world's greatest invention essay

November 1, 2013

What Are the 10 Greatest Inventions of Our Time?

Before you consider, here are a few opinions from Scientific American readers in 1913 on what makes a great invention

By Daniel C. Schlenoff

A competition sponsored in 1913 by Scientific American asked for essays on the 10 greatest inventions. The rules: “our time” meant the previous quarter century, 1888 to 1913; the invention had to be patentable and was considered to date from its “commercial introduction.”

Perception is at the heart of this question. Inventions are most salient when we can see the historical changes they cause. In 2013 we might not appreciate the work of Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison on a daily basis, as we are accustomed to electricity in all its forms, but we are very impressed by the societal changes caused by the Internet and the World Wide Web (both of which run on alternating-current electricity, by the way). A century from now they might be curious as to what all the fuss was about. The answers from 1913 thus provide a snapshot of the perceptions of the time.

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The airplane: The Wright Flyer for military purposes, being demonstrated at Fort Myer, Va., in 1908. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

Following are excerpts from the first- and second-prize essays, along with a statistical tally of all the entries that were sent in.

The first-prize essay was written by William I. Wyman, who worked in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., and was thus well informed on the progress of inventions. His list was:

1. The electric furnace (1889) It was “the only means for commercially producing Carborundum (the hardest of all manufactured substances).” The electric furnace also converted aluminum “from a merely precious to very useful metal” (by reducing it’s price 98 percent), and was “radically transforming the steel industry.”

2. The steam turbine, invented by Charles Parsons in 1884 and commercially introduced over the next 10 years. A huge improvement in powering ships, the more far-reaching use of this invention was to drive generators that produced electricity.

3. The gasoline-powered automobile. Many inventors worked toward the goal of a “self-propelled” vehicle in the 19th century. Wyman gave the honor specifically to Gottleib Daimler for his 1889 engine, arguing: “a century's insistent but unsuccessful endeavor to provide a practical self-propelled car proves that the success of any type that once answered requirements would be immediate. Such success did come with the advent of the Daimler motor, and not before.”

4. The moving picture. Entertainment always will be important to people. “The moving picture has transformed the amusements of the multitude.” The technical pioneer he cited was Thomas Edison.

5. The airplane. For “the Realization of an age-long dream” he gave the laurels of success to the Wright brothers, but apart from its military use reserved judgment on the utility of the invention: “It presents the least commercial utility of all the inventions considered.”

6. Wireless Telegraphy. Systems for transmitting information between people have been around for centuries, perhaps millennia. Telegraph signals got a speed boost in the U.S. from Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail. Wireless telegraphy as invented by Guglielmo Marconi, later evolving into radio, set information free from wires.

7. The cyanide process. Sounds toxic, yes? It appears on this list for only one reason: It is used to extract gold from ore. “Gold is the life blood of trade,” and in 1913 it was considered to be the foundation for international commerce and national currencies.

8. The Nikola Tesla induction motor. “This epoch-making invention is mainly responsible for the present large and increasing use of electricity in the industries.” Before people had electricity in their homes, the alternating current–producing motor constructed by Tesla supplied 90 percent of the electricity used by manufacturing.

9. The Linotype machine. The Linotype machine enabled publishers—largely newspapers—to compose text and print it much faster and cheaper. It was an advance as large as the invention of the printing press itself was over the painstaking handwritten scrolls before it. Pretty soon we won’t be using paper for writing and reading, so the history of printing will be forgotten anyway.

10. The electric welding process of Elihu Thomson. In the era of mass production, the electric welding process enabled faster production and construction of better, more intricate machines for that manufacturing process.

The electric welder invented by Elihu Thomson enabled the cheaper production of intricate welded machinery. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

The turbine invented by Charles Parsons powered ships. Assembled in numbers, they provided an efficient means of driving electrical generators and producing that most useful commodity. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

The second-prize essay, by George M. Dowe, also of Washington, D.C., who may have been a patent attorney, was more philosophical. He divided his inventions into those aiding three broad sectors: production, transportation and communication.

1. Electrical fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. As natural fertilizer sources were depleted during the 19th century, artificial fertilizers enabled the further expansion of agriculture.

2. Preservation of sugar-producing plants. George W. McMullen of Chicago is credited with the discovery of a method for drying sugar cane and sugar beets for transport. Sugar production became more efficient and its supply increased by leaps and bounds, like a kid on a “sugar buzz.” Maybe this is one invention we could have done without. But I digress.

3. High-speed steel alloys. By adding tungsten to steel, “tools so made were able to cut at such a speed that they became almost red hot without losing either their temper or their cutting edge” The increase in the efficiency of cutting machines was “nothing short of revolutionary.”

4. Tungsten-filament lamp. Another success of chemistry. After tungsten replaced carbon in its filament, the lightbulb was considered “perfected.” As of 2013 they are being phased out worldwide in favor of compact fluorescent bulbs, which are four times as efficient.

5. The airplane. Not yet in wide use as transportation in 1913, but “To [Samuel] Langley and to the Wright brothers must be awarded the chief honors in the attainment of mechanical flight.” In 2013 the annoying aspects of commercial airline flying make transportation by horse and buggy seem a viable alternative.

6. The steam turbine. As with Mr. Wyman, the turbine deserved credit not only “in the utilization of steam as a prime mover” but in its use in the “generation of electricity.”

7. Internal combustion engine. As a means of transportation, Dowe gives the greatest credit to “Daimler, Ford and Duryea.” Gottleib Daimler is a well-known pioneer in motor vehicles. Henry Ford began production of the Model T in 1908 and it was quite popular by 1913. Charles Duryea made one of the earliest commercially successful petrol-driven vehicles, starting in 1896.

8. The pneumatic tire. Cars for personal transportation were an improvement on railways. “What the track has done for the locomotive, the pneumatic tire has done for the vehicle not confined to tracks.” Credit is given to John Dunlop and William C. Bartlet, who each had a milestone on the road (pun intended) to successful automobile and bicycle tires.

9. Wireless communication. Marconi was given the credit for making wireless “commercially practical.” Dowe also makes a comment that could apply equally to the rise of the World Wide Web, stating that wireless was “devised to meet the needs of commerce primarily, but incidentally they have contributed to social intercourse.”

10. Composing machines. The giant rotary press was quite capable of churning out masses of printed material. The bottleneck in the chain of production was composing the printing plates. The Linotype and the Monotype dispensed with that bottleneck.

The essays sent in were compiled to come up with a master list of inventions that were considered to be the top 10. Wireless telegraphy was on almost everyone’s list. The “aeroplane” came in second, although it was considered important because of its potential, not because there were so many airplanes in the sky. Here are the rest of the results:

There were also mentions for Luther Burbank's agricultural work (23); Louis Pasteur and vaccination work (20); acetylene gas from carbide (17); mercury-vapor lamp (7); preservation of sugar-producing plants (7); combined motion picture and talking machine (10); Edison's storage battery (6); automatic player piano (4); Pulmotor (a respirator machine) (4); telephone (4).

The motion picture: The hard-working Thomas Edison helped make this entertainment form technically viable. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

The full contents of all the prize-winning essays is available with a subscription to the Scientific American archives .

The Stories Behind 20 Inventions That Changed the World

By mentalfloss .com | mar 30, 2023, 6:09 pm edt.

You might find it impossible to imagine a world without your smartphone, or have trouble remembering a time when Wi-Fi wasn’t everywhere, but many of today’s most relied-upon technologies would not have been possible—or even dreamed of—if it weren’t for the game-changing inventions that came before them. And while it’s easy to take many of the marvels of design and engineering we interact with on a daily basis for granted—think toilets, seat belts, and suspension bridges—it’s just as easy to overlook how a handful of more surprising inventions, like the Super Soaker or the pizza saver, have affected the world around us. From blood banks to barcodes and beyond, here are the stories behind 20 inventions that changed the world.

1. Suspension Bridges

Suspension bridges are nothing new; there’s one in China that until recently used bamboo that’s at least 1000 years old , and may be over 2000. But the modern suspension bridges that came along in the 1800s were something else altogether: They were cheaper to build, easier to repair, and provided plenty of leeway in case of flooding. Eventually, the bridges allowed for passage over far larger bodies of water and could withstand violent storms and the ever-increasing weight of foot and vehicle traffic in cities (not to mention drastically cutting down travel times). In the middle of the 19th century, engineer John A. Roebling saw that the Allegheny Portage Railroad was using breakable hemp ropes, leading him to create a way to spin and manufacture wire rope, a technology Roebling would soon put toward suspension bridges. Eventually, the wire could be spun and anchored on site , which helped speed up the construction process.

Roebling’s innovations led to his designs for the Niagara River Gorge Bridge, the Sixth Street Bridge in Pittsburgh, and the famed Brooklyn Bridge in the second half of the 19th century. Though the Brooklyn Bridge was John Roebling’s basic design, his son, Washington, took over the project as chief engineer following his father’s death in 1869. Then, after Washington became mostly confined to his home following a battle with decompression sickness (or “the bends”), his wife, Emily, took on many of his responsibilities. During a time when women were kept far away from STEM fields, Emily learned about cable construction, stress analysis, and other principles of suspension bridge engineering, and was a key figure in the completion of the project.

Today, suspension bridges are located in all corners of the globe, allowing people to safely and easily travel across great chasms and bodies of water. And these bridges are no longer suspended only over simple rivers— Japan’s Akashi Kaikyo Bridge stretches 12,828 feet across the Akashi Strait and features a main span that is 6527 feet long.

Dry and flush toilets have been around for thousands of years, and while many of us take these pieces of porcelain hardware for granted these days, there’s no doubt that life would look much different—and much worse—without them. “Toilets are the key to a thriving, healthy society,” Kimberly Worsham, sanitation expert and founder of FLUSH (Facilitated Learning for Universal Sanitation and Hygiene), tells Mental Floss. Having a designated place to do your business cuts back on outbreaks of infectious diseases like cholera and typhoid—both rampant in urban areas before flush toilets (and indoor plumbing and sewers) were widely used. And in the case of dry toilets, the waste deposited there can be processed for agricultural use.

