I'm not sure that's actually true. How much wealth was created via the development of jet engines, radar, satellite communications, antibiotics, computers? The unprecedented economic growth of the latter half of the 20th century was driven by civilian applications of technologies developed for the purpose of fighting WW2.
In the fifties Germany used industrial technology from the thirties to get back on her feet. Had the Reich used the twenties years in between for something other than destroying itself and the rest of Europe, it would have surely been richer and more advanced.
"In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete -- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, [...]" (from "Chapter 3: War is Peace" of Emanuel Goldstein's `The Theory of Hierarchical Society' (from 1984))
Anyway, the greatest life-altering technologic advances have been made during the long and relatively peaceful period of the 19th century. And no, it was not all an application of inventions from the Napoleonic wars.
I'm not sure that's actually true. How much wealth was created via the development of jet engines, radar, satellite communications, antibiotics, computers? The unprecedented economic growth of the latter half of the 20th century was driven by civilian applications of technologies developed for the purpose of fighting WW2.