PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
FROM SAIL TO STEAM TO MOTORS
FIGURE 7.5 The percentage of U.S. total tonnage of merchant vessels by type
of ship. Again, the vertical axis shows the logistic scale that transforms S-
curves to straight lines. The straight lines shown are fits to the data. The curved
section is the transition period between the end of phasing in and the beginning
of phasing out (see Appendix A). Steamships substituted for sailboats between
1800 and 1920, at which time boats with internal-combustion engines started
replacing steam ships. World War II seems to have brought this substitution
process down to its natural course. The little circle is an update from Lloyd’s
Register database ∗
Suddenly the realities of World War II, notably a shortage of gasoline,
interrupted the accelerated introduction of motors in ships, and the substitution
process was readjusted to a level and a rhythm that later proved
to be the natural trend.
∗ Adapted from a graph by Nebojsa Nakicenovic in “The Automobile Road to Technological
Change: Diffusion of the Automobile as a Process of Technological
Substitution,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 29 (1986): 309–
340. Copyright 1986 by Elsevier Science Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher.
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