Typically, people date the modern flush toilet to John Harington, godson to Queen Elizabeth I , but there were flush toilets well before he got involved (one in Knossos, which dates back to the 16th century BCE, was even connected to a sewer). “Flush toilets like his had been available to Western Europe during the Roman Empire, but after Rome fell, Europe essentially resorted to sh***ing outside again,” Worsham says. “All of those systems fell into disrepair.” (Other areas of the world, like East Asia and areas of the Middle East, still used toilets even as Western Europe went backward.)

The options available at the time Harington was innovating were chamber pots, garderobes—which Worsham describes as “dreadful closets with holes in the ground”—or going to the bathroom outside. Harington wanted to bring the toilet back in and make going to the bathroom a more comfortable experience, but his invention left a lot to be desired: Instead of connecting to a sewer, it had a pipe that went straight down into a lower chamber that would eventually need to be emptied by some unlucky person. Even worse, its design meant that the toxic, flammable gases released when urine and poop decompose could come wafting back up, creating potentially deadly situations. It didn’t catch on; Harington built just a handful of models.

Then, in 1775, a Scottish watchmaker named Alexander Cumming developed the S-trap, a piece of plumbing that attaches to the back of the toilet. “This was revolutionary because it used water in the trap to keep the toxic gasses from getting back into the home and the poo and pee from easily sliding back into the toilet,” Worsham says. “Once Cumming patented his design, we had something like a flush toilet renaissance.” Tinkering with toilets commenced in earnest, with people like Thomas Crapper (who, according to Worsham, “created a killer marketing campaign for toilets”) getting involved. Once materials to make toilets became cheaper, they became more common, and the world got much safer. “We saw mortality rates decline,” Worsham says. “It also made our living spaces far less sh***y—literally.” Bodily waste deposited into flush toilets went into sewers or septic tanks, which meant it wasn’t on the street or in drinking water.

That said, there’s still a long way to go to make sure everyone has access to a toilet: According to Worsham, “1 in 4 people in the world lack access to basic toilets, and 1 in 2 lacks access to safely managed toilets—toilets where the waste is never put back into the environment untreated.” Without toilets, people are sicker and miss both work and school more often, which can lead to poverty traps and inequality. Thankfully, toilet tinkering hasn’t stopped: “There have been some really great projects by social enterprises and non-governmental organizations in different parts of the world working to build newer, better, more environmentally-friendly toilets,” Worsham says. “There’s also been some really neat innovation in integrating fecal waste from the toilets with organic waste—a.k.a. food scraps—and treating them to create great agricultural products like fertilizer and animal feed. We’re thinking circular economies here, and it’s exciting.”

3. The Walkman

Though many of today’s kids didn’t know what a Walkman was until they saw Chris Pratt’s Peter Quill flaunt one in 2014’s  Guardians of the Galaxy , they pay unofficial homage to the device every time they play a song on their smartphone. Transistor radios had been around since the 1950s, but it was Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka who really revolutionized the idea of playing whatever you want wherever you are (provided that you had the cassette tape on hand). For Ibuka, he really wanted something he could use to listen to music on flights. The Sony Walkman debuted in Japan in 1979 (and the U.S. in 1980) and quickly became the It Girl of the ’80s. The Walkman itself was compact, lightweight, and portable, and so were its headphones. As new devices debuted over the years—from Sony’s Discman to Apple’s iPod to smartphones and the Bluetooth headphones of today—the focus on those qualities never wavered.

4. The Pill

By the end of the 19th century, bicycles were offering women a relatively cheap, easy form of independence. Their movements, and the clothing they wore , became less restricted. Decades later, a new item would hit the market and further revolutionize women’s rights: the Pill.

Hormonal birth control pills (often shortened to just the Pill) weren’t the first oral contraceptive ; people had long relied on various concoctions, such as drinking mercury or toxic pennyroyal. By the early 20th century, a push for better contraceptives was rising in the U.S.—Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth control clinic in 1916, for example, though it was raided and shut down. Work on a contraceptive pill didn’t begin until the 1950s. A biologist named Gregory Goodwin Pincus and a gynecologist named John Rock, with encouragement and funding from Sanger and wealthy philanthropist Katharine McCormick, teamed up to develop a “magic pill” that could prevent pregnancy. “I would argue that effective contraception was probably in the whole of the 20th century the most important change for women,” Linda Gordon, author of Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America , told Allure .

When the Pill first hit the market in 1957, it was only approved to help regulate menstruation [ PDF ]; even after the FDA approved the Pill for contraceptive use in 1960, it still wasn’t readily available. In some U.S. states, it remained illegal for unmarried women to purchase the pill until 1972. Oral contraceptives have evolved since their original debut; today, there are many brands on the market, and people can now choose from a variety of monophasic, biphasic, and triphasic options, which provide varying amounts of estrogen and progestin.

The creation of the Pill did more than give women control over their sexual health and fertility—it allowed them to choose to marry later, seek additional education, and advance in their careers. As Vanessa Grigoriadis wrote in New York magazine, “These days, women’s twenties are as free and fabulous as they can be, a time of boundless freedom and experimentation, of easily trying on and discarding identities, careers, partners. The Pill, which is the most popular form of contraception in the U.S., is still the symbol of that freedom.”

5. Super Soaker

For decades, squirt guns were flimsy pieces of plastic that could barely muster enough power to water a houseplant. Then the first Super Soaker—then called the Power Drencher—hit the market in 1990, bringing along with it a Schwarzenegger-esque machismo and a sophisticated air-pressure system that promised to drench unsuspecting targets from far further than previous water guns. The allure of wreaking havoc at family get-togethers and school functions was apparently too much for kids to pass up, and more than 2 million guns flew off the shelves in its debut year. Al Davis, the former executive vice president of Larami, wrote in his book Super Soaker that “The deliveries would come into the stores, and the clerks wouldn’t even have time to put them on the shelves. They’d just take them out of the boxes and sell them to the kids waiting in line for them.”

In its first 25 years on the market, more than 175 different variations of the high-powered water gun were released, racking up over $1 billion in sales in the process. Hasbro bought Larami and the Super Soaker brand in 1995 , and to this day, the company continues to release bigger models that promise to unleash more water-fueled mayhem every summer.

When the Strong National Museum of Play inducted the Super Soaker into its National Toy Hall of Fame in 2015, former Curator Patricia Hogan noted, “[The] Super Soaker had a big impact on neighborhood play. The small squirt guns of the past had required close-in work to engage the opposition. The long, drenching reach of Johnson’s invention requires a quick retreat from a soggy assault or a good chase, meaning that kids with Super Soakers do some serious sprinting. Calculating the distance to target and the physics of velocity and arc requires kids to use their brains. Contemplating strategies and tactics and puzzling out plans forces kids to analyze the best approaches to triumphal ends. And if kids get soaked in the process? It’s all good clean fun.”

None of this would have been possible if not for the outside-the-box thinking of former NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson. He got the idea for the Super Soaker while testing a new type of heat pump he had created that used water as a coolant in the early 1980s. While the heat pump worked fine, he also realized it was pretty fun to shoot concentrated streams of water from the pump across his bathroom.

“I was having trouble getting people to understand the hard science inventions I had like a heat pump or the digital measuring instrument,” Johnson told Forbes . “I thought the toy was something anyone could look at and appreciate.”

Though Johnson holds over 100 patents and worked on NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter, his reinvention of the water gun, from 29-cent novelty to summer staple, is something that generations of kids—and some unwitting bystanders—will never forget.

6. The Blood Bank

Less than a century ago, patients requiring a blood transfusion were in a race against time. There was no organized network for people to donate blood, and because blood was difficult to preserve, there was no way to store it for future use. Patients had to find their own blood donors before it was too late.

In 1937, after devising a technique for preserving blood for up to 10 days, physician Bernard Fantus set up the nation’s first “ blood bank ” at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. People could make “deposits” of their own blood for their own use or to be given to others with matching blood types.

At about the same time, surgeon Charles R. Drew figured out a method for separating plasma from whole blood, and found that if whole blood wasn’t necessary, blood transfusions could be successfully performed with plasma alone . Plasma could be dried for long-term storage in blood banks. As World War II decimated Europe, Drew and the American Red Cross launched a groundbreaking program to collect donated plasma in the U.S. and ship it to Britain, essentially creating a national system for blood donation. During the war, he collaborated with the Red Cross to set up “bloodmobiles”—mobile blood donation centers that made sustaining blood banks more practical. Today, about 13.6 million units of whole blood and red blood cells are collected in the U.S. each year, saving countless lives.

7. Space Telescopes

When Lyman Spitzer proposed the invention of a space telescope in the 1940s, humans could look at our universe only through land-based instruments. Earth’s atmosphere acted like a veil between the land-based telescopes and space, blurring images and hindering detection of far-off celestial phenomena. Spitzer’s research paved the way for the Hubble Space Telescope, the first space-based major optical telescope , launched in 1990 and named for the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble .

Over its three decades in orbit, Hubble has determined the age of the universe (13.8 billion years), accurately measured the distance to a neighboring galaxy, and spotted numerous moons and exoplanets, in addition to revealing the beauty of the universe through stunning photographs . “The Hubble space telescope has brought about a visual revolution, more significant than any recent work of art in transforming the way we see ourselves and the cosmos,” art critic Jonathan Jones wrote in The Guardian . This year, NASA is scheduled to launch the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most technologically advanced space telescope ever built, to unravel more secrets of space.

