The story of the United States is one that is inextricably intertwined with technology, from the railroads that connected the nation’s first settlements to the telegraph lines that connected early cities. But, as generations have come and gone, the sheer transformative power and impact of those early technologies that helped change the continent seemingly faded away, consigned to the history books and museums as relics of another time.
However, those technologies are not truly gone. The descendants of those original technologies have become just as, if not even more, impactful, and today they are transforming the nation and its society all over again.
The telegraph, for example, was replaced by faster fixed-line telephone systems, which was in time usurped by more mobile communications technologies. First came 1G, then 2G, 3G, and 4G, and now, arguably just a scant six generations from the original telegraph system that connected people using clicks and whirs, the world lives online, embracing a new type of clicks, and communicating and experiencing life in bits and bytes - something that would have been inconceivable to our pioneering ancestors. In this world, science fiction is increasingly difficult to distinguish from science fact.