Exactly. Gordon in the Rise and Fall of American Growth spells out the details of what real innovation looks like. Peter Drucker used to make about the same point, putting the emphasis on the 60 years leading up to 1914, which he considered the most innovative 60 years in human history: photography, telephones, radio, electricity, the combustion engine and therefore cars and trucks, airplanes, the modern textile dye industry, the oil industry, the first plastics, mass production of cleaning solutions, sulfa drugs, the modern steel industry and therefore cheap steel, and therefore skyscrapers and larger boats, the wholesale reinvention of mathematics starting with group theory discovered or re-discovered from Gauss in the 1870s and then followed by the evolution towards set theory, not to mention the tensor calculus, Boolean logic, and statistics becoming part of science, Max Plank but also Albert Einstein, etc. The list is really too long.
At a slightly larger scale, there was what some historians refer to as a "secular boom" from the 1700s to the 1970s, and then since the 1970s we've seen the onset of what some call The Great Stagnation.
How this ends and what comes next is anyone's guess.
Really a teriffic time period; Semmelweiss suggesting handwashing was just before it in 1847. Kamerlingh-Onnes work on Superconductivity in 1911. Rutherford splitting the atom in 1911. Modern 'safety' bicycle, 1876 and practical pneumatic tyres 1888. Lord Kelvin and the analogue computers predicted tides, 1872. Tsiolkovsky proposes space exploration by rocket in 1898 and liquid propellent in 1903. Just missing 1917, Gillies and the first modern skin grafts / plastic surgery[1]. Darwin and "On the Origin of Species", published 1859.
Someone from the Roman Empire would have had a good understanding of the world in 1750. Ocean travel better, some advances in building large buildings, otherwise not that different.
In 1900? Quite a bit has changed.
The general shape of daily life today is not so different than say 1970. Email instead of letters, cell phones instead of searching for dimes for the pay phone.
But we fly in jets that average about 450 MPH, cars with a top road speed around 60 or 70 MPH, television but now with an Internet or cable feed, supermarkets are much the same, etc etc.
At a slightly larger scale, there was what some historians refer to as a "secular boom" from the 1700s to the 1970s, and then since the 1970s we've seen the onset of what some call The Great Stagnation.
How this ends and what comes next is anyone's guess.