8. The Pizza Box and Pizza Table

The pizza industry has undergone numerous innovations in recent decades, but one element that has remained largely the same is the box your pie comes in. Domino's Pizza founder Tom Monaghan changed the game in the early 1960s when he worked with Triad Containers in Detroit to develop the modern pizza box. Prior to this, pizzas were delivered in bags or paperboard bakery boxes. These containers were flimsy and often crumpled under the intense heat of the pie before they reached their destinations. Domino’s corrugated cardboard containers were much more durable. They withstood grease and kept pizzas warm while releasing steam through strategically placed openings. Most importantly, the sturdy boxes were stackable , opening the door to mass deliveries.

But there was one area where the simple design fell short: The top of the box sometimes collapsed and stuck to the top of the pizza. The answer to this issue was the pizza saver , which Carmela Vitale patented in 1985. Shaped like a miniature patio table, the plastic device keeps the box lid separate from the pizza, thus keeping the cheese and toppings intact throughout the delivery journey. Vitale was a city council member—not a pizza salesperson—but she had eaten enough delivery pizza to notice a problem and come up with an ingenious solution.

One fall evening in 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen, a German physics professor, was experimenting with the conduction of electricity through low-pressure gases when he accidentally discovered a mysterious ray capable of making a chemical-coated screen fluoresce a few yards away. He went on to put objects between the tube and the screen to see the shadows they produced—and when he tried it with a hunk of lead, he saw shadows of not just the lead but the bones in his hand. Further experimentation showed that the screen could be replaced by a photographic plate—and the X-ray was born.

Röntgen named it X-strahlen — strahlen being German for “beam” or “ray,” and X being used in mathematics to indicate an unknown quantity [ PDF ]. Röntgen's discovery revolutionized the way doctors detect disease and injury, from breast cancer to broken bones. Today, X-rays are also used to find cracks in everything from aircraft wings to nuclear reactors—helping make the modern world quite a bit safer. “Thanks to [Röntgen's] invisible light,” radiologist Richard Gunderman wrote in The Conversation, “we now operate with a much deeper understanding of the universe we inhabit, the molecules and cells of which we are composed[,] and the diseases that threaten our lives.”

10. Wildlife Cams

The first “wildlife cams” were invented by Pennsylvania Congressman and photography enthusiast George Shiras around the end of the 19th century. He got the idea from a hunting technique used by the Ojibwa tribe called jacklighting, in which a fire is built in a pan and placed in the front part of a canoe while the hunter sits in the bow. “The glow makes it possible to distinguish the animal, whose attention is caught by the flames, causing it to stand still with an expectant air,” Sonia Voss, who curated an exhibition of Shiras’s photographs, told National Geographic. “At the rear of the canoe, the hunter, cast into the shadows, only needs to aim between the animal’s eyes, which reflect the flames and stand out like two bright beacons in the night. In the photographic version, the fire is replaced by a kerosene lamp and the trigger of the rifle by the shutter release of the camera.” Later, Shiras graduated to cameras equipped with flash and tripped by a string.

Today, critter cameras have evolved to be so light that they can be strapped to marine life, are battery powered so they can be left in nature for months at a time, and have been attached to robots to get closer to dangerous creatures than ever before, giving us an unprecedented look into the lives of the animals we share the planet with, and the world they inhabit—and helping us make plenty of scientific discoveries along the way. Thanks to wildlife cameras, we know that fishers are breeding in Washington state for the first time in decades; the hairy-nosed otter—the world’s most endangered otter species—is once again lurking within Malaysia; and the rare Siamese crocodile is still slyly slipping around the waters of Thailand. Cameras have also snapped footage of previously unknown species , such as Tanzania’s grey-faced sengi (a species of elephant shrew). In 2020 , trail cameras were essential in allowing scientists to continue their field research and gather data remotely during long stretches of COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions.

11. Duct Tape

Duct tape was the brainchild of Vesta Stoudt, an Illinois mom whose two sons were in the Navy. Stoudt worked at Green River Ordnance Plant packing and inspecting boxes of ammunition. The boxes were sealed with paper tape, dipped in wax, and had a tab to open them. Stoudt noticed that the boxes had a flaw: The tape was flimsy and tabs often tore off, which meant that soldiers couldn’t quickly open the boxes when they were under fire. Why not create a cloth-based waterproof tape to seal the boxes? She asked her supervisors, but they weren’t supportive, so she escalated the matter … straight to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt . “I suggested we use a strong cloth tape to close seams, and make tab of same,” she wrote. “It worked fine, I showed it to different government inspectors they said it was all right, but I could never get them to change tape.”

The president sent her letter to the War Production Board, her idea was approved, and the rest is history. Duct tape has been a quick fix for everyone from your average joe to physicists (who use it on their particle accelerators ) to astronauts (duct tape helped them make repairs on the moon ). When the three crewmembers of Apollo 13 were forced to transfer to the lunar module, duct tape helped them survive— according to Northrop Grumman, the vessel was designed to hold two people for 36 hours, but after the accident, had to hold three for over 86 hours. They used the adhesive (along with cardboard, plastic bags, and space suit components) to adapt their square carbon dioxide filters to the module's round holes. Jerry Woodfill, a NASA engineer who assisted the team from the ground, later told Universe Today , “Of course … the solution to every conceivable knotty problem has got to be duct tape! And so it was.”

12. Barcodes

On June 26, 1974, a grocery store cashier at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, passed a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum over a scanner—and the item and price were automatically registered. It was the first time an item with a barcode had ever been purchased.

The inventors behind this marvel of commerce were N. Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver, who envisioned a system of lines that could identify consumer products by using encoded information read by an optical scanner. It all started when Silver, a grad student at Drexel, overheard the president of a local food chain talking to the dean about the need to automatically obtain product information. The dean wasn't interested in pursuing the idea, but Silver mentioned it to his colleague Woodland, who thought the idea had so much promise that he quit his job and moved to Florida to pursue it. Ultimately, Woodland devised a system inspired by Morse code (which he had used as a Boy Scout) as well as the movie sound systems of the 1920s. It was later refined with help from IBM employee George Laurer, and became the basis for getting through checkout lines faster.

Today’s standard barcodes are known as universal product codes, or UPC-A, and are comprised of 12 digits. The first is a product category—3 denotes a health-related item, for example, while the rest point to the manufacturer and specific product. The more recent QR barcodes commonly recognized by smartphones can deliver information in an instant. Barcodes are used across a variety of industries and can boost productivity eight to 10 times compared to manual data entry. It all makes for a much speedier transaction, but not always: Aldi grocery employees sometimes memorize popular product barcodes so heavy items can remain in the cart.

13. Seat Belts

The idea of a seat belt for transportation safety doesn't begin with Nils Bohlin, the Swedish engineer who conceived of a three-point shoulder and lap belt for automobiles in 1958. Other innovators, like 19th century aviator George Cayley, recognized a need to keep humans from being ejected out of planes and other moving vehicles. But it was Bohlin, a Volvo engineer, who sought to improve upon the two-point lap belts, which could sometimes do more harm than good in the event of an accident. (At high speeds, the belts were capable of causing internal injuries.) By stabilizing the torso with a shoulder strap, drivers and passengers were kept in place without resorting to the more burdensome four-point belts worn by pilots or an earlier Y-shaped belt placed over the stomach. In what could only be described as an act of corporate selflessness, Volvo allowed any car manufacturer to duplicate the belt. At the time of Bohlin’s death in 2002, it was estimated his invention had saved well over a million lives.

14. The Microwave

During World War II, engineer Percy Spencer aided the U.S. war effort through his work on magnetrons—tubes that generate electromagnetic waves for radar—while working for tech company Raytheon. His work didn’t end with the war. In 1945, Spencer was tinkering with magnetrons when he noticed the peanut cluster candy bar in his pocket had suddenly transformed into a “gooey, sticky mess.” It didn’t take long for him to realize the magnetron’s microwaves were responsible, prompting him to develop a microwave oven that people could use to heat food more deliberately. The refrigerator-sized “Radarange” debuted in the mid-1940s and was originally meant for restaurants and airplanes rather than regular homes. (Its $1250 price tag—nearly $17,000 today—would have made widespread success in that realm unlikely anyway.)

Designs improved and costs decreased over time, and the 1967 edition of the Radarange was a hit among homemakers. By the mid-1970s, the microwave oven—eventually just “the microwave”—was becoming a mainstay in U.S. kitchens, and not just for leftovers. Manufacturers marketed the appliance as a faster, easier, (literally) cooler alternative to conventional ovens. “Make the greatest cooking discovery since fire,” actress Barbara Hale said in a 1972 Radarange ad that Mad Men ’s Don Draper surely would have wished he’d come up with himself. A 1971 ad for General Electric’s Just-A-Minute oven emphasized that “with the special timer, control settings, and recipe booklet that come with the oven, practically all the guesswork is taken out of cooking,” a boon to unconfident cooks everywhere. Full-fledged cookbooks cropped up, too— Madame Benoit’s Microwave Cook Book , Barbara Kafka’s The Microwave Gourmet , and so on—featuring everything from duck à l’orange to “ Elegant Beef Dinner .” One 1978 cookbook even recommended making pie in the microwave (to get around the lack of browning, it was advised, just throw some yellow food coloring in there). And when Swanson debuted its plastic, microwave-safe trays in 1986, the microwave and the TV dinner entered into a marriage of convenience that worn-out adults would rely on for decades to come.

15. The Can Opener

Decades after people started storing food in tin cans, someone finally came up with a way to crack them open that didn’t involve a chisel and a hammer (or some other dangerous tool). In the mid-19th century, a series of inventors built what were known as lever knives—not too dissimilar to the can opener on a modern Swiss Army Knife, and by 1870, William Lyman innovated a design that included a rotary cutte. But it wasn’t until the 1920s that Charles Arthur Bunker arrived on the scene with a patent that featured handles you squeeze together to safely puncture the lid and a handle you twist to propel a sharp little wheel along the rim. If that sounds familiar, it’s probably because today’s manual can openers are pretty much the same.

