It took radio 38 years to catch on; Facebook just two

A little more than two decades ago, when I was living in France, I passed an exhibition centre outside Paris and was drawn by a series of enticing posters advertising the annual gathering of a Society of Inventors.

Three hours later I left with my mind boggling at the ingenuity of humankind. Most of the new inventions on show were not the products of well funded commercial or state research laboratories, but of ordinary citizens working diligently in basements and garages to bring something new to the world.

I was sad to learn from the organisers that while almost every new invention had enormous merit in terms of contributing to the advance of society, few saw the light of day, because inventing something was the easy part. It was mass-manufacturing and marketing that caused stumbling blocks.

But it is in the field of information technology today that ordinary people can invent things, sell them and market them without it costing a fortune, with the result that technology is advancing at an ever increasing pace.

So much so that according to my good friend and media specialist Chris Brewer, the amount of new technical information available to the world is doubling every two years. As a result, for students starting a three-year technical degree at university, half of what they learn in their first year will be outdated by their third year of study.

Right now we are the most informed human beings of all time. It is estimated that a week’s worth of newspapers contains more information than an average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.

Which reminds me of another statistic I read recently. Ten percent of all people born since the time of Adam and Eve are alive today. And if that suggests that the world population has grown like Topsy, it is nothing compared to the growth in information technology.

According to Chris Brewer, the first commercial text message (SMS) was sent in December 1992. Today, the number of SMS text messages sent and received every day exceeds the total population of the planet. Hardly surprising when one considers that there are, for example, more cellphones in South Africa than there are people.

Something else he pointed out to illustrate the rapid advance in humankind’s embracing of information technology were statistical data on the amount of time it took for various media to reach an audience of 50 million people.

Radio: 38 years
TV: 13 years
Internet: 4 years
iPod: 3 years
Facebook: 2 years

In 1984 there were only one thousand devices in the world capable of accessing the Internet. Eight years later this had reached one million. Last year it reached one billion, and there will be little surprise if this figure doubles within the next few years.

And still new inventions come thick and fast in spite of the enormous cost of development, initial manufacture and marketing.

According to research I did on the Internet, the most important inventions of 2008 included pollution-eating cement, high altitude flying windmills, bionic contact lenses, and believe it or not, plastic produced from pig urine.

Last year also saw a new Dutch invention coming on stream in Holland: the world’s first power station producing electricity entirely from chicken droppings. It came as no surprise to me that this remarkable achievement in finding a novel use for excrement happened in the Dutch town of Moerdijk.

While I remain somewhat bemused and cynical of pig-urine plastic, I was absolutely fascinated by the concept of cement that could devour smog and other urban pollution.

According to the Italian manufacturers, TX Active self-cleaning and pollution-mitigating cement can reduce pollution (nitric oxides) by up to 60%. It contains a titanium dioxide-based photocatalyser. Through photocatalysis, the product reduces the maintenance requirements for concrete by destroying most pollutants that cause discoloration. The cement also effectively destroys airborne pollutants responsible for pollution. The product can be used any place regular cement is being used.

One of the judges for the invention of the year commented: “This one gets my vote. If we’re going to pave paradise, let’s at least give paradise a fighting chance to recover.”

I’m sure that every heavenly host must have smiled at that comment, and I’ve no doubt that the head of that Italian company should be getting some sort of papal award for developing something that, for once, is not destroying the wonderful world God gave us.