Rapid Development

A quick trip through time – industrial-digital revolutions and their impact on our everyday life.

Many digital technologies that we use every day today already existed in mechanical or analog form a long time ago. It is therefore all the more interesting to go back to their origins in a digital journey through time and marvel at how technical development in the world of bits and bytes has accelerated compared to the past.

Five revolutions – one goal

Less hardship, shorter manufacturing times, the better use of resources, greater efficiency and safety – all inventions and developments throughout the five industrial revolutions that have come to pass in total aim to make work and private life easier for people. For example by eliminating the need to complete monotonous, repetitive tasks, by having heavy loads lifted by machines, or by automating safety-relevant processes. The first revolutions focused on heavy industry and agriculture, with machines making work and manufacturing processes significantly easier and faster. The technical and mechanical developments then got a massive boost with the ready availability of electricity in the 1920s and the invention of the computer in the 1970s. Because this not only made it easier to complete tasks and execute processes, but also allowed processes to be managed and controlled and for the safety and reliability of processes to be ensured.

A look back from the digital perspective

In the fourth industrial revolution, which involved digitization, business and social processes were expanded with a new facet that surprises us almost every day with new possibilities – including artificial intelligence. The many digital helpers combined with better and better sensors and the availability of the Internet nearly everywhere facilitate not only a safe and convenient work and private life, but also an interesting look back – at things and processes that required a great deal of patience and time “back then”: inexplicable faults that could bring an entire factory to a grinding halt, improperly adjusted measuring instruments that caused incorrect loads or customs tariffs, mechanical time clocks for recording working time, and illegible chalkboards for shift planning. And communication itself was a nightmare compared to today, with the only thing that was “interconnected” back then being the tie-downs that secured loads on trucks.

Increased focus on people

Alongside digitization, the topic of sustainability has also climbed ever higher in the global list of priorities. The term “efficiency” has gained a key new facet: the optimal use of the employed materials and effort. In our highly developed society, resource efficiency is impossible without digitalised know-how. And this efficiency pertains not only to the use of raw materials and machines, but also human labour. We took a look at this improvement of efficiency and helping people in this article about Industry 5.0.

Join us in our digital time travel on Facebook and Linkedin, where we take a look at the past from the “digital perspective”!