Like the button (which dates back thousands of years, though the buttonhole is a more recent innovation) and the zipper (invented in the 19th century) that came before it, Velcro revolutionized clothing—and we have old-fashioned curiosity to thank for its invention. In the 1940s, George de Mestral and his dog returned from a hunting trip covered in burdock burrs. Intrigued, de Mestral whipped out his microscope to find out what, exactly, made the burrs stick. He discovered that the burrs were covered in little hooks, and that provided de Mestral, a serial inventor, with a burst of inspiration: If he could create a fabric that mimicked the burrs’ hooks, and combine it with fabric loops those hooks could latch into, he’d have a middle ground between fasteners like buttons and zippers.

It took him some time to find a manufacturer to create his fabric; many didn’t think it could be done. But de Mestral persevered and continued to innovate on his idea until he had a product that worked, and Velcro—a trademarked combination of the French words velours and croche , meaning “velvet” and “hook,” respectively—debuted in the early ‘60s. Since then, it has proved as useful as de Mestral thought it would: NASA has used it to anchor equipment in space missions and during walks on the moon ; Mead made use of the material as fasteners on its iconic  Trapper Keepers ; and, of course, it’s used in shoes and clothing , where it’s particularly helpful to people who have difficulty with zippers and buttons (or their caretakers ).

17. Air Conditioning

Since its introduction at the turn of the 20th century, the air conditioner has transformed the quality of life in regions with warm climates—but the first modern air-conditioning unit wasn’t invented for people at all. It was created for a printing press.

In 1902, a 25-year-old engineer named Willis Carrier was asked to come up with a way to control the humidity at the Sackett & Wilhelms printing plant in Brooklyn, where the sweltering summer days frequently messed with the color register. After early tests with rollers, burlap, and calcium chloride brine, Carrier hit on a device that sent chilled water through heating coils. The system was installed later that same summer at the printing plant alongside fans, perforated steam pipes, and other accouterments. It was a huge success, and reportedly had the same cooling effect as 108,000 pounds of ice per day.

Carrier's invention was sold everywhere from flour mills to razor factories, and air-conditioning went on to reshape both architecture (by allowing for skyscrapers where people didn't broil on top floors) and nations, making the development of modern metropolises in sun-scorched places like Singapore, Shanghai, the Sun Belt, and Dubai possible. It also, of course, made everyday life more pleasant (and productive) for millions, if not billions. Ironically, the large amount of energy air conditioners consume has contributed to climate change , making the need for artificial cool air more vital than ever. “It’s not a matter of going back to the past. But before, people knew how to work with the climate,” Malaysian architect Ken Yeang told The Guardian . “Air conditioning became a way to control it, and it was no longer a concern. No one saw the consequences. People see them now.”

The story of the invention of the radio is about a race against time between two scientists—and the power of patents.

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, sent and received his first radio signals in 1894, and patented his invention in 1896 in England. Three years later, Marconi sent wireless signals across the English Channel, and two years after that, he claimed that he received a message sent from across the Atlantic (that claim, however, is controversial).

At roughly the same time Marconi was at work in Europe, inventor Nikola Tesla was working on a similar invention in America. Tesla invented the Tesla coil —which sent and received radio waves—in the 1890s. He was all set up for a long-distance experiment in 1895, but a fire broke out in his lab, interrupting the experiment. Two years later, Tesla applied for his patent in the United States.

Marconi and Tesla’s paths converged in 1900, when Marconi applied for a patent in the U.S.—which was denied because Tesla’s had been approved earlier that year.

Undaunted, Marconi continued to apply, and in 1904, the U.S. declared him to be the creator of the radio. This, along with the fact that Marconi had won a Nobel Prize for the technology, enraged Tesla. In 1915, he sued Marconi for patent infringement , but lacked the financial resources to pursue the case.

But beyond the courtroom drama, radio was already at work transforming the world. In 1910, it helped catch Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, a man who was accused of killing his wife and escaping to Canada on a ship with his lover; he was caught thanks to Marconi’s wireless telegraph, which sent radio waves, and a very clever ship captain . On August 31, 1920, the first radio news program was broadcast by a station in Detroit, and the first ad played on the radio in 1922 , changing the world of advertising. Radio was also used during both World Wars.

From protests, music, famous speeches, and political unrest, the radio has broadcast many iconic moments and connected the world in a way Marconi and Tesla probably never imagined. Some have gone so far as to say that radio changed everything ; as Jack Lule wrote in his book , Understanding Media and Culture , the radio became “an instrument of social cohesion as it brought together members of different classes and backgrounds to experience the world as a nation.”

As for who came out on top in the radio patent war? Tesla finally got his victory in 1943, when the Supreme Court upheld that his patent had priority. But it was a win the inventor never got to celebrate: He had passed away earlier that year.

19. Aquariums

While keeping fish as pets may have begun with the Romans, the first glass aquarium wasn’t created until 1832, when seamstress-turned-scientist Jeanne Villepreux-Power got tired of studying dead specimens in her lab. Observing marine life wasn’t as easy as observing animals on land, and she wanted to come up with a way to keep cephalopods—especially the paper nautilus—alive outside of the ocean.

To further her research, Villepreux-Power created three different types of aquariums: one for indoor study, one for shallow water, and one to be anchored to the ocean floor. The indoor glass aquarium allowed her to discover that the Argonauta Argo produced its own shell at the larva stage, as well as the fact that the animals can repair their shells within a few hours. She also came up with the idea of repopulating rivers using fish raised in aquariums. (Unfortunately, most of Villepreux-Power’s research was lost in a shipwreck, and she never rewrote her findings.)

Many would improve on her work, from Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (who turned a terrarium upside down) to Anna Thynne (who created the first marine aquarium filled with coral and seaweed) to Robert Warington [ PDF ] (who published his findings after managing to keep the environment in a 12-gallon tank stable). Two decades after Villepreux-Power’s invention, the first public aquarium opened in London in 1853; a few years after that, P.T. Barnum built an aquarium inside his Barnum’s American Museum in New York, which visitors enjoyed for until the museum burned down in 1865.

Since then, aquariums have become a favorite pastime for people around the world: According to American Humane , 700 million people around the world visit zoos and aquariums annually. Like zoos, aquariums can help with conservation efforts and protect endangered species—and like zoos, they can be controversial, as we debate how humane it is to keep large marine mammals like dolphins, orcas, and beluga whales in tanks much smaller than their natural environments. Still, many aquariums aren’t just for entertainment, but are also focused on exactly what Villepreux-Power was when created an aquarium in the first place: studying and learning.

20. The Lightbulb

Lighting a home used to be a hazardous experience: Open flames on candles and in fireplaces could set things ablaze. The gas lamp , invented near the end of the 18th century, was a definite upgrade, but it had its own set of issues, from fumes to being hard to maintain to the potential for explosions.

Enter: the lightbulb.

While Thomas Edison is often credited with inventing the lightbulb, there were many scientists and researchers who worked on a version of the device before Edison. Inventors like Humphry Davy (creator of the arc lamp) demonstrated how electricity could be used to create light. In the first half of the 19th century , a series of improvements were made—so much so that in the 1840s later-Sir William Grove was able to give a lecture fully illuminated by electric light. But the light was exceedingly expensive, up to 4 shillings an hour (16 pounds or $22 in today’s money) and early lightbulbs themselves were both expensive to make and unreliable.

There wasn’t a breakthrough until 1878, when chemist Joseph Swan replaced the expensive platinum filament with a cheaper carbonized paper one that also had longevity. Edison demonstrated his lightbulb in 1879, one year after Swan. After a long patent infringement lawsuit, the two decided to combine forces and formed the company Edison-Swan United. Later in life, Edison would choose his lighting system as his greatest invention.

Even Edison and Swan’s bulb wasn’t perfect, however, and many scientists continued to improve on its design—including patent expert Lewis Latimer , who streamlined and improved the carbon filament by encasing it in cardboard instead of bamboo, an innovation that allowed for longer-lasting bulbs.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the modern lightbulb changed how society functioned. Beyond making the home safer, it helped cut back on health problems created by things like gas fumes and smoke inhalation, paved the way for longer working hours, impacted building design, and kicked off the creation of massive infrastructure like the electric grid. Lightbulbs went into everything from cars to airplanes to trains, increasing the rate of travel—and making it much safer. And the lightbulb has left its mark symbolically, too. “Even though this invention, Edison’s bulb, is 135 years old at this point,” Ernest Freeberg, author of The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America , said in 2015 , “we still use [it] as the universal symbol for a great idea, for a stroke of inventive genius, for this Eureka moment.” Today, scientists work on improving the lightbulb every year, leading to more energy-efficient bulbs—and joining the long line of scientists and engineers whose bright ideas have changed history.

A version of this story ran in 2020; it has been updated for 2023.

35 of the most revolutionary inventions that shaped our world

From ancient tools to the latest digital advances, these human inventions changed the world and transformed life on earth..

Christopher McFadden

An old steam train

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• Humans are a very creative species.
• We stood on two feet from the very first day; we’ve been building things.
• But. some are more important in the grander scheme of history than others.

Human inventions and technologies have shaped civilizations and transformed life on Earth. As expectations and capabilities evolve, each generation cultivates its innovative thinkers.

From the invention of the wheel to the development of the Mars rover, many of these inventions have been genuinely revolutionary, even if that wasn’t always apparent then.

Most significant inventions don’t have just one inventor. Instead, they have been developed separately by many people, or many people have had a hand in their evolution from basic concepts to valuable inventions .

Here is a list of our top picks of revolutionary inventions that changed the world:

1. The invention of the wheel was a big deal

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The wheel is an original engineering marvel and one of the most famous inventions . This basic technology not only made it easier to travel but also served as the foundation for a vast number of other innovative technologies.

However, interestingly, the wheel is not that old. The oldest known wheel is from Mesopotamia, around 3500 B.C. By then, people had made metal alloys, built canals and sailboats, and made complicated instruments like harps.

