to the worshippers of the e-world, the late 20th century brought us an unprecedented number of profound inventions. But that is a categorical misunderstanding, as most recent advances have been variations on the microprocessor theme and on the parsing of the electromagnetic spectrum. Perhaps the most inventive time was the 1880s. Have any two sets of primary inventions and epochal discoveries shaped the modern world more than electricity and internal combustion engines? ??? Electricity alone, without microchips, is enough to make a sophisticated and affluent world (we had one in the 1960s). Yet a microchip-governed e-world is utterly dependent on an electricity supply whose fundamental design remains beholden to thermal- and hydropowered- generation systems, both reaching the commercial market in 1882, which still provide more than 80 percent of the world???s electricity. And we aspire to make it available at least 99.9999 percent of the time, so that it can serve as the cornerstone of everything electronic. Add to that the feats of Benz, Maybach, and Daimler, whose success with gasoline-fueled engines inspired Rudolf Diesel to come up with a more efficient alternative just a decade later. By the end of the 19th century we also had conceptual designs of the most efficient of all internal-combustion engines, the gas turbine. And it was in the 1880s that Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of electromagnetic waves (which had been predicted by James Clerk Maxwell decades earlier). Hertz thus paved the way to our wireless world.