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Thomas P Hughes (°1929) is an American historian of technology and visiting professor of MIT and Stanford. In 2000 he gave an interesting lecture, comparing the second industrial revolution with the third industrial, or ICT, revolution. He states that the second industrial revolution, which was all about the invention and adoption of electrical power systems, went through five stages.

The first stage began in 1880 and the fifth stage ended in 1940. Hughes is convinced that the ICT revolution will live the same five stages. In 2000, the year of his lecture, the IT revolution was already its fourth stage.

In this blog post I will discuss the first two stages of both revolutions. In my next blog post, I will focus on the other stages and will try to extrapolate on the fifth stage of the ICT revolution.

The five stages that can be discerned in the evolution of the electric light and power systems, are characterized by the type of entrepreneur dominating the phase and the geographical spread of the electrical utilities.

Between 1880 and 1900, the first stage, “inventor-entrepreneurs” developed the initial industrial electricity applications, such as lighting systems and electricity transportation networks. Electricity support extended over urban districts. The époque heroes were Thomas Edison and Georges Westinghouse. Towards 1890 engineers started interconnecting electrical power systems by means of transformers and frequency changers. This way a universal system emerged from the “battle of systems”.

The first stage of the ICT revolution started in 1967 when ARPANET was introduced to a wide audience of professionals. The stage-one heroes invented new hard- and software: John Hennessey invented RISC chips (seventies), Scott McNeally developed the SUN Microsystems (eighties), Timothy Berners-Lee made the basic design for the internet and built the first website at CERN (1991) , Marc Andreesen developed the first widespread browser Netscape (mid 90’ies). The comparison between the electrical transformers and frequency changers on the one hand and the routers and gateways on the other hand is striking.

Between 1900 and 1920 “manager-entrepreneurs” took the lead. They grew large companies through mergers and acquisitions and leveraged the universal electricity system to develop supply infrastructures covering cities like New York and Chicago. Furthermore they developed the electricity market and optimized the utilization, or the load factor, of the electricity generation facilities.

In the ICT arena, the outstanding “manager-entrepreneur” story is the Microsoft saga and the development of Windows as the dominant PC operating system. The spread of Windows created a huge market for PC applications. Mergers and acquisitions created other market making companies. The merger between Time Warner, a media company providing content, and America on Line (AOL) a late internet service provider, is an outstanding example.. The recent strategic partnerships between mobile phone companies and music industry players further expand the market.

The third stage in both revolutions is the stage of the large infrastructure investments and the increasing regulation by government. As said, my next blog post will start from there. Come and read next week!