It didn’t take long for this group of optical aficionados to realize what they witnessed was nothing short of history — in those days, developing photographs required mixing a batch of messy chemicals. The Polaroid Land Camera, which went on sale in Boston on Nov. 26, 1948, for $89.95, used a unique film that sandwiched chemicals between exposed negatives and the receiving positives and that, when peeled apart, showed images almost instantly.
Little did Land know that his invention would help usher in a new era in which instant gratification would rule the day. And it was all due to the impatience of little Jennifer, Land’s three-year-old daughter, who had complained that it took too long to develop photographic film.
Land’s revolution would reverberate throughout the world. His invention was the first in a series of products that exposed consumers to the seductive qualities of immediate gratification. The art of photography has changed markedly since then. People rarely get to see prints at all. In 2005, the Photo Marketing Association estimated that 35% of digital photos were printed. A reasonable estimate today would be less than 2%. Film processing is a thing of the past, just 25 years after Apple introduced the world’s first, easy-to-use digital camera, the QuickTake 100.
LCD screens are now the display device of choice. People huddle around phone and camera screens as if staring into a digital fireplace, faces lit up as they peer into a window of wonder.
Instant gratification now rules the world of imaging, as evidenced by this notable trend: In 2000, Kodak proudly announced that consumers across the globe had taken 80 billion photos, setting a new record. That number pales in comparison to the 1.3 trillion digital images taken in 2017.
Digital Lifestyle Ubertrend-propelled trends, such as the internet and social media, played helped spread the gospel of instant gratification. By simplifying picture sharing, Facebook reported that some 350 million photos were uploaded daily in 2013, with just 1.1 billion members. Between Facebook’s current membership of 2.9 billion and Instagram’s 2 billion, the daily upload figure is likely approaching 1 billion photos. That estimate includes Instagram’s daily image upload of 80 million in 2016, when it had 400 million users.
Land wasn’t the only one working to compress time. Not far away, in Waltham, Massachusetts, self-taught engineer Percy Spencer observed something peculiar. While testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron, the fruit of wartime radar research at defense contractor Raytheon, Spencer noticed that a peanut cluster candy bar had melted in his pocket.
Intrigued by this phenomenon, Spencer placed some popcorn near the tube and watched in amazement as kernels began popping all over his lab counter. Raytheon engineers quickly refined Spencer’s discovery and, in late 1946, filed for a patent covering the use of microwaves to cook food.
Tappan Stove Co. took on the challenge of mainstreaming Raytheon’s technology for general use by introducing the first home microwave oven, priced at $1,295, on Oct. 25, 1955. In 1965, Raytheon acquired Amana Refrigeration, and two years later, the company introduced the first countertop microwave. This 100-volt model cost less than $500 and was smaller, safer and more reliable than previous models. By 1975, microwave oven sales exceeded those of gas ranges for the first time. Like Polaroid’s Land Camera, Raytheon’s microwave technology compressed a tedious chore into mere minutes, representing a quantum leap in consumer convenience.
The most significant development in this quickly accelerating Ubertrend was yet to come. While operating their first restaurant, the Airdome, in San Bernardino, California, brothers Dick and Maurice (“Mac”) McDonald realized that the future of consumer restaurants lay in mass production and speed of service.
On Dec. 12, 1948, they opened the first McDonald’s restaurant at 14th and E Street. The restaurant sold 15¢ burgers and 10¢ fries using its new “Speedee Service System.”
While White Castle had beaten McDonald’s to the punch, launching a fast-food restaurant in Wichita, Kan., in 1921, McDonald’s would come to symbolize the fast-food industry. Under the aegis of Ray Kroc, who bought out the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million in 1961 and moved the company to Des Plaines, Ill., McDonald’s reached the 1 billion sold mark in 1963, just two years after White Castle achieved that same feat.
Ray Kroc personally served the one billionth milestone hamburger, an occasion televised nationally. McDonald’s has played a vital role in helping global fast-food sales reach $978 billion in 2023.
McDonald’s has become the poster child of Time Compression. While its restaurants have lost their iconic “billions sold” signs, the company has sold an estimated half-trillion hamburgers while spurring a $978 billion global fast-food industry. (Image courtesy: McDonald’s Corp.)
