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Word: faster (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
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Usage:

Fortunately for him, America during the post-Civil War boom of the 1870s was famished for faster and more reliable ways of doing business. An improvement Edison made in the stock ticker eventually earned him $40,000, a considerable sum at the time. He used this windfall to set up and staff a shop in Newark, N.J., to manufacture these tickers. But other companies began besieging Edison for technical advice, and in 1876 he moved his operation to Menlo Park and created the world's first industrial-research facility, a humming workplace dedicated to improving or creating new products...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: 19th Century: Thomas Edison (1847-1931) | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

...more tethered we become, the faster things change, because the tethers are plugging people into the very social collaboration that drives the change. Science, technology, music, politics--flux in all these realms is hastened by the new electronic synergy. The Internet and allied technologies make us neurons in a vast social brain, a brain that keeps enticing us into making it bigger, stronger, faster. We have, you might say, a Web to weave...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

...Kremer has noted, Mother Nature happened to conduct an experiment that underscored the value of large social brains. Melting polar ice caps severed Tasmania from Australia and the New World from the Old World. Thereafter, just as you would expect, the larger the landmass and hence the population, the faster subsistence technology progressed. The people of the vast Old World invented farming before the people of the smaller (and, at first, thinly populated) New World. And the Aborigines of yet smaller Australia never farmed. As for tiny Tasmania, modern explorers, on contacting the Tasmanians, found them lacking such Australian essentials...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

Early writing didn't spur invention the way writing does now. There were no technical journals to convey news of inventions, no patents to file. No, the main service of writing, like that of farming, was to permit bigger, faster social brains; to allow neurons to be packed more densely still, further boosting intellectual synergy. After all, it was via writing that royal bureaucracies kept large cities functioning. And writing also meant clear, precise legal codes, which kept urban life peaceful, even though people now lived cheek by jowl with lots of other people who were neither friends nor family...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

...transmission of data, whether by sound, print or image--only raised the chances of further advances. Via endless positive feedback, the technological infrastructure for a mature global brain was, in a sense, building itself. And so it had been, ever since the Middle Paleolithic: the story of humankind is faster and vaster data processing...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Web We Weave | 12/31/1999 | See Source »

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