I wish I’d seen this before the Boom-Box adoption story, because it ties in: The 100-Year March of Technology in 1 Graph, though the overlap of the technologies under discussion isn’t complete.
You can see the effects I previously mentioned, namely cost, infrastructure and quality of the new product — most adoption that requires infrastructure to be developed alongside sees a change in slope once you reach critical mass.
Some tidbits I find interesting: The depression and WWII dips, from the economic pressure of high unemployment and then “we’re building tanks, not cars/washing machines”, but that refrigerators and radio did not experience the same effect. Refrigerator penetration was low during the depression, so the well-off could still afford to adopt the technology and it does see a slightly slower increase during WWII but doesn’t drop. It was just that important of a technology. Radio was a source of cheap entertainment and got its start enough before the depression to be unduly hampered by it.
Another is the double-kink timeline of the computer. The first being around 1982, which would coincide with the first Macintosh computer, probably along with adoption of word processing machines in the business world. The second looks to be 1995, which is probably driven by Windows 95 being introduced.
The article also discusses the notion of what it means to be poor. I know there are those with the attitude that if you own a few gadgets, you can’t be considered poor, but I disagree. Having some disposable income at a few interval of your life, or being able to save a few dollars up to eventually buy something, does not move you from those ranks. Because of the way your surroundings develop, what was once considered a luxury becomes a necessity. Once upon a time cars were a luxury, then one car was middle class and having two was being well-off. But as having a car became the norm in most places, that economic reality helped drive things like the rise of strip malls, and suburban sprawl. The ubiquity of cars meant the ability to skimp on public transportation. The result is that cars are much more of a necessity, and the divide is now not simply owning a car or not, but whether/how often you can buy a new one, or whether you have to make do with an old beater of a car, and all the problems inherent in owning a less-than-reliable vehicle. Refrigeration is another example. At some point the adoption of electric refrigerators meant that selling blocks of ice was no longer viable and those businesses closed, which meant that iceboxes had to be replaced with refrigerators. It’s no longer a choice between the two, with one for the middle class and above and the other for the less fortunate.
One small nit – 1982 corresponds to the introduction of the IBM PC. Before that, the Apple II and the many small CP/M vendors owned the market. IBM came in with a turnkey system branded with their big name, and a $5000 total price for computer, monitor, and printer which was coincidentally exactly what a doctor or lawyer could write off on their taxes as a professional expense.
As for radios, early market growth was hampered by patent battles, but by the late ’30s this had mostly sorted itself out, so what resources there were available during the war could be used to build the fairly standardized All-American 5 (see wikipedia for details) design. In other words, the boost of standardization approximately canceled the dip that war scarcity would otherwise have produced.
In addition to the “we’re building tanks, not cars” effect, there’s also the “the Army won’t let me bring a car with me to Omaha Beach” effect. Both supply and demand were suppressed.
The big drop in phones during the depression caught my attention. Losing your car in that era is quite easy to understand, but it really shows how tough things must have been if many people were also giving up such a small appliance as a phone. But perhaps I’m underestimating how much phone-service subscriptions cost as a percentage of typical income back then.
There are also some very curious sharp peaks and valleys in phone ownership in the late fifties and early sixties. No other curve has those jagged parts, and I can’t think of any social or technological causes. Is this maybe not a real effect but rather just a data-collection problem? (After all, we’re all familiar with noisy phone lines…)
Post WW-II recovery in washing machine ownership looks rather slow, but I’ll bet that was just people choosing to save up for that long-delayed car purchase first before saving up for a washing machine.
@Milan Yes, the IBM PC undoubtedly had a large share of that jump.
@Emory I hadn’t considered the demand drop from having 15 million people in the military, but it certainly makes sense. There was also rationing at home that would have hampered demand, too. Some probably thought “Why bother with a car if it’s that much of a pain to buy gas and tires?”
got any links to these graphs? sounds an interesting gander 😀
and i don’t exactly understand what your trying to portray, the fact hat if you own a PC, phone and kindle you can still be poor or below the poverty line?
NVM i missed the link lol