New technologies

An article in The Atlantic recently featured this graph, though a more detailed version can be found here:

This chart is rather unremarkable, and it doesn't strongly support the idea that consumption spreads faster today.  Why did it take so long for electricity to be adopted, but such a short time for color TV?  The simplest explanation is infrastructure.  Before the homes in an area can have electricity, a power plant has to be built nearby.  After this, a network of transmission lines needs to be built to deliver the electricity to homes.  All of this requires time, effort, and money.

Television—which was distributed wirelessly for much of the 20th century—only required to be put in the homes.  Units could be produced quickly and transported easily.  Once the technology was available, it could be distributed quickly.  Looking closely at the graph, we see that during their periods of quick growth, radio and color TV matched the growth of the Internet.

Furthermore, this graph ignores the early development of electrical appliances.  The impetus for electric power plants was electric lighting.  However, many electronic appliances were first developed before 1930 to make use of electricity.  The data is not shown, but it is possible that these would have grown quickly to match the prevalence of electricity of the time.