Compression

Compression

I had one of those "aha" moments the other day when I saw these powerful charts for the first time. It’s not that I didn’t realize that we humans have been adopting new technologies faster and faster over the last century (that would be a "duh" moment).  It’s that I didn’t realize just how much faster the adoption had gotten relative to other technologies.

The first chart here, from a report issued by the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, shows the U.S. household penetration of new technologies on the vertical axis and years from date of introduction on the horizontal axis.

And in case that wasn’t a clear enough visual representation, here’s the critical tabular data.

It just makes me wonder — what’s next on the list, and how vertical will its line be?  Thanks to Carl Turza for pointing me to this interesting data.