How not? Penicilin alone has a giant impact on the lives of people. What about anti-conceptionals too.

So did (even to a greater effect) the doctors washing their hands. Between 1822-1922, only in Physics humanity discovered/developed, the laws of Electromagnetism, the laws of Thermodynamics and their microscopic extension: Statistical Mechanics, the special theory of relativity, quantum mechanics and the General theory of relativity.

The last 100 years have been about doing things in large quantities in a cheaper, faster way. Of course there has been great progress (the era of the PC/Internet by far the most important one) but the rate is significantly lower.

Personal Computers (and smartphones, etc) are the largest change by far.

They are definitely the biggest change in the past century and on par with those big innovations I mentioned, so I wouldn’t want to undersell them as they’ve been a major disruptive change to most / all fields.

However, they wouldn’t exactly be incomprehensible to someone from the early 1900’s, since they already had the telegraph, telephony, and fax machines which could send pictures over a long distance came very soon after this article was written.

Whereas I think a person from the early 1800’s would genuinely struggle with understanding the modern world.