From the beginnings of the steam engine in Scotland, to the semiconductor fabrication plants in California, human history over the last three hundred years has witnessed the unfolding of an inexorable trend and veritable explosion of material progress. The end of the Eighteenth Century saw the rise of portable firearms and the resulting obsolescense of traditional European set piece warfare; the discovery of the nature of electricity; and the development of the steam engine. The end of the Nineteenth Century witnessed the birth of mechanized warfare, conceived in the Crimean War, born in the fires of the American Civil War, nurtured through the Franco-Prussian War, and imitated in the Sino-Japanese War; the harnessing of electricity by the Wizard of Menlo Park; the development of the internal combustion engine; the rise of Darwinism as an explanation for natural history; and the building of an ever more sophisticated telecommunications network. By the end of the Twentieth Century, nuclear weapons were the ultimate military status symbols; electricity is taken for granted even in developing nations; gas engines were becoming hybridized with electric motors; the Human Genome Project was nearly completed; and the Internet was already old enough to drink, even in the United States, and web logs were already laying their seeds.