General-purpose technologies are accelerants. Invention sparks invention. Waves lay the ground for further scientific and technological experimentation, nudging open the doors of possibility. This in turn yields new tools and techniques, new areas of research—new domains of technology itself. Companies form in and around them, attracting investment, pushing the new technologies out into small and big niches alike, further adapting them for a thousand different purposes. Waves are so huge and historic precisely because of this protean complexity, this tendency to mushroom and spill over.
