Certainly, you have watched a film in which a character transmigrated from one space-time to another. If the gap between the two were only tens of years apart, we would see the character struggles with the difference in tools and convenience, however, if that gap were hundreds of years, the character would become someone “from another world”.

A person from the 80s of the 20th century, who only know of the rare telephone booths in the city, now suddenly sees the people of the 21st century walking around with their smartphones, which include all sorts of functions, such as receiving and making calls, playing music, taking photos. They won’t even understand how widespread and useful the Internet has become in modern life.

In Vietnam, public phone services have already died out since 2012.

However, in England, the telephone booths seem to have become a “heritage” with artistic beauty, and were even repurposed as something fresher, such as public libraries, cafes, phone repair shops…

If you are wondering how just tens of years can make such a big difference, don’t worry, there used to be a time when even if you “transmigrated” a few hundred years and there wouldn’t be much of a difference. In the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, author Yuval Noah Harari mentioned the following situation:

Suppose a European farmer fell into a long slumber in the year 1000, and was woken up 500 years later by the noise of Columbus’ rowdy sailors climbing onto the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, for him, the world was still as familiar as ever. Despite many changes in technology, way of conduct, and political boundaries, the oversleeping farmer still felt at home.

The story only changed in the last 500 years.

One of Columbus’ sailors falling into the same slumber would be woken up by an iPhone’s ringtone, he would find himself in a strange world that he could not understand. “Am I in heaven?” he  would surely ask “Or am I in hell?”

In the last 500 years, we have witnessed unprecedented growth in the strength of humanity. In 1500, there were about 500 million people on Earth. Today, that number is 8 billion. The total value of goods and services provided by humankind in 1500 is approximately 250 billion dollars in today’s value. Nowadays, the value of one year of production is almost 60 thousand billion dollars. The population have increased by 14 times, production, 240 times, and energy consumption, 150 times.

It only takes five modern cargo ships to carry all the goods that the entirety of the merchant vessels at the time could carry. A modern computer can easily store every number and letter in all the handwritten books and bibles of every medieval library and still have room to spare. Any major bank today holds more money than all the premodern kingdoms of the world combined.

In 1500, very few cities had more than 100.000 people. Most buildings were built out of mud, wood and straw; a 3-story building was considered a skyscraper. The streets were small trails that were dirty and dusty in summer and muddy in winter, with streams of pedestrians, horses, goats, chickens, and a few rickshaws. The most familiar sounds in the city were the sounds of humans and animals, along with those of hammers and saws. When the sun set, the entire city was shrouded in darkness, occasionally, a candle or torch would flicker in the night.

If a denizen of that city was to see Tokyo, New York, or Mumbai, what would he think?

Have you figured out why elevators were invented yet?

The maximum speed of a horse running at full gallop is 88km/h, meanwhile, a jet-powered car with a capacity of 9.500 horsepower can accelerate from 0 to 160km/h in 0,8 seconds.

This tremendous speed is perhaps something that the people of the 16^th century could never in their wildest dreams have imagined – Image: Rimac

In 1800 only 3% of the world’s population were city dwellers. By the end of the 20^th century, this number has shot up to 47%. Mumbai, often dubbed the city of skyscrapers, has a population density of 20.000 people per square kilometre. If all of Mumbai’s population stood on the same surface, each of them would have 50 square meters of land for all their daily needs. The area is equivalent to an apartment and yet has to include public spaces such as streets, schools, shopping centres, offices…

If we only spread out on the ground, we would have stopped at cities and would not be able to have as many megacities as we do today. That was when humans began to change our practices, no longer were we scattered about, reclaiming and expanding our land, depending on natural resources. Instead, we stack our architectures to build a concentrated population. Before the elevator, 3-storey or 5-storey buildings could be considered “skyscrapers”, and elevators were invented so we could build skyscrapers that can reach the clouds.

Is there any other dream as far-off as that of the people from hundreds of years ago about the concept of “skyscrapers”?

The problem in industrial development does not stop at competition between the same type of product, between a strong horse and a weak horse, but total replacement. It is how the beginning and development of one thing could erase the existence of another. However, with enough ingenuity, it is possible to turn these “obsolete” things into a cultural heritage, just like what England did with their phone booths.

Elevators have helped humans reach new heights; however, it is possible that one day, we will no longer choose a crowded agglomerated life, we will return to living on the ground and in harmony with nature. Then, elevators will hopefully also become a heritage, a symbol of the ongoing era of urbanization today.