This delay is because the primary intention here was not the wheel itself, which was likely invented the first time someone saw a rock rolling along, but the combination of a wheel and a fixed axle that allows the wheel to be connected to a stable platform. Without the fixed axle, the wheel has minimal utility. 

2. The compass ranks up there with the most important inventions

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Some believe this relatively modern invention  was first created for fortune-telling and “geomancy.” It was only later that it was adapted for navigational purposes. The Chinese most likely invented the earliest compasses similar to those we use today around 200 BC.

Earlier forms of the compass were made of lodestone, a naturally-occurring form of the mineral magnetite. Evidence suggests civilizations may have also used lodestones for similar purposes as early as the sixth century BCE. At some point, possibly around 1050 AD, people began suspending the lodestones so they could move freely and use them for navigation.

A description of a magnetized needle and its use among sailors occurs in a European book written in 1190 AD, so by that time, it is likely that using a needle as a compass was commonplace.

3. The modern world wouldn’t exist without the automobile

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Some people credit the birth of the modern car to the German inventor Karl Benz, who patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen in 1886. However, automobiles had been in the works since 1769, when Nicolas-Joseph Cugno developed the first steam-powered automobile capable of human transportation.

Over the years, many people contributed to the development of the automobile and its constituent parts. At the beginning of the 20th century, Henry Ford devised ways to make cars cheap enough for most people to buy. These techniques then became standard, with General Motors and Chrysler following suit. 

The history of the automobile reflects a worldwide evolution. Many people had to work together to make the internal combustion engine and the other parts that make automobiles. Dozens of spin-off industries were also involved, including oil and steel.

4. The steam engine was a true revolution in technology

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A Spanish mining administrator named Jerónimo de Ayanz is thought to have been the first to develop a steam engine. He patented a device that used steam power to pump water from mines. 

However, Englishman Thomas Savery , an engineer and inventor, is usually credited with developing the first practical steam engine in 1698 AD. His device was used to draw water from flooded mines using steam pressure. In developing his engine, Savery used principles set forth by Denis Papin, a French-born British physicist who invented the pressure cooker. 

In 1711, another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, developed an improvement in the engine. Later, in 1781 AD, James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker employed by Glasgow University, added a separate condenser to Newcomen’s engine, which allowed the steam cylinder to be maintained at a constant temperature — dramatically improving its functionality.+ He later developed a double-rotating steam engine that, by the 1800s, would power trains, mills, factories, and numerous other manufacturing operations.

The world would never be the same again.

5. Concrete is another great invention

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Concrete is one of the most widely used building materials today. It’s a composite material made from a mixture of broken stone or gravel, sand, Portland cement, and water, which can be spread or poured into molds and forms a mass resembling stone on hardening.

One of concrete’s key ingredients is cement, which is thought to have been devised in 1300 BC . Later, cement would be combined with other materials to make a substance more akin to what we know as concrete today. The Romans, for example, are famed for their concrete; many structures built using it still stand today. But it could be older than that.

Middle eastern builders coated the outside of their clay fortresses with a thin, moist layer of burned limestone, which chemically reacted with gasses in the air to form a hard, protective surface.

Around or before the third millennium BC, Nabataean traders or Bedouins built the first concrete-like structures in the southern Syria and northern Jordan regions . By 700 BC, the significance of hydraulic lime was known, which led to the development of mortar supply kilns for the construction of rubble-wall houses, concrete floors, and underground waterproof cisterns.

Around 3000 BC, the Egyptians used early concrete forms as mortar in their building. In 1824, Portland cement was invented by Joseph Aspdin of England. George Bartholomew laid down the first concrete-paved street in the US in 1893, which still exists.

By the end of the 19th century, steel-reinforced concrete was developed. In 1902, August Perret designed and built an apartment building in Paris using steel-reinforced concrete. This building had wide admiration and popularity for concrete and influenced the development of reinforced concrete. n 1921, Eugène Freyssinet pioneered reinforced-concrete construction by building two colossal parabolic-arched airship hangars at Orly Airport in Paris.

6. Crude oil distillates fuel the modern world

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Without gasoline, there would be no transportation industry as we know it today.

Gasoline is a fuel derivative of crude oil , and it is called “gas” in the United States and “petrol” in many other English-speaking places worldwide.

More specifically, petrol is a transparent, crude oil-derived liquid used as a fuel in internal combustion engines. Interestingly gas was initially discarded as an unwanted byproduct.

Before the discovery and commercialization of gasoline, the fuel of choice was a blend of alcohol, usually methanol and turpentine, called camphene. Later, this would be primarily replaced by kerosene. The first oil well dug in the US, in 1859, in Pennsylvania, refined the oil to produce kerosene. Although the distillation process also produced gasoline, this was discarded as a byproduct. The method of distillation refining only produced about 20 percent of gasoline from a given amount of crude petroleum.

However, once it was discovered that the internal combustion engine ran best on light fuels like gasoline, the refining process was refined. In 1913, a new process began to be used to produce gasoline more easily using chemical catalysts and pressure. The new thermal cracking process doubled the efficiency of refining and made refining gasoline more practical.

7. Locomotives have proved to be powerful tools

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Locomotives can carry a large number of passengers with comfort while also being able to haul heavy loads over long distances. While tracks, or rails, have been used for carrying wagons since the sixteenth century, the history of modern train travel is just over 200 years old.

Richard Trevithick, a British engineer, built the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive in the United Kingdom in 1804. It used high-pressure steam to drive the engine. On February 21, 18044, the world’s first steam-powered railway journey occurred when Trevithick’s unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway in Wales. 

However, Trevithick’s locomotives were too heavy for the cast-iron plateway track than in use. The commercial appearance of train networks came in the 1820s. In 1821, George Stephenson was appointed as an engineer for the construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the northeast of England, which was opened as the first public steam-powered railway in 1825. In 1829, he built his famous steam engine,  Rocket , and the age of railways began. 

8. The invention of the airplane was a quantum leap in tech

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On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled flight. This was a day that would be remembered for all time.

Flying machines had been dreamt up since Leonardo da Vinci’s time and likely long before. But thanks to the work of countless inventors over several centuries, the Wright Brothers became the first to achieve controlled powered flight.

Beginning with their work on gliders, the duo’s success laid the foundation for modern aeronautical engineering by demonstrating what was possible.

9. Fire might be the most crucial invention of all

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Though fire is a natural phenomenon, its discovery as a useful tool marks a revolution in the pages of history . The controlled use of fire likely predates the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens .

There is evidence of cooked food from around 1.9 million years ago — long before the evolution of Homo sapiens . There is also evidence of the controlled use of fire by our ancestors,  Homo erectus , beginning around 1,000,000 years ago. 

Flint blades burned in fires have been dated to roughly 300,000 years ago. There is also evidence that fire was used systematically by early modern humans to heat treat stone to increase its ability to flake for use in toolmaking around 164,000 years ago.

According to a heavily debated hypothesis, using fire for cooking allowed the larger brain of our species to develop in the first place by allowing hominids to eat a wider variety of foods.

From the past to the present, fire has been used in rituals, agriculture, cooking, generating heat and light, signaling, industrial processes, agriculture, and as a means of destruction. It can easily be considered one of the greatest inventions that changed the world. 

10. The nail is an underrated invention

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The nail is one of the most important and arguably underrated inventions . Before the invention of nails, wood structures were often built using rope to interlock adjacent boards. Some cultures developed sophisticated woodworking techniques to interlock wooden structures together.

We can’t be entirely sure when the first metal nails were developed, but bronze nails dating from around 3400 BC have been found in Egypt. These were later replaced by iron and steel over time, with most made by hand.

Hand-wrought nails were the norm until the 1790s and early 1800s. Today, nails are readily mass-produced and are so common most people take them for granted.

11. Humans have been using tools for as long as we know

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As with fire, using tools likely predated the evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens and may stretch back 2.6 million years or more. Today, several animal species are also known to use tools. 

Anthropologists believe using tools was an essential step in the evolution of humans . Some of the earliest tools may have been sticks, stones, and fire. However, almost anything can be a tool, depending on its use.

12. The lightbulb is another crucial invention

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The light we use today in our homes and offices comes from a bright idea from over 150 years ago. Electric lights were pioneered in the early 19th century by Humphry Davy, who experimented with electricity and invented an electric battery. When he connected wires between his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light.

His invention was known as the electric arc lamp. Over the next seven decades, other inventors also created “lightbulbs,” but these were incapable of commercial application. 

In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan created a “light bulb” by enclosing carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. But without a good vacuum, his bulb had too short a lifetime for commercial use. However, in the 1870s, better vacuum pumps became available, and Swan developed a longer-lasting lightbulb.

Thomas A. Edison improved on Swan’s design by using metal filaments, and in 1878 and 1879, he filed patents for electric lights using different materials for the filament. Electric Light Company began marketing its new product.

13. The mastery of electricity was a tremendous feat

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Electricity has become a basic need for daily life and is another essential invention. Of course, electricity has been around all along, but the practical applications to effectively use it first needed to be invented.

Alessandro Volta is generally credited with discovering the first practical ‘battery.’ He invented his voltaic pile in 1799. It consisted of discs of two different metals, such as copper and zinc, separated by cardboard soaked in brine. 

In 1831, British scientist Michael Faraday discovered the basic principles of electricity generation. The electromagnetic induction discovery revolutionized energy usage. The rise in electricity usability is now the backbone of modern industrial society.

14. The battery is another great invention

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The earliest device based on the principles of what would become the battery may date back to the Parthian empire, around 2,000 years old. The old battery consisted of a clay jar filled with a vinegar solution, into which an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder was inserted.

This device might have been used to electroplate silver. But, as mentioned in the previous entry, the inventor of the first electric battery was Alessandro Volta, who developed the pile battery.

