It takes a certain kind of person to make a whole new industry out of wholecloth. Alternating current, remote control, wireless power, death ray lasers - Nikola Tesla had it all in terms of vision. Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned great functional cities, Usonian he called them, mile high towers and practically invented the modern US home in the 1920s and 30s.

The progress has slowed somewhat and most progress has been shifted to small electronic devices and computers.

Where's progress in home design? Folks are still living in homes averaging a half century old and with little in terms of sheer innovation to show for it. The homes being churned out in tracts now are not noticeably better structurally or technologically than stuff sold in 1980 -possibly worse as builders 'cheap out' and cut quality.

While automakers have learned to squeeze more miles and make vehicles out of composite materials and plastics, what revolutionary new advances have been made in comfort, safety or endurance? Airbags were already available from Ford in 1975. Firetrucks? Ambulances? Police cars? All hardly much in advance of 1970 design. And what of our highways and roads? Technologically, they date to the 1950s when both concrete and asphalt were used.

Where's the NY-Tokyo 1 hour rocketliner promised in the late 1960s? I know, I know - way too cost ineffective. If one can't have supersonic planes, what hope is there for rocket planes?

Now we have computers, games and cell phones and that's really great, but where are the new mediums of communication and entertainment? Where's the long awaited holographic theaters and such?

Where is city design? Cities are still pell nell chaos. Random construction, no goals to speak of in layout or ease of usage and universal aesthetic disasters, made more so by cheap advertising and the diversity of architecture. Most cities are stuck somewhere between 1935 and 1980 in terms of technological progress. The few exceptions like Irvine, CA are merely totalitarian exercises in conformity, similar to most new home tracts with homeowner associations, and are not much improvement in ease of use or design superiority.

Where are the glittering cities?

What of medicine? The brain is still a vast mystery as are many organs of the body. Drugs are more prevalent, but are loaded with side-effects and are at best, crude relief from the plethora and endless litany of human ailments.

While pessimism is not the goal, it's clear we need more Faradays, DaVincis and Teslas to make a comparable step up in man's quality of life, such as the one made from 1910 to 1950.

Population increases have dictated that the quality of personal items, homes and general quality of life have already gone down for most Americans since 1990. Now people must largely buy mass produced items. One product, various brands, serves all. Custom manufacture for a single individual is not just for the wealthy, but for the very wealthy. The question is how much further will it descend before some new revolution in technology compensates for the population growth the way alternating current did back in the 1890s?