When a truly great new invention appears, people rarely greet it with the reverence that hindsight later bestows. Instead, they squint at it through the lens of the familiar. They ask: What is this like? And because it is not like anything they already know, they underestimate it.
History is littered with inventions that, at birth, seemed trivial, eccentric, impractical, or merely entertaining. Only later did they reveal themselves as civilisational turning points.
The Automobile.
The Telephone.
Wireless (radio).
Television.
Computers.
The Internet.
Electricity itself.
All were, at first, misunderstood not because they were obscure, but because they were too new for the categories available to people at the time. A similar phenomenon appears to be happening now with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
This is not just a failure of foresight. It is a deeper cognitive limitation: a failure of imagination constrained by analogy.
The Automobile “The horseless carriage”
The automobile followed the same pattern of dismissal. Early cars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were noisy, unreliable, expensive contraptions compared with the perfectly serviceable horse. Many observers saw them as toys for the wealthy or curiosities for enthusiasts. After all, roads were built for carts, cities were designed for pedestrians, and transport needs were already met by horses, trains, and trams. What people failed to imagine was not that cars could go faster than horses, but that the entire physical layout of society would reorganise around them. Suburbs would spread far from city centres. Highways would carve through landscapes. Shopping centres, motels, petrol stations, and drive-through culture would emerge. Commuting, tourism, freight, and even courtship patterns would change. The car was judged as a replacement for the horse; in reality, it reshaped geography, architecture, economics, and daily life.
The Telephone: “A toy for the curious”
When Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone in 1876, many saw it as a novelty. Western Union famously declined to buy the patent, judging it to have “no commercial possibilities.” Why? Because people already had the telegraph. Messages could be sent across distance. What more was needed?
They saw the telephone as an inferior telegraph — slower, less precise, dependent on real-time attention. They did not see that it would replace letters, visits, social arrangements, business practice, and eventually change the rhythm of daily life.
They evaluated the invention in terms of what it resembled, not what it would replace.
Electricity: “A laboratory curiosity”
Early electricity demonstrations in the 19th century were essentially spectacles. Sparks, glowing filaments, odd contraptions. Many educated observers considered it a scientific curiosity with limited practical use.
Gas lighting already worked. Mechanical power already existed. Heat already existed. What problem did electricity solve?
The mistake was assuming that electricity would merely compete with existing methods of doing existing things. No one foresaw electric motors in every factory, electric lighting in every home, refrigeration, telecommunications, computing, or medical devices. Electricity did not just do something better — it enabled entirely new categories of activity.
Television: “A passing amusement”
Early television in the 1930s and 40s was regarded as a technical marvel but culturally trivial. Many thought it would be a niche entertainment device, a novelty like the magic lantern or the phonograph.
What people failed to imagine was not the picture on the screen, but the social centrality of the screen. They could not foresee:
- The living room reorganised around it
- Advertising reshaping consumer culture
- Politics transformed by image rather than text
- Shared national narratives created through broadcast media
They saw television as an extension of radio with pictures. They did not see that it would become the dominant cultural force of the 20th century.
Computers: “Glorified calculators”
In the 1940s and 50s, computers were regarded as specialised machines for mathematical calculation. Even into the 1970s, many experts thought there might be a market for “a few dozen” worldwide.
Why? Because people thought computers were for doing arithmetic faster. They could not conceive that a computer was a general symbol-manipulation machine.
They did not imagine:
- Word processing replacing typewriters
- Databases replacing filing cabinets
- Graphics, music, video, design, communication
- Personal computing as an extension of thought itself
They saw the computer as a better calculator, not as a new intellectual prosthesis.
The Internet: “A faster library”
In the 1990s, many people understood the internet as a convenient way to access information — an electronic encyclopedia. Few predicted:
- Social media
- E-commerce dominating retail
- Remote work
- Streaming replacing broadcast
- The collapse of newspapers
- Political movements organised online
- The digitisation of nearly all human communication
They saw it as a faster way to do what libraries and mail already did.
They did not see that it would rewire social, economic, and political life.
Why are such inventions under appreciated?
It is tempting to say this is a failure of imagination. But that is only partly true. It is more accurate to say:
People understand new inventions by analogy to old ones.
And analogy is conservative.
We ask:
- “What is this like?”
- “What job does this do?”
- “What existing thing does this replace?”
But transformative inventions do not merely replace — they redefine the landscape in which replacement even makes sense.
Electricity did not replace candles.
The computer did not replace calculators.
The internet did not replace libraries.
They changed the structure of human activity.
And humans are poor at imagining structural change because we live inside current structures. We cannot easily conceive of how our habits, institutions, and expectations might be reorganised.
The hidden pattern: Platform inventions
The inventions most underestimated share a common feature: they are platform technologies. They are not single tools. They are foundations upon which thousands of unforeseen tools will later be built.
- Electricity is a platform for countless devices.
- The computer is a platform for countless applications.
- The internet is a platform for countless services.
At the moment of invention, only the platform exists. The ecosystem does not yet exist. So observers judge the invention by what it can do right now, rather than what it will enable later.
This is like judging the value of the printing press before books, newspapers, pamphlets, and literacy movements exist.
The time lag of imagination
There is also a temporal asymmetry. The inventors often glimpse possibilities others cannot. But society at large needs time — sometimes decades — to develop:
- Use cases
- Cultural practices
- Business models
- Institutions
The invention arrives before the world is ready to understand it.
By the time the world understands it, the invention seems obvious in retrospect.
The present lesson
We are likely repeating this pattern now with artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing.
Many people see AI today as:
- A better search engine
- A writing assistant
- A coding helper
This is exactly how people once saw computers: a better calculator.
History strongly suggests that when an invention is interpreted as a marginal improvement to existing tools, we are probably underestimating it.
Conclusion
The under appreciation of great inventions is not mere short-sightedness. It arises from a deep feature of human cognition: we interpret the new in terms of the old.
But transformative inventions are not incremental. They do not fit into existing categories. They create new ones.
We cannot easily imagine how our way of life will reorganise around them, because we are embedded in our current way of life.
So we ask, innocently and reasonably:
“What use is this?”
And history answers, decades later:
“It changed everything.”
The Logical Place 