After that, in 1800 AD, William Cruickshank designed the trough battery, an improvement on Alessandro Volta’s voltaic pile.

Batteries had a breakthrough in 1859 AD with the invention of the first rechargeable battery based on lead acid by the French physician Gaston Planté. The Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd) battery was introduced in 1899 by Waldemar Jungner. 

15. The printing press democratized information

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Before the Internet’s ability to spread information, the printing press helped information travel around the globe. 

German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is often credited with inventing the printing press around 1436 AD, although he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process. Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century, and Korean bookmakers were printing with moveable metal type a century before Gutenberg.

Johannes Gutenberg’s machine, however, improved on the already existing presses and introduced them to the West. By 1500 AD, Gutenberg presses were operating throughout Western Europe, producing vast quantities of written materials, from individual pages to pamphlets and books.

16. Morse Code and the telegraph machine greatly sped up communication

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The telegraph was developed between the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse and other inventors, and it revolutionized long-distance communication.

The system works by sending electrical signals that are transmitted by a wire laid between stations. In addition, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed a code, eventually called Morse code , for the simple transmission of messages across telegraph lines. Based on the frequency of usage, the code assigned a set of dots (short marks) and dashes (long marks) to the English alphabet and numbers.

According to some scholars, the telegraph was instrumental in laying the foundations for modern conveniences like telephones and computer code.

17. The advent of steel was of great importance

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Bronze was the first metal forged for use by humans. However, bronze is relatively weak. Iron was probably smelted throughout the Bronze Age, although it was seen as an inferior metal that was not as hard or durable as bronze. The use of iron became more widespread after people learned how to make steel, a much harder metal made by heating iron with carbon. Around 1,800 BC, a people along the Black Sea called the Chalybes began using iron ore to create sturdy wrought iron weapons with around 0.8 percent carbon.

Cast iron, with about 2-4 percent carbon, was first made in ancient China around 500 BC. The Chinese metalworkers built large furnaces to smelt iron ore into a liquid and poured this into carved molds. Around 400 BC, Indian metalworkers invented a smelting method that used a clay receptacle called a crucible to hold the molten metal. The workers put bars of wrought iron and pieces of charcoal into the crucibles, then sealed the containers and inserted them into a furnace.

This wrought iron melted and absorbed the carbon in the charcoal. When the crucibles cooled, they contained ingots of pure steel – a much stronger, less brittle metal than iron. The later development of the blast furnace led to even stronger steel. British engineer Henry Bessemer developed a process that blasted air through molten pig iron to create carbon-free, pure iron in 1856 AD.

The famous invention of the Bessemer Process  paved the way for the mass production of steel, making it one of the world’s biggest industries. Now steel is used in the creation of everything from bridges to skyscrapers.

18. Transistors are vital for modern electronics

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The transistor is an essential component in nearly every modern electronic gadget. In 1926 AD, Julius Lilienfeld patented a field-effect transistor, but the working device was not feasible as it was.

In 1947 AD, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley developed the first practical transistor device at Bell Laboratories. The trio was awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for this invention.

Transistors have since become a fundamental piece of the circuitry in countless electronic devices, including televisions, cellphones, and computers, making a remarkable impact on technology.

19. Antibiotics have saved countless lives

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Antibiotics have saved millions of lives by killing and inhibiting the growth of harmful bacteria. Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch first described the use of antibiotic drugs in 1877 AD.

In 1928, Alexander Fleming identified penicillin, derived from a mold species.

Throughout the 20th century, antibiotics spread rapidly and proved a significant living improvement, fighting nearly every known infection and protecting people’s health. But, their overprescription and use could soon render them ineffective .

20. Contraceptives changed women’s lives forever but are arguably controversial

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The prevention of pregnancy has a surprisingly long history.

The history of contraceptives dates back to around 1500 B.C., where records indicate that ancient Egyptian women would mix honey, sodium carbonate, and crocodile dung into a thick, solid paste called pessary and insert it into their vaginas before intercourse. However, many researchers believe old-world birth control methods are ineffective and possibly life-threatening.

The first known form of condom (from a goat bladder) was used in Egypt around 3000 B.C. In 1844 AD, Charles Goodyear patented the vulcanization of rubber, which led to the mass production of rubber condoms.

In 1914 AD, with a monthly newsletter called “The Woman Rebel,” Margaret Sanger, a nurse and sex educator from New York state, first coined the term “Birth control.” Later, Carl Djerassi successfully created a progesterone pill that could block ovulation.

“The Pill” was approved for sale in 1960 and launched an international revolution that allowed women to determine when they would have children and freed them from unplanned pregnancies, which could derail their lives. 

21. The harnessing of x-rays was a major medical advancement

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Since x-rays are a natural phenomenon, nobody can claim to have “invented” them. But, the development of the X-ray machine is undoubtedly one of the epoch-making advancements in medicine.

And they were discovered by accident by physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. While testing whether cathode rays could pass through some glass, he noticed a glow from a nearby chemically coated screen.

Because of the unknown nature of the rays, he named them x-rays. Through his observation, he learned that x-rays could be photographed when they penetrate human flesh.

In 1897 AD, x-rays were used during the Balkan war to find bullets and broken bones inside patients. In 1901 AD, he received the Nobel prize in physics for his work.

22. The refrigerator is another hugely important invention

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Over the last 150 years, refrigeration has offered us ways to preserve food, medicines, and other perishable substances. Before its conception, people often cooled their food with ice and snow or purchased only what they could use immediately.

James Harrison built the first practical vapor compression refrigeration system. However, the first widespread commercial refrigerator was the General Electric “Monitor-Top” refrigerator, which became available in 1927. The introduction of Freon revved up the refrigerator market in the 1930s by providing a safer, low-toxicity alternative to previously used refrigerants.

23. Television has changed many aspects of our lives

The invention of the television was the work of many individuals. Although TV plays an integral part in our everyday lives, it rapidly developed during the 19th and 20th centuries as a result of the work of several people.

In 1884, a 23-year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow, patented the image rasterizer, a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes, so each hole scanned a line of an image. 

The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in 1909 AD. In 1911 AD, Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Zworykin created a system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit crude images over wires to a cathode ray tube or in a receiver. But the system was not sensitive enough to allow moving images.

In the 1920s, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird used the Nipkow disk to create a prototype video system. In 1925 AD, Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised images in motion. Later, in 1927 AD, he demonstrated the transmission of an image of a face in motion using telephone lines. This is widely regarded as being the world’s first public television demonstration. 

24. The camera was another significant technological development

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This modern invention has witnessed many phases of evolution — camera obscura, daguerreotypes, dry plates, calotypes, SLRs, and DSLRs. In 1826 AD, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used a sliding wooden box camera made by Charles and Vincent Chevalier to click what is credited as the first permanent photograph.

With technological advancements, Digital cameras were introduced, which saved images on memory cards rather than using film. The history of the digital camera began with Eugene F. Lally’s idea to take pictures of the planets and stars.

Later, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson invented and built the first digital camera in 1975 AD. It was built using parts of kits lying around the Kodak factory. The camera was about the size of a breadbox, taking 23 seconds to capture a single image. 

Today, every smartphone has at least one built-in camera that can take videos.

25. The computer is, possibly, the greatest invention of the last Millenium

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In the early 19th century, the “father of the computer,” Charles Babbage, conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer. From those first tentative steps, the journey to the modern computer began.

Although there’s no single inventor of the modern computer , the principles of modern computer science were set out by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper, “ On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem .” Today, computers stand as the symbolic representation of the modern world.

26. Email is an often overlooked significant invention

I going to make a greatest artwork as I can, by my head, my hand and by my mind/iStock  

Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar but often incompatible mail applications. Over time, these became linked by a web of gateways and routing systems.

Many US universities were part of the ARPANET, which increased software portability between its systems. That portability helped make the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) increasingly influential. The first ARPANET email was sent in 1971 AD.

Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing one common feature of the email system that we know today. In 1972 AD, while working as an ARPANET contractor, Tomlinson used the @ symbol to denote sending messages from one computer to another.

By the mid-1970s, email had taken on the form we recognize today. In the present day, most official business communication depends on email.

27. The Internet has changed the world

piranka/iStock  

Like other inventions, the Internet has no single “inventor. ” Instead, it has evolved. It originated around the 1950s, along with the development of computers.   

The first workable prototype of the Internet came in the late 1960s, with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocols in 1983, and from there, researchers began to assemble the “network of networks” that became the modern Internet.

28. The World Wide Web is the modern-day equivalent of the printing press

Henrik5000/iStock  

The Internet is a networking infrastructure, whereas the World Wide Web is a way to access information over the Internet medium.

The father of the World Wide Web is the British computer scientist and legend Tim Berners-Lee. The Web was initially conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes worldwide.

Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first proposal for the World Wide Web in March 1989 and a  second proposal in May 1990 . Berners-Lee worked with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau to formalize the proposal, including describing a “WorldWideWeb” in which “hypertext documents” could be viewed by “browsers.”

By the end of 1990, Berners-Lee had the first Web server and browser up and running at CERN. Only a few users had access to the computer platform that ran the browser, so development soon started on a more spartan browser, which could run on any system. 

29. Currency was an important invention

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From materials like livestock to shells, precious metals, and coins, the currency has taken various forms throughout history. Due to frequent shortages of coins, and portability issues, banks issued paper notes as a promise against payment of precious metals in the future.

The use of a lightweight substance, like paper, as a currency may have originated in China during the Han Dynasty in 118 BC. 

The switch to paper money, rather than money based on precious metals, relieved governments during crisis times. Thus, it changed the face of the global economy with a vital step in a new monetary system.

30. Credit cards are arguably another important invention

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At the dawn of the 20th century, most people paid for everything with cash.

The idea of the credit card  was introduced around 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara, founders of Diners Club, which allowed diners to sign for their meal and then pay later. While technology advances, paying for daily purchases with credit has become the norm.

