THE INTERNET
The Internet, a network of
computers covering the entire planet, allows people to access almost any
information located anywhere in the world at any time. Its effects on business,
communication, economy, entertainment and even politics are profound. The Internet
may not have changed the world as much as the plow, but it's probably on par
with the steam engine or automobile.
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the research
and development arm of the U.S. military, created ARPANET in the late 1960s.
This network of computer-to-computer connections was intended for military and
academic research. Other computer networks began to cross the globe in the next
few years, and by the late 1970s computer scientists had created a single
protocol, TCP/IP, that would allow computers on any network to communicate with
computers on other networks. This was, essentially, the birth of the Internet,
but it took 10 or so years for various other networks in the world to adopt the
new protocol, making the Internet truly global.
The Internet is such a powerful invention that we've probably only
begun to see the effects it will have on the world. The ability to diffuse and
recombine information with such efficiency could accelerate the rate at which
further world-changing inventions are created. At the same time, some fear that
our ability to communicate, work, play and do business via the Internet breaks
down our ties to local communities and causes us to become socially isolated.
Like any invention, the good or ill it accomplishes will come from how we
choose to use it.
THE COMPUTER
A computer is a machine that takes information in, is able to manipulate
it in some way, and outputs new information. There is no single inventor of the
modern computer, although the ideas of British mathematician Alan Turing are
considered eminently influential in the field of computing. Mechanical
computing devices were in existence in the 1800s (there were even rare devices
that could be considered computers in ancient eras), but electronic computers
were invented in the 20th century.
Computers are able to make complicated mathematical calculations
at an incredible rate of speed. When they operate under the instructions of
skilled programmers, computers can accomplish amazing feats. Some
high-performance military aircraft wouldn't be able to fly without constant
computerized adjustments to flight control surfaces. Computers performed the
sequencing of the human genome, let us put spacecraft into orbit, control
medical testing equipment, and create the complex visual imagery used in films
and video games.
If we only examine these grandiose uses of computers, we overlook
how much we rely on them from day to day. Computers let us store vast amounts
of information and retrieve a given piece of it almost instantly. Many of the
things we take for granted in the world wouldn't function without computers,
from cars to power plants to phones.
LIGHT BULB
If there's a common theme to this list, it's that no major
invention came from a single stroke of genius from a single inventor. Every
invention is built by incrementally improving earlier designs, and the person
usually associated with an invention is the first person to make it
commercially viable. Such is the case with the light bulb. We immediately think
of Thomas Edison as the electric light bulb's inventor, but dozens of people
were working on similar ideas in the 1870s, when Edison developed his
incandescent bulb. Joseph Swan did similar work in Britain at the time, and
eventually the two merged their ideas into a single company, Ediswan.
The bulb itself works by transmitting electricity through a wire
with high resistance known as a filament. The waste energy created by the
resistance is expelled as heat and light. The glass bulb encases the filament
in a vacuum or in inert gas, preventing combustion.
You might think the light bulb changed the world by allowing
people to work at night or in dark places (it did, to some extent), but we
already had relatively cheap and efficient gas lamps and other light sources at
the time. It was actually the infrastructure that was built to provide
electricity to every home and business that changed the world. Today, our world
is filled with powered devices than we can plug in pretty much anywhere. We
have the light bulb to thank for it.
THE STEAM ENGINE
the steam engine mobilized industry, the automobile mobilized
people. While ideas for personal vehicles had been around for years, Karl
Benz's 1885 Motorwagen, powered by an internal combustion engine of his own
design, is widely considered the first automobile. Henry Ford's improvements in
the production process -- and effective marketing -- brought the price
The automobile's effect on commerce, society and culture is hard
to overestimate. Most of us can jump in our car and go wherever we want
whenever we want, effectively expanding the size of any community to the
distance we're willing to drive to shop or visit friends. Our cities are
largely designed and built around automobile access, with paved roads and
parking lots taking up huge amounts of space and a big chunk of our governments'
budgets. The auto industry has fueled enormous economic growth worldwide, but
it's also generated a lot of pollution.
Prior to the invention of the “steam engine”, most products were
made by hand. Water wheels and draft animals provided the only 'industrial'
power available, which clearly had its limits. The Industrial Revolution, which
is perhaps the greatest change over the shortest period of time in the history
of civilization, was carried forward by the steam engine.
The concept of using steam to power machines had been around for
thousands of years, but Thomas Newcomen's creation in 1712 was the first to
harness that power for useful work (pumping water out of mines, for the most
part). In 1769, James Watt modified a Newcomen engine by adding a separate
condenser, which vastly increased the steam engine's power and made it a far
more practical way to do work. He also developed a way for the engine to
produce rotary motion, which may be just as important as the efficiency gains.
Thus, Watt is often considered the inventor of the steam engine.
Newcomen's and Watt's engines actually used the vacuum of
condensing steam to drive the pistons, not the pressure of steam expansion.
This made the engines bulky. It was the high-pressure steam engine developed by
Richard Trevithick and others that allowed for steam engines small enough to
power a train. Not only did steam engines power factories that made the rapid
production of goods possible, they powered the trains and steamships that
carried those goods across the globe.
While the steam engine has been eclipsed by electric and internal
combustion engines in the areas of transport and factory power, they're still
incredibly important. Most power plants in the world actually generate
electricity using steam turbines, whether the steam is heated by burning coal,
natural gas or a nuclear reactor.