The company’s ability to sell large volumes of food was promoted by outlet signage that advertised the chain’s success in almost jackpot-like fashion with “billions sold” figures. The last year McDonald’s could publicize this milestone without running out of display space was 1994, when its barometer of time-compressed gluttony reached 99 billion.
The blog “Over How Many Billions Served?” estimates McDonald’s sells about 1.4 billion hamburgers monthly, suggesting the fast-food giant has sold 525 billion burgers, or half a trillion, as of December 2023. This staggering number underscores how important fast food has become in today’s time-compressed economy.
Land, Spencer, the McDonald brothers and Kroc created a lifestyle undercurrent that was about to drag society into a fast-moving riptide and add a new dimension to the definition of speed.
What better proxy for the acceleration of life than meal-prep reduction time? In 2003, the James Beard Foundation reported that it took 15 minutes to prepare Cream of Wheat in 1893 when the sticky porridge was invented. By 1939, savvy cooks had whittled that time down to five minutes. Today, it takes a mere 30 seconds to cook Cream of Wheat, which may still take too long for some.
Jet Age Trends
That was management’s approach at British Overseas Airways Corporation, or BOAC, as it was more popularly known, as it firmly pushed into the jet age. On May 2, 1952, a BOAC de Havilland DH-106 Comet jet took off from London’s Heathrow Airport, headed for Johannesburg, South Africa, a trip that would take 23 hours and 40 minutes, with five stops in Rome, Beirut, Khartoum, Entebbe and Livingstone. In a BOAC piston-engine aircraft, the same trip took 27 hours and 55 minutes on a route 1,000 miles shorter than the Comet’s, the BBC reported.
The acceleration of humanity had just taken a giant leap forward with this 503-mile-per-hour jet. Society was about to be transformed by jet propulsion, and mirroring this accelerated lifestyle was the emergence of a new term: “jet-setter,” an all-too-meaningful homage to a glamorous and significantly faster lifestyle.
The jet era also introduced another time-based anomaly. Suddenly, it was possible to “gain time” by arriving just a few hours later than the original departure time. This phenomenon is demonstrated most strikingly when crossing the international date line. Sure, air travel in the opposite direction negates the benefit, but jet travel added a whole new dimension to Time Compression.
De Havilland did not rule the jet age for long. By 1958, most airlines were opting for the new Boeing 707 or Douglas DC-8, which could seat almost twice as many passengers as the Comet. Still, BOAC’s bold leap set the tone for the fabulous 1950s, which, like the 1940s, would become a breeding ground for Time Compression developments — not surprising, given this period’s post-World War II penchant for re-purposing trendsetting wartime technologies.
As life was accelerating and people were getting more things done in a shorter period of time, another important concept, destined to become a fixture of faster living, emerged. The word “realtime” was mentioned for the very first time in the April 1953 quarterly journal Mathematical Tables & Other Aids to Computation. Think about it: what could be more instantly gratifying than getting realtime results?
The advent of the internet and mobile phone would introduce the world to a host of realtime trends, such as realtime weather, realtime flight and stock tracking, realtime traffic, realtime visitor metrics, and so much more.
To do split-second tracking, one needs to be able to slice time into ever smaller increments, which demands time instruments of high precision. On Christmas Day 1969, Seiko launched the Quartz 35 SQ Astron, the world’s first commercially available quartz watch. With a limited production run of only 100 pieces, the Seiko Quartz 35 SQ Astron featured an analog dial and sold for 450,000 yen ($1,250) in Tokyo, roughly the same price as a Toyota Corolla at the time.
The Astron’s use of a quartz oscillator with a frequency of 8,192 cycles per second, which was accurate to about five seconds a month, or a minute a year, was truly groundbreaking. The Seiko Quartz Astron was the first timekeeping device able to keep pace with a society that was moving toward a split-second economy.
Launched in 1969, Seiko’s Quartz 35 SQ Astron was the first watch capable of slicing time into 8,192 beats per second, delivering a one-minute-a-year accuracy, perfect for the age of Time Compression. (Image courtesy: Seiko Group Corp.)
No one appreciated split-second performance more than Fred Smith, who had submitted a term paper at Yale University describing a service that relied on jet aircraft to deliver letters and small packages overnight. Smith, a former Marine, based the idea on his belief that a highly automated society would require a completely different logistics system.
