The Pietist Schoolman

Earlier this year, according to one study, the smart phone reached an important milestone: 50% market penetration in the United States.

It’s a remarkably quick ascent, but just how remarkable?

I’m no historian of technology, but Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal (author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology) recently looked at a series of now-common technologies and how quickly (or slowly) they became “now-common” in this country and reached 50% penetration. Here’s his list of technologies:

Air conditioning, Automobile, Cell phone, Color TV, Computer, Dishwasher, Dryer, Electricity, Internet, Microwave, Radio, Refrigerator, Stove, Telephone, VCR, Washing machine

In case you’d like to make educated guesses about how quickly they hit 50% penetration, I omitted the dates and put them in alphabetical rather than chronological order. Scroll down to check your guesses:

Here’s the list again, clustered into the decades in which each technology achieved the 50% mark:

• 1920s: electricity (1924), automobile (1925)
  
• 1930s: radio (1931), stove (1937)
• 1940s: refrigerator (1942), telephone (1946), automobile again (1947) (up to 60% as the 1920s drew to a close, the trend reversed during the Great Depression, then World War II — during which Detroit’s factories produced other kinds of vehicles — caused automobile penetration to slip below 50% for a brief time)
• 1950s: none
• 1960s: washing machine (1964)
• 1970s: dryer (1970), color TV (1972), air conditioning (1973)
• 1980s: microwave (1985), VCR (1987)
• 1990s: dishwasher and computer (both 1996)
• 2000s: cell phone (2000), Internet (2001)

Were you surprised by how early or late any of these reached the 50% threshold? Dishwasher seemed awfully late to me, though my grandparents never did/have own(ed) one…

Madrigal is interested in how quickly these technologies became popular, but admits that it’s hard to gauge because there’s rarely a clear start point. Even setting aside years of development, most technologies grow through a series of innovations and don’t have a single “invented in” or “introduced to the general public in” date.

But to give some sense of how they spread… Here’s the list of technologies again, with the year that each reached 10%, 50%, and 90% penetration. (The first and third dates are very rough, my best guess using a graph reproduced as a not-so-high resolution GIF.) 10% as an indicator of when something ceased to be an oddity and became a somewhat well-known curiosity, or a luxury good; 90% as the flip side: when not having the technology was clearly out of the ordinary.

	10%	50%	90%
Electricity	1910	1924	1949
Automobile	1916	1925	1988
Radio	1926	1931	1947
Stove	1900	1937	1956
Refrigerator	1931	1942	1954
Telephone	1914	1946	1975
Washing machine	1930	1964	?
Dryer	1956	1970	?
Color TV	1966	1972	1986
Air conditioning	1957	1973	?
Microwave	1980	1985	?
VCR	1985	1987	?
Dishwasher	1963	1996	?
Computer	1985	1996	?
Cell phone	1994	2000	?
Internet	1994	2001	?

Clearly, some things caught on more quickly than others. The five fastest: VCR (2 years from 10% to 50%), radio and microwave (5 years each), and color TV and cell phone (6 each). The five slowest: stove (37 years), washing machine (34), dishwasher (33), telephone (32), and air conditioning (16).

I’d be fascinated to know more about the history of the stove. (And if these numbers reflect only gas or electric stoves, or those that burned wood or other fuels…) Why did it spread so gradually?? Then why did it get from 50% to 90% relatively quickly (faster than cars, electricity, or telephones)?

Indeed, the stove is the major exception to one rule apparent from the above chart: it generally takes longer to get from 50% to 90% than from 10% to 50%. The automobile is the glaring example of this: though complicated by what I noted above about the impact of the Great Depression and WWII, that it took over 60 years to get from being something that most people owned to a true commonplace item probably reflects the fact that it’s easily the most expensive (and therefore risky) purchase on this list.

Related to this is the other thing that jumps out at you from that 10/50/90 chart: most of these technologies still have not reached 90% penetration. The graph from Madrigal’s article only goes up through 2005; but even adding cell phone and microwave (just under 90% seven years ago), you’re still left with several technologies that seem to have plateaued at lower levels of penetration (air conditioning, washing machine, and clothes dryer, stuck at 88%, 82%, and 79%, respectively) or are even starting to fall off (VCR, already becoming obsolete in 2005; and computer, tailing off seven years ago, and that before tablets had emerged as a cheaper alternative).

Interestingly, two other Atlantic contributors also contemplated the pace and impact of technological innovation last week:

First, business editor Derek Thompson dissected a graph showing how many hours Americans spent on different types of communication from 1900 to the present day. A few highlights:

• When the 20th century started, Americans averaged 6 hours of communication, four of them in person.
• The addition of radio didn’t really change that, but added two more hours to the tally.
• Our current average of 10 hours spent communicating each day was actually reached in the 1980s, long before the addition of e-mail, IM, social media, etc., which haven’t added to the total but have certainly changed how we communicate.

Then if you haven’t yet got your fill of Atlantic writing about technology, be sure to read Wheaton professor Alan Jacobs, who looked at J.R.R. Tolkien’s well-known antipathy to “The Machine” and how that theme has continued to resonate with fantasy writers. “What would a fantasy that embraces technology look like?”, asked Jacobs. “Arthur Weasley’s fascination with Muggle tech in the Harry Potter books is simply comical — though a great source of fun in the books. I’d like to see a writer imagine what technologies would arise in a fictional world where magic rules but is not the only game in town. Is that too much to ask?”