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Ten Best Inventions Of All Time
Thanks to LiveScience for this one – the top ten best inventions of all time:
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The Seiss Army Knife. More used than any of the other tools in my kit.
(Though I suppose the pocket knife was the original invention.)
The Kentucky long rifle changed the world. It could shoot the pumpkin off a redcoat’s shoulders at 150 yards.
Changed the world, but not for the better.
Steel?
Bicycle?
Transistor?
Nuts and bolts?
All excellent candidates Mr B but which four of the top ten as posted would you drop to put in your four?
All good inventions.
If I had to, I would drop the internal combuston engine – we did pretty well on external combustion engines for quite a while, and move from the top ten to the top thirteen inventions of all time.
To be fair, many more that those 10, 13 or 14 have been essential to get humanity to where it is, and to mess up the rest of the world as humanity has. Arguably, the chain saw might have been the top one to be un-invented.
Nothing really electronic on the list then (this is Electronics Weekly !) ? Transistor ? IC ?
I’d put the screw far higher than the nail on this list.
Surely penicillin was a discovery, rather than an invention?
I suppose a lot of inventions are preceded by a discovery, Nehack, e.g Edison said they tried 2000 materials as the filament for a light bulb before they tried carbonised cotton
Light bulb was the invention, filament was the development?
Penicillin was discovered, then developed for manufacture?
The bicycle allowed people to travel further afield, adding a bit of mix to the DNA. Without it, we might all have been our own grandpa.
Yes oddly enough in medieval times it was royalty and the upper classes who were the least in-bred 🙂
My tribe of Saxon reivers avoided in breeding by stealing women from the English and we traded women with the Scots.
Antibiotics were a rediscovery. Jesus, one of my favorite scientists, used antibiotics to cure an eye infection. He took good earth into his mouth and extracted the antibiotics into his saliva that he spit into the infected eye. He learned this from the village vintner who also taught him how to ferment any sweet beverage and turn water into wine.
I was searching for the favourite scientists for a while..
..I first read that as ‘Jesus! One of my favourite …’
ROFL, truly gone fruit loops.
19 comments in and nobody has mentioned fire! Whether discovery or invention similar to penicillin, no? And precedes almost everything on the list.
I would have thought paper, and hence the pen/quill/whatever, preceded and were more important than the printing press.
One step back to charcoal and cave walls. Just not portable
I suppose writing was actually the original invention. We’re not born with it, unlike speech which grew out of grunts and screeches (and still is in certain Mediterranean countries)
If you include cuneiform in wet clay, we go back to about 3100 BC. They invented cylindrical seals but the printing press eluded everyone until much, much later.
But what about sliced bread ???
And more seriously what about the toilet? The toilet is right up there with penicillin, certainly a better invention than contraceptives … even you do have your mind always in the gutter
I consider sliced bread primitive and awkward compared to the flat breads roti and tortillas that let you roll a melange of foods into a snack tube.
Digressing somewhat I was puzzled why humans are the only species that needs toilette paper. In fact humans do not need toilette paper when they eat the vegetarian diet of our evolutionary past. The cholesterol in meat creates the mess. Humans have no mechanisms to accommodate excess cholesterol. As I the newly minted vegan scour my arteries of atherosclerosis with medicaments to excreted the deposited cholesterol the mess returns.
We have toilet paper because not only does this l mark us out as more civilised beings, many of the other cleaning options used by the animal kingdom aren’t available to us.
For example, my cats don’t need toilet paper as they have what seems to be a much more efficient way of cleaning themselves. Unfortunately not only does their chosen method really not appeal to me, I’m not sure I’m flexible enough any more
Slightly stomach-churning (see what I did there?) but nonetheless interesting…
Googles ‘atherosclerosis’ with mild anticipation.
PS Although.. I’ve seen quite a few vegan farm aninals (cows/sheep) that would benefit form a good wipe should their hooves allow.
Whenever you invent something other people look at the invention and say that is so simple that I could have thought of it. With that they feel justified in copying the invention without attribution. Nails and wheels are good examples. Simple, yet humans did not imagine them for millions of years.
Hindsight is a frequent issue in my line of work.
To that list, I would also have added written language, I cannot see how the printing press could have come about without writing already existing.