His college professor, clearly less attuned to the need for speed trend, gave the paper a C. His thinking must have been, “Who would pay a lot of money to send a package overnight?” But to Smith speed was more important than cost and like any self-respecting entrepreneur, Smith pushed on and used his father’s inheritance of $4 million to raise an additional $91 million in venture capital, which was quite a feat in the early 1970s.
In 1973, on the company’s first night of operation, 389 Federal Express employees and 14 Dassault Falcon jets delivered 186 packages overnight to 25 U.S. cities. Federal Express — the company changed its name to FedEx in 2000 — would not catch on until the early 1980s, after introducing the Overnight Letter, which could contain up to two ounces and was delivered the next day for $9.50.
The year 1981 also coincided with FedEx’s hiring of advertising agency Ally & Gargano, which played a key role in dramatically raising the company’s profile.
The agency was responsible for creating the legendary “fast-talking” television ad campaign, which featured John Moschitta, “the world’s fastest-talking man.” Moschitta helped propel new operational business trends that would resonate with the ad’s mantra, “when it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight.”
Institutionalizing Energy
Not to mention that it also contained an aphrodisiac called damiana, derived from a shrub native to Central and South America. Pemberton’s recipe also included the Kola nut, indigenous to Africa, but its primary “invigorator” was the coca leaf, the basis of cocaine. The rise of the temperance movement, however, forced Pemberton to search for a new temperance drink formula.
On May 8, 1886, Pemberton succeeded in creating a non-alcoholic successor. To the caramel-colored syrup, Pemberton added a shot of cold, carbonated water and sold the concoction for five cents a glass at the soda fountain of Atlanta’s largest drugstore, Jacob’s Pharmacy. With the help of the pharmacy’s bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, Pemberton christened his creation Coca-Cola. Robinson also designed the unique, cursive logo that has been Coca-Cola’s trademark ever since.
Robinson convinced Pemberton of the great importance of advertising, and on May 29, 1886, the first Coca-Cola ad appeared in The Atlanta Journal:
“Coca-Cola. Delicious! Refreshing! Exhilarating! Invigorating! The new and popular soda fountain drink, containing the properties of the wonderful Coca plant and the famous Cola nuts. For sale by Willis Venable and Nunnally & Rawson.”
Cocaine was first isolated from coca leaves in the 1860s, but it wasn’t until the 1880s that its use began to spread in America due to a substantial boost in the production of its purest form. In plentiful supply, the coca leaf thus became the basis for the world’s first “energy drink.”
The soda fountain at Jacob’s Pharmacy, located at Marietta and Peachtree, first offered Coca-Cola on May 8, 1886 for five cents a glass. The pharmacy’s bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, helped Coca-Cola creator John Pemberton name his drink and also designed the unique logo. They don’t make bookkeepers like that anymore. (Image courtesy: The Coca-Cola Company.)
Pemberton was obsessed with inventing what today would be called a multi-functional beverage: the ultimate medicine and perfect drink all rolled into one, explaining his dalliance with the coca leaf. Coca-Cola contained about nine milligrams of cocaine in each seven-ounce (207 ml) glass, in addition to a relatively large dose of caffeine from the kola bean.
In 1893, 10 years before cocaine was quietly removed from its secret recipe, Coca-Cola was described in advertising as an “ideal brain tonic.” A 1929 slogan claiming that it produced a “pause that refreshes” also alluded to this history.
As cocaine use declined in the 1930s, interest grew in amphetamine — a new stimulant that had been synthesized long before but was introduced in the U.S. in 1932 as Benzedrine. By the end of the 1930s, Benzedrine was promoted as a “treatment for hay fever and melancholy and as a general pepper-upper,” notes Dr. David Musto, professor of history of medicine at Yale University.
Amphetamines got off to a slow start and did not become fairly common until World War II when war pilots taking part in night-time bombing raids over Germany were the first to use the drug to not only keep them awake but also to intensify their zeal. Former war pilots helped spread the use of amphetamines to America’s roadways. In the 1940s and 1950s, amphetamines were implicated in numerous trucking accidents resulting from their use by long-haul drivers, reports Musto.
While jet-setters plied the skies in fast aircraft, American truck drivers increasingly realized that delivery speed was of the essence, an awareness that would blossom in the 1960s, when “speed,” as it was by then colloquially known, caught on among certain youths, a trend that can be traced to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Not that America’s need for speed was a brand-new phenomenon.
