Spoken like someone who's never had to carry all their daily water from a well.
Even if you can't drink tap water the fact that you don't need to carry the water for washing, bathing, cleaning, watering, etc. etc. etc. is an amazing improvement in quality of life.
Spoken like someone who didn't read the comment properly, or at all.
Building a big red bridge quickly isn't that much of a testament to the ability of people in the 30s to get stuff done if people in the 30s also spent their entire childhood drinking dirty well water because in many parts of the US people hadn't got around to implementing the ancient technology of piped water
Not going to lie, I'd pick the society where taps are standard but a bridge might take a long time to build over the one where the bridge building progresses more quickly but you'll be waiting 15 years to get a tap and need to boil what comes out of it.
There's a difference between flowing piped water, which is a technology as old as Rome, and static piped water, something that was figured out only in the 20th century.
Water towers and pumping were not twentieth century technologies (and nor were water closet toilets and sewerage). London had steam-pumped water supply two-hundred years earlier, and those pesky regulators forced every multi-storey building in NYC to have them during the 19th century. Piped water wasn't the future in the 1930s, it was just unevenly distributed.
I've carried water occasionally in the past - aside from hiking trips my grandfather built a summer house without running water.
I would prefer to have clean rather than just running water, since the latter is useless when contaminated.
There's a stream close to where my grandfather built the house. We never used water from there because it was too rich in iron, even though it's more accessible since you don't have to pull the bucket out like in a well.
>Just because it's an amazing thing which without life would be more difficult doesn't necessarily make it a good or amazing innovation.
Actually it does. That's the very definition of a "good or amazing innovation".
It might not be technically involved or some deep use of science and physics and such, but it's definitely a good AND amazing innovation.
Aside from the huge quality of life improvement it brought, it was also a huge productivity boost (all those wasted domestic hours plus also the boost to agriculture, and industrial uses) AND a huge quantity of life improvement (early "low hanging fruit" like running water saved millions of lives).
>But in terms of innovation or technical level they are far away from a cell phone.
Which is irrelevant.
We don't create stuff for the "innovation in technical level" alone, but for the improvement in our daily lives. And life was perfect livable (if not more so) 1992, before everybody had cellphones. Much less so before running water.
If "technical innovation" alone mattered, we'd be building ever more complex Rube Goldberg machines. That's for the people who appreciate an IoT washing machine because "it has more technology, man", even though functionality wise it's the same as a regular one (if not worse, due to more complex UI and failure points).
OP complained about that things don't move fast enough. It's like development has slowed down.
My argument is that developing a cell phone is way more difficult and complex than some other old inventions. Even though one can argue forever which innovation is most valuable.
Even if you can't drink tap water the fact that you don't need to carry the water for washing, bathing, cleaning, watering, etc. etc. etc. is an amazing improvement in quality of life.