Issaac Newton once said “If I have seen further, it is only because I stood on the shoulders of giants”. The point being that all technological advancement relies on the copying and incremental improvement of what came before it. What was once miraculous is now commonplace and it is from this collective barrel of past ideas that new ideas can be birthed and improved.
The divine intervention of miraculous invention is a myth. All of the greatest inventors of history were great logical thinkers but what they do is take the existing materials and rearrange them slightly to come up with an improvement. They could not have possibly invented the same item 50 or even 5 years out of the time that they did because they would not have had the same history of cultural and technological progression that led them to this point.
In the exciting market of electronics, this constant and rapid innovation means that the once unobtainable and expensive liquid crystal display technology is now available in any cheap LCD TV. Originally LCD displays could not refresh the image fast enough to be able to be used in television and the plasma displays featured a superior picture quality. CRT screens still had the advantage despite being cumbersome and lower quality than either plasma or LCD. But, due to innovation LCD managed to release their potential and cracked the formula that they needed to in order to produce a TV that could refresh at an appropriate rate.
Since this remarkable innovation a few years ago, LCD TVs have been hugely successful with consumers because of the high picture quality, cheaper costs and large screen sizes coupled with thin, lighter monitors. Now these high end TVs are available to all of us at very reasonable prices. Plus, more importantly, with the technology for LCD TVs, the next innovator in that market will be able to create something new and very exciting.