CONCEPT
Five Great Surges
Perez's enumeration of the five technological revolutions since 1771 — each following the same two-phase installation/deployment structure and producing the empirical basis for her framework.
Perez identifies five great surges of technological development since the late eighteenth century: the Industrial Revolution irrupting around 1771 with Arkwright's cotton mill; the Age of Steam and Railways beginning around 1829 with Stephenson's Rocket; the Age of Steel, Electricity, and Heavy Engineering starting around 1875; the Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production beginning around 1908 with Ford's Model T; and the Age of Information and Telecommunications irrupting in 1971 with the Intel microprocessor. Each surge has followed the same two-phase structure — installation driven by financial capital, deployment driven by production capital, separated by a turning point — and each has produced the characteristic pattern of speculative frenzy, crash, institutional reckoning, and either golden age or lost generation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first surge was launched by Richard Arkwright's cotton mill at Cromford in 1771, which combined water power, continuous operation, and a disciplined labor force into a system that transformed textile production and, within a century, reshaped civilization. The