Jonah: Your correspondent makes Mark Steyn’s point. The advance in (say)

fighter-plane technology from 1897 to 1947 was an advance from ABOLUTELY

NOTHING WHATSOEVER to the first fighter jets. The advance from 1947 to 1997

was from those first fighter jets to somewhat faster, safer, better-equipped

fighter jets.

I first rode a commercial passenger plane in 1964. The last time I rode in

one was about a week ago. That’s 41 years. If you asked me to describe the

differences in those two experiences 41 years apart, I’d have to think a

bit, scratch my head, before I could come up with something. (The only

thing I can come up with, in fact, is that there was unrestricted smoking

on the 1964 plane. And I think it was prop driven, not a jet, though jet

passenger planes were flying.)

If you wind back another 41 years, to 1923, there were (I think) no

commercial passenger planes at all.

Sure, there is technological progress all the time. It just isn’t dramatic,

as it was from 1850 to 1950. It’s incremental improvements at the margin,

not great big stunning novelties like cars, planes, and atom bombs.

Somewhere at the heart of this is the matter of low-hanging fruit. Flight

technology started, in the period 1900-1920, as an Everyman’s game. Anyone

with a good set of wrenches, a handful of basic scientific ideas, and some

perseverance, could get into the flying business. Then it all moved on to a

game that only $1bn corporations with 5,000-man research teams could play.

Same thing with computer software. (I bought my first PC in 1987, got a

copy of the 8088 book, and Peter Norton’s guide to Assembler Language, and

an MS Assembler, and started tweaking the OS. Try that with Windows XP!)

What was the year — it seems to me to have been around 1975 — when

18-year-old males stopped giving over their Saturday mornings to fiddling

with the insides of their cars?