It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity, and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.” — Alexis de Tocqueville 1835
The driven nature of Americans had been codified more than a hundred years earlier, when noted French author Alexis de Tocqueville pointedly observed in his 1835 tome Democracy in America, “It is odd to watch with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue prosperity, and how they are ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.”
Editor: The Time Compression Ubertrend spans 56 pages in “Ubertrends,” so it’s not a trivial task to provide a useful summary of its many subtrends while avoiding removing critical aspects of each phenomenon. The following section offers a summary of a select few subtrends that should titillate your imagination.Acceleration Of Dance
According to dance and music historian Curt Sachs, the period between 1650 and 1750 was known as “the age of minuet.” The minuet, the most popular dance among Europe’s aristocracy during those years, is pointedly described as a “measured circling around.” That measured approach was probably appropriate for people who enjoyed an average 17th-century lifespan of just 40 years.
Life was languid because everything moved at a glacial pace. Around this time, the average person living in 17th century England read the equivalent of one daily issue of The New York Times newspaper during their entire lifetime, reports noted author and designer Richard Saul Wurman in his book Information Anxiety.
Today, most dance clubs move to the Digital Lifestyle beat of electronic dance music (EDM), a descendant of Kraftwerk’s pioneering music of the early 1970s, which not only mirrors our rapidly morphing lifestyle but also echoes the influence of digital electronics in our daily lives.
Compression Formula
Although Xerox was first with the Magnafax Telecopier, smaller, faster and more nimble fax machines entered the market in the 1980s, thanks to such Japanese stalwarts as Sharp. Between 1980 and 1990, the number of fax machines in the U.S. surged from 250,000 to 5 million, mainly due to the 1980 approval of the ITU Group 3 standard, which changed the fax standard from analog to digital and reduced transmission speed to one minute a page. A mathematical compression formula, or algorithm, was used to speed up fax transmissions. These algorithms were dubbed “codec” — an abbreviation of COmpression/DECompression.
This arcane science plays a significant role in Time Compression. Compression algorithms have made disruptive technologies like DVD, HDTV, satellite TV, internet telephony and DSL possible. The Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) uses MPEG-2 compression, allowing a single-layer DVD to play movies over two hours long. HDTV also uses MPEG-2. The two major U.S. satellite TV providers, DirecTV and DISH Network upgraded to MPEG-4 due to its improved compression algorithm originally designed for streaming video.
The history of data compression dates back to the 1960s when work began on video conferencing systems at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories. By the early 1980s, Karlheinz Brandenburg began working on digital music compression as a doctoral student at Germany’s Erlangen-Nuremberg University. In April 1989, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits of Fürth, Germany, which Brandenburg had joined, received a German patent for MP3 — an abbreviation of MPEG audio layer 3. MP3 was the outcome of a collaboration between Brandenburg, working as a postdoctoral researcher at AT&T-Bell Labs with James Johnston, and Fraunhofer. On July 14, 1995, the Fraunhofer team chose “.mp3” as the official file name extension.
Brandenburg reportedly used a CD recording of Suzanne Vega’s song Tom’s Diner to refine the MP3 compression algorithm, which is why some call Vega “The Mother of MP3.” What makes the MP3 codec so outstanding is its pervasive cultural footprint. Propelled by such über-hot music swapping sites as Napster, MP3 became so popular that the term outranked “sex” in search for a brief period in 1999, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. A remarkable phenomenon, considering the codec’s techie history.
This deep dive into the history of codecs is vitally important because codecs lie in the eye of the Time Compression storm. By squeezing ever more data through narrow pipes, codecs have enabled faster data transmission speeds, which, in turn, have accelerated the human experience.
Advances in codecs help accelerate data transfer speeds, allowing for more rapid entertainment consumption, faster data distillation, and faster processing of elaborate communication protocols. And if lifestyle changes take their cue directly from the ascent of codecs, one can only surmise from ongoing reports of the development of ever-more-efficient compression algorithms like Google’s VP9 that life will only speed up further in the future. “Time Compression” was originally identified by futurist Michael Tchong. To read more about this Ubertrend, get a copy of “Ubertrends — How Trends And Innovation Are Transforming Our Future.”