While a bane to many people’s lives today, their sensible use can be very beneficial.

31. The ATM lets you get your cash on demand

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The invention of the ATM (Automated Teller Machine) is significant to modern banking. According to the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA), there are millions of ATMs installed worldwide.

Customers can make various transactions using an ATM, such as cash withdrawals, check balances, or credit mobile phones. Many experts believe that the first ATM was the creation of Luther Simjian, called Bankograph.

In 1967, John Shepherd-Barron led the team that came up with a bright idea of a money vending machine implemented by a London bank called Barclays. These machines used single-use tokens that had been impregnated with radioactive carbon-14. The machine detected the radioactive signal and matched it against a personal identification number entered on a keypad. 

Soon, rival cash dispenser systems began to emerge, including one that used a reusable plastic card instead of a radioactive token. Dallas Engineer Donald Wetzel is said to have devised the first automated banking machine used in the U.S.

32. The telephone and mobile phones have shrunk the world

Delmaine Donson/iStock  

Telephone history conceivably started with the human desire to communicate far and wide.

“Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” were the immortal first words ever spoken on a telephone. Alexander Graham Bell said them on March 10h, 1876 AD, to his assistant Thomas Watson. This moment would change communications forever.

With the arrival of the mobile phone in the 1980s, personal communications were no longer shackled to cables.

The clever invention of the cellular network supported the revolution of the telephone industry. From bulky mobile phones to ultrathin handsets, mobile phones have come a long way. John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola demonstrated the first handheld device in 1973, starting a technological revolution we still live in today.

33. The robot has, and will continue to, change the world

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Robotic devices perform complicated, repetitive, and sometimes dangerous tasks. The word “robot” first appeared in R.U.R. ( Rossum’s Universal Robots ), a play written by Czech playwright Karl Capek in 1921. Coincidentally, the word “robotics” was popularized by a science-fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, in his short story “Runabout,” published in 1942.

But robots have a very long history. Around 3000 B.C, mechanical, human figurines were used to strike the hour bells in an Egyptian water clock. This marked the first mechanical design. As time flew, more designs and devices evolved. 

The foundation for modern robots was laid in the 1950s by George C. Devol, who invented and patented a reprogrammable manipulator called “Unimate.”

In the late 1960s, Joseph Engleberger acquired the patent to the Unimate and modified them into industrial robots. For this, he is often called “the Father of Robotics.” They are genuinely inventions that changed the world and are only just getting started.

34. Guns have been a force for good and bad

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Weapons have been used since the dawn of humanity. But it is undeniable that guns and gunpowder have revolutionized the world. Gunpowder was invented in China around the 9th century, but it may have originally been used for fireworks initially. One early firearm consisted of a bamboo tube that used gunpowder to fire a spear and was used in China around 1000 AD.

Another early type of portable firearm was the fire lance, a black-powder–filled tube attached to the end of a spear and used as a flamethrower; shrapnel was sometimes placed in the barrel so that it would fly out together with the flames. 

Gunpowder was made more potent by increasing the amount of saltpeter. This, in turn, meant that a more robust barrel was needed, the bamboo was replaced by metal, and the projectiles were replaced by smaller pieces of metal that fit into the barrel more tightly.

By the mid-to-late 14th century, knowledge of gunpowder and firearms had reached Europe, and smaller, portable hand-held cannons were developed, creating a type of personal firearm. The problem of needing to reload frequently was solved with the invention of a hand-driven machine gun called the Gatling gun. Richard J. Gatling invented it during the American Civil War. As the tech has continued to evolve, each following model has become more deadly. 

35. Films were another important invention

LeMusique/iStock  

Almost everyone loves to watch movies like love stories, comedies, dramas, horror, suspense, action, fiction, biography, etc. A film is also called a movie, motion picture, theatrical film, photoplay, or flick. The word “film” originates from the fact that a photographic film has been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures.

Early inspiration for movies came from plays and dance, which had elements common to film: scripts, sets, costumes, production, direction, actors, audiences, and storyboards. Later in the 17th century, lanterns were used to project animation, achieved by various mechanical slides.

In March 1895, the first motion picture film shot with a Cinématographe camera was La Sortie de leucine Lumière a Lyon (Workers leaving the Lumière factory at Lyon). The commercial, public screening of ten of the Lumière brothers’ short films in Paris on December 28, 1895, is often thought of as the start of projected cinematographic motion pictures.

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With time, movies have evolved to include sound, color, and advanced digital technology. 

And that is your lot for today.

There have been tools for as long as there have been human beings. While simple in design, in the beginning, modern tools are highly complex engineering. Entirely what we’ll be inventing in the future is anyone’s guess, but rest assured, we will continue to make things for as long as our species exists.

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Christopher McFadden Christopher graduated from Cardiff University in 2004 with a Masters Degree in Geology. Since then, he has worked exclusively within the Built Environment, Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Consultancy industries. He is a qualified and accredited Energy Consultant, Green Deal Assessor and Practitioner member of IEMA. Chris’s main interests range from Science and Engineering, Military and Ancient History to Politics and Philosophy.

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The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel

Why did it take so long to invent the wheelbarrow? Have we hit peak innovation? What our list reveals about imagination, optimism, and the nature of progress.

Jump straight to the list

S ome questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts. Seven years ago, The Atlantic surveyed a group of eminent historians to create a ranked list of the 100 people who had done the most to shape the character of modern America. The panelists agreed easily on the top few names—Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, in that order—but then began diverging in intriguing ways that reflected not simply their own values but also the varied avenues toward influence in our country. Lewis and Clark, or Henry Ford? Thomas Edison, or Martin Luther King? The result was of course not scientific. But the exercise of asking, comparing, and choosing helped us understand more about what these historical figures had done and about the areas in which American society had proved most and least open to the changes wrought by talented, determined men and women.

Now we turn to technology. The Atlantic recently assembled a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others to assess the innovations that have done the most to shape the nature of modern life. The main rule for this exercise was that the innovations should have come after widespread use of the wheel began, perhaps 6,000 years ago. That ruled out fire, which our forebears began to employ several hundred thousand years earlier. We asked each panelist to make 25 selections and to rank them, despite the impossibility of fairly comparing, say, the atomic bomb and the plow. (As it happens, both of these made it to our final list: the discovery and application of nuclear fission , which led to both the atomic bomb and nuclear-power plants, was No. 21 of the top 50, ahead of the moldboard plow , which greatly expanded the range of land that farmers could till, at No. 30.) We also invited panelists to add explanations of their choices, and I followed up with several of them and with other experts in interviews.

One panelist ranked his choices not by importance but by date of invention, oldest (cement) to newest (GPS satellites). Some emphasized the importance not of specific breakthroughs but of broad categories of achievement. For instance, Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern, nominated in his top 10 “modularity.” By that he meant the refinements in industrial processes that allowed high-volume output of functionally identical parts. This enabled mass production and the Henry Ford–style assembly line (49 on The Atlantic ’s list), and the profound shift from handmade to volume-produced versions of everything. Modularity didn’t make it onto our final list; the adoption of standardized shipping containers, which extended the same logic in a different realm, just missed the cut.

In short, these scientists and creative types decided to answer the question they wanted us to ask, rather than the exact one we posed. We have new sympathy for people attempting to manage universities and R&D labs. But in the end we had enough comparable and overlapping suggestions, from enough people, with enough spelled-out explanations, and enough force of experience and insight behind them, to be comfortable presenting The Atlantic ’s survey of humanity’s 50 most important technical breakthroughs since the wheel. We converted all the responses into values we could enter on a spreadsheet; we weighted, as reasonably as we could, the intensity and breadth of support; we watched the combined rankings go up and down as each new response arrived; and we came up with the final ranking you see here.

One aspect of the results will be evident as soon as you start looking through them: the debatability of the choices and rankings once you move beyond the first few. For instance, anesthesia (46), which, on its debut in 1846, began to distinguish surgery from torture, barely made the top 50, and that was only because one panelist pushed it hard. If I were doing the ranking, it would be in the top 10, certainly above the personal computer (16 on our final list). In this case the test for me is: Which would I miss more if it didn’t exist? (Our panelist John Doerr, a well-known technology investor, said he worked his way through his own top‑25 list using a similar set of “pairwise comparisons,” asking which technology he would miss more.) I rely on personal computers, but I got along fine before their introduction; I still remember a dental procedure in England when the National Health Service didn’t pay for novocaine.

Less evident from the final list is what I was fascinated to learn from my talks with many of the panelists. That is the diversity of views about the types of historical breakthroughs that matter, with a striking consensus on whether the long trail of innovation recorded here is now nearing its end.

Innovation: A Taxonomy

The clearest example of consensus was the first item on the final compilation, the printing press . Ten of the 12 people who submitted rankings had it at or near the top. To draw another parallel to our Influential Americans survey, the printing press was the counterpart to Abraham Lincoln as the clear consensus for the top choice. And just as that previous exercise revealed the major patterns through which historical figures had exerted influence—as political leaders in times of crisis, as industrial pioneers, through pop culture or design—a set of categories emerged from the individual nominations. One of our panelists, Leslie Berlin, a historian of business at Stanford, organized her nominations not as an overall list but grouped into functional categories. From our panelists’ nominations, a similar but slightly broader set of categories emerges. Here is my adaptation of Berlin’s useful scheme:

Innovations that expand the human intellect and its creative, expressive, and even moral possibilities. This group includes the printing press (1) and also paper , (6) and now of course the Internet , (9) the personal computer , (16) and the underlying technology for the modern data age, semiconductor electronics (4), plus photography (29). Charles C. Mann, the science writer and frequent Atlantic contributor, put writing third, behind fire and agricultural improvements, including the domestication of animals. Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin, ranked as his top three innovations items from this category: alphabetization, paper, and the printing press.

