Not
all technology is the future. Some technology
succeeds in a changing society and some fails.
And even when an idea is right, the machine that introduces it to the
society may not be. Cai Lun did not
invent paper, Gutenberg did not invent the printing press, Robert Fulton did
not invent the steamboat, and Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb. Rather, these were people who took existing
ideas or machines that were not suiting society’s needs and reworked them into
technologies that did. It says something
about our world that we seldom remember the person who came up with an idea,
but canonize the pragmatist who made it commercially viable.
(from Paper –
Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky)
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