COMMUNICATION
Maybe it's cheating to lump the telegraph, telephone, radio and
television into one 'invention,' but the development of “communication”
technology has been a continuum of increased utility and flexibility since
Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph in 1836 (building on the prior
work of others, of course). The telephone simply refined the idea by allowing
actual voice communications to be sent over copper wires, instead of just beeps
that spelled out the plain text in Morse code. These communication methods were
point-to-point, and required an extensive infrastructure of wires to function.
Transmitting signals wirelessly using electromagnetic waves was a
concept worked on by many inventors around the world, but Guglielmo Marconi and
Nikola Tesla popularized it in the early 20th century. Eventually, sound could
be transmitted wirelessly, while engineers gradually perfected the transmission
of images. Radio and television were new landmarks in communications because
they allowed a single broadcaster to send messages to thousands or even
millions of recipients as long as they were equipped with receivers.
These developments in communications technology effectively shrank
the world. In the span of about 120 years, we went from a world where it might
take weeks to hear news from across the country to one where we can watch
events occurring on the other side of the globe as they happen. The advent of
mass communications put more information within our grasp and altered how we
interact with each other.
REFRIGERATORS
Refrigerators cool things down by taking advantage of the way
substances absorb and unload heat as their pressure points and phases of matter
change (usually from gas to liquid and back). It's difficult to pinpoint a
single inventor of the refrigerator, because the concept was widely known and
gradually improved over the course of about 200 years. Some credit Oliver
Evans' 1805 unproduced design of a vapor-compression unit, while others point
to Carl von Linde's 1876 design as the actual precursor of the modern ”refrigerator”
in your kitchen. Dozens of inventors, including Albert Einstein, would refine
or improve refrigerator designs over the decades.
In the early 20th century, harvested natural ice was still common,
but large industries such as breweries were beginning to use ice-making
machines. Harvested ice for industrial use was rare by World War I. However, it
wasn't until the development of safer refrigerant chemicals in the 1920s that
home refrigerators became the norm.
The ability to keep food cold for prolonged periods (and even
during shipping, once refrigerated trucks were developed) drastically changed
the food production industry and the eating habits of people around the world.
Now, we have easy access to fresh meats and dairy products even in the hottest
summer months, and we're no longer tied to the expense of harvesting and
shipping natural ice -- which never could have kept pace with the world's
growing population in any case.
PRINTING PRESS
Like many of the inventions on this list, the man we believe
invented the printing press (Johann Gutenberg in the 1430s) actually improved
on pre-existing technologies and made them useful and efficient enough to
become popular. The world already had paper and block printing -- the Chinese
had them as early as the 11th century -- but the complexity of their language
limited popularity. Marco Polo brought the idea to Europe in 1295.
Gutenberg combined the idea of block printing with a screw press
(used for olive oil and wine production). He also developed metal printing
blocks that were far more durable and easier to make than the hand-carved
wooden letters in use previously. Finally, his advances in ink and paper
production helped revolutionize the whole process of mass printing.
The printing press allowed enormous quantities of information to
be recorded and spread throughout the world. Books had previously been items
only the extremely rich could afford, but mass production brought the price
down tremendously. The printing press is probably responsible for many other
inventions, but in a more subtle way than the wheel. The diffusion of knowledge
it created gave billions of humans the education they needed to create their
own inventions in the centuries since.
THE WHEEL
The wheel is another invention so ancient that we have no way of
knowing who first developed it. The oldest wheel and axle mechanism we've found
was near Ljubljana, Slovenia, and dates to roughly 3100 B.C.
The wheel made the transportation of goods much faster and more
efficient, especially when affixed to horse-drawn chariots and carts. However,
if it had been used only for transportation, the wheel wouldn't have been as
much of a world-changer as it was. In fact, a lack of quality roads limited its
usefulness in this regard for thousands of years.
A wheel can be used for a lot of things other than sticking them
on a cart to carry grain, though. Tens of thousands of other inventions require
wheels to function, from water wheels that power mills to gears and cogs that
allowed even ancient cultures to create complex machines. Cranks and pulleys
need wheels to work. A huge amount of modern technology still depends on the
wheel, like centrifuges used in chemistry and medical research, electric motors
and combustion engines, jet engines, power plants and countless others.
THE PLOW
Compared to some of the gleaming, electronic inventions that fill
our lives today, the plow doesn't seem very exciting. It's a simple cutting
tool used to carve a furrow into the soil, churning it up to expose nutrients
and prepare it for planting. Yet the plow is probably the one invention that
made all others possible.
No one knows who invented the plow, or exactly when it came to be.
It probably developed independently in a number of regions, and there is
evidence of its use in prehistoric eras. Prior to the plow, humans were
subsistence farmers or hunter/gatherers. Their lives were devoted solely to
finding enough food to survive from one season to the next. Growing food added
some stability to life, but doing it by hand was labor intensive and took a
long time. The plow changed all that.
Plows made the work easier and faster. Improvements in the plow's
design made farming so efficient that people could harvest far more food than
they needed to survive. They could trade the surplus for goods or services. And
if you could get food by trading, then you could devote your day-to-day
existence to something other than growing food, such as producing the goods and
services that were suddenly in demand.
The ability to trade and store materials drove the invention of
written language, number systems, fortifications and militaries. As populations
gathered to engage in these activities, cities grew. It's not a stretch to say
that the plow is responsible for the creation of human civilization.
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