The practical uniform of factory hands, clerks, shopkeepers and librarians, it "both symbolized and enabled a wave of women's liberation," Mr. Von Drehle argued, the "perfect repudiation of corsets and bustles and hoops - all the ludicrous contraptions that literally imprisoned women in their own clothes".
Cloud as the enabler The cloud is certainly enabling a new wave of startups and entrepreneurs to compete in a competitive and often global market, but larger businesses are also getting a piece of the action.
If the engineers are right, the popular and inexpensive Wi-Fi wireless standard, also known as 802.11, could serve as the wedge for the next-generation Internet, enabling a new wave of wireless portable gadgets that ultimately blanket homes, schools and shopping malls with Internet access.
More important, his matchbook-size cells could provide far more punch, enabling a new wave of powerful energy-slurping devices.
With digital currency as a major unifying element for the industry, its disruption is enabling a third wave of change wherein the financial institution is removed from the equation.
High-throughput sequencing technologies can generate hundreds of millions of short tags (typically only 25 50 nt) from a single experiment, and this capacity is enabling a new wave of genomic research.
"This is about developing a new generation of technology that is cheaper, can be used more often and will enable a new wave of explorers," said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X Prize Foundation.
Why it's important: Machine learning tools have enabled a new wave of use cases that include use cases built on top of image recognition or speech detection.
That has enabled carmakers to introduce a wave of new diesel-powered cars to American motorists, who still tend to think of diesels as stinky and smoky.
During the 1990s, a wave of privatization enabled Perez Companc to buy stakes in all sorts of Argentine businesses, from telecommunications and public utilities to railroads and shopping malls.