Innovations that are integral to the physical and operating infrastructure of the modern world. George Dyson, the technology writer, said that cement , which in the end ranked 37th, was a crucial early innovation, “at the foundation of civilization as we know it—most of which would collapse without it.” Three of the top five choices from John Doerr were in this category: electrical systems were first, indoor plumbing was second, and filtration systems to create potable water were fifth. (One panelist mentioned aqueducts.) Doerr said that in much of today’s poor world, “the payoff of clean water, in terms of community prosperity,” is at least 20‑to-1. In our ranking, electricity was No. 2 and sanitation systems were No. 12. Through the past half century, air-conditioning (44) played a major role in America’s expansion across the Sun Belt. Air-conditioning is now having a similar effect in China, India, the Gulf states, and elsewhere. Our panelist Joi Ito, the head of the Media Lab at MIT, said that air-conditioning “was famously identified by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore as the technology that allowed residents to have white-collar work, and that empowered populations living in temperate climates.”

Innovations that enabled the Industrial Revolution and its successive waves of expanded material output. These include the steam engine (10), industrial steelmaking (19), and the refining and drilling of oil (35 and 39, respectively). A century ago, a comparable list would have had to include the use of coal, which does not appear here, although it is still the most widely used fuel for electric-power plants.

I nnovations extending life, to use Leslie Berlin’s term. This broad group includes the successive agricultural revolutions that now let the Earth support its billions of people: nitrogen fixation (11), notably the Haber-Bosch process, about a century old, which made modern ammonia-based fertilizers possible and, by making more nitrogen available to plants, lifted a previously unbreakable limit on crop yields. (That same process led to modern explosives and the poison gas used during World War I.) Also, the green revolution (22); the moldboard plow (30); Archimedes’ screw (31), which drew water from streams and canals to irrigate fields; and scientific plant breeding (38). This group also includes the advances in medical knowledge and treatment that predate our current genomics revolution: No. 3, penicillin (nearly a century old); No. 8, vaccination (a few hundred years old); and No. 20, the pill (half a century old). One of our panelists suggested “the germ theory of infectious disease” as one of humanity’s top 10 breakthroughs. A list made 50 years from now, or maybe only five, would undoubtedly emphasize the revolutionary potential of genomics, but as yet it did not make our cut. The life-extending category also includes the public-health measures that have advanced in parallel with improved medical treatment: sanitation systems (12) and refrigeration (13).

After penicillin, the highest-ranked item from this category was optical lenses , at No. 5. I am glad they were mentioned by several panelists, because their inclusion illustrates the underappreciated ripple effects of certain technologies. Before the advent of corrective lenses, people with imperfect vision could be vulnerable to enemies or predators in humanity’s early hunter-warrior stages, and later intellectually handicapped by their simple inability to see letters or numbers as clearly as others. None of our panelists put it this way, but I have always believed that the adoption of corrective lenses amounted to the largest onetime IQ boost in human history, by expanding the pool of potentially literate people. It was also one of several puzzlingly “late” innovations, occurring many long centuries after the Romans and others discovered the optical properties of lenses. A similar puzzle, according to Joel Mokyr, involves the delayed appearance of the wheelbarrow. “It is about as simple a labor-saving device as you can think of,” he told me, “but it doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone for thousands of years after the wheel, and it took about a thousand years longer to occur to anyone in Europe after its first use in China.”

Innovations that allowed real-time communication beyond the range of a single human voice. The Internet (9) obviously brings new scale and speed to communication, but the real leap beyond previous limitations occurred in the mid‑1800s, with the development of the telegraph (26), followed by the telephone (24) and then radio (28). As Joel Mokyr put it, before the telegraph, “with few exceptions, information could move no faster than a man on horseback. Smoke signals, homing pigeons, and the semaphore telegraph all had very little bandwidth and were unreliable. The telegraph made it at least in principle possible for information to move at the speed of light, and thus vastly improved long-distance communications and hence command and control over much larger territories.”

Considering how often the modern era has been called the “television age” and how much time people now spend before a variety of screens, it is notable that television comes in only at No. 45. Many years from now, perhaps people will regard the second half of the 20th century as the brief moment when broadcast TV could seem a dominant technology. With its obvious-in-retrospect limitations, like one-way information flow rather than interactivity, and dependence on heavy hardware for best display, maybe TV was bound to be a transition to some other system more tailored to individual tastes. Or maybe our panelists were embarrassed to vote for it.

Innovations in the physical movement of people and goods . Through the past 150 years, the internal combustion engine (7) made possible the social, economic, political, and environmental effects brought on by the age of the automobile (18). With variations in propulsion systems (and later the emergence of jet-turbine engines), this same innovation made possible the airplane (15). Why is the airplane ahead of the car? Presumably because automobile travel sped up the land journeys people had long made by other means, whereas the airplane made possible an entirely new form of human movement—and, perhaps as important, an unprecedented way of seeing and understanding the Earth. Until the first, tentative balloon flights in the late 1700s, human beings had never viewed the layout of their environment from an elevation higher than that of a treetop or a mountain. In the age of 20th-century powered flight, they could see for themselves the natural contours and man-made features they had approximated on maps.

Starting in the 1700s, the steam engine (10) enabled growth of the railroad—which, like the bicycle, presumably would have come near the top of a comparable survey a century ago. Even now railroads carry far more freight in the United States than do trucks, barges, or any other form of transport; they are the backbone of passenger-travel systems in Europe; and they account for more of China’s infrastructure investment than airports or roads. But not everything could make the final cut! Also in this category are No. 40, the sailboat (with the sextant at No. 23 and the compass at No. 17), and No. 41, rocketry (“our only way off the planet—so far,” in George Dyson’s words).

Organizational breakthroughs that provide the software for people working and living together in increasingly efficient and modern ways. Linda Sanford, a senior vice president for enterprise transformation at IBM, picked the Gregorian calendar (34) as her very first item, ahead of her second choice, paper. The importance of alphabetization (25) is easy to overlook until you consider the challenges of indexing, arraying, and retrieving knowledge that arise in non-alphabetic languages, notably Chinese.

Finally, and less prominently than we might have found in 1950 or 1920—and less prominently than I initially expected—we have innovations in killing , including gunpowder (14) and nuclear fission (21). The machine gun, which received only one nomination, would have dominated in this category 100 years ago. Nor did anyone bring up drones, or chemical or biological weapons, or terrorism or guerrilla warfare. But on reflection, our panelists probably got it right. Except for the atomic bomb, breakthroughs in weaponry matter less than the culture and temperament of human conflict.

Any collection of 50 breakthroughs must exclude 50,000 more. What about GPS systems, on which so many forms of movement now depend, and which two panelists recommended? What about the concept of the number zero, as suggested by Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco? (She did not rank her 25 items, but 18 of them showed up among the final 50; Michelle Alexopoulos, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, had 21, and Walter Isaacson had 25 of the 26 he submitted.) In addition to coal, how can no one have mentioned paved roads? Or the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA? Landing on the moon? Or the mathematics of calculus, on which space flight and so much else depended? The more questions and discussions our ranking provokes, the more successful the endeavor will have been.

We notice that innovation may be less personalized than we assume. Our Influential Americans survey was all about specific people who made a difference, though in some cases—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martin Luther King—the difference they made was to persuade large groups to work toward a common end. In this survey, it is remarkable how few world-changing breakthroughs can be tied directly to a single, heroic, Nobel Prize–worthy innovator. Pasteurization (33) is the only one of the top 50 to be named for a person, unless you count the Gregorian calendar or Archimedes’ screw . Other people made other celebrated advances, from Johannes Gutenberg to Alexander Graham Bell, but overall these are the achievements of groups of people who built on one another’s efforts, sometimes over spans of many years.

We learn, finally, why technology breeds optimism, which may be the most significant part of this exercise.

Popular culture often lionizes the stars of discovery and invention. A century ago, this meant the Wright brothers, Edison, and the auto pioneers; in the Eisenhower years, Jonas Salk and Wernher von Braun; and in the past generation, first Bill Gates and then Steve Jobs. But about technology’s onrush in general, cultural and political attitudes have been mixed at best. For each writer or thinker or government leader who has enthusiastically welcomed whatever changes technology might bring, there has been a counterpart warning of its dangers. From Blake to Dickens, from Metropolis to Blade Runner , from Upton Sinclair to Rachel Carson, and through a long list of similar pairings, the culture of a technology-driven era has continually played catch-up to correct modernity’s destructive and dehumanizing effects.

For our era, the major problems that technology has helped cause, and that faster innovation may or may not correct, are environmental, demographic, and socioeconomic. Environmental challenges, because of the unsustainable burden being placed on the world’s oceans, skies, soils, and nonhuman life-forms; demographic, because advances in medicine and public health are rapidly pushing up the median age throughout the developed world; and socioeconomic, because a globalized, high-tech economy is widening the gap between rich and poor everywhere.

Perhaps I should not have been surprised that people who have thought deeply about innovation’s sources and effects, like our panelists, were aware of the harm it has done along with the good. I found it notable that the technologists I spoke with volunteered lists of innovation-enhanced perils. “Does innovation raise the wealth of the planet? I believe it does,” John Doerr, who has helped launch Google, Amazon, and other giants of today’s technology, said. “But technology left to its own devices widens rather than narrows the gap between the rich and the poor.” Despite the prospects for innovation that excite him, he said, “I don’t think there is any reason to assume there will automatically be enough ‘good’ jobs, for enough people, in the long run.” Joel Mokyr pointed out that innovation has always done both good and harm. “You look at antibiotics, insecticides, transportation—every time we solve one problem, a new one comes up,” he said. “Each invention relies on subsequent inventions to clean up the mess it has made.”

Please stop to think about this: Outside of the sciences and technology, and apart from the legacies created in each family, humanity is struggling today for a sense of cumulative achievement. Are today’s statesmen an improvement over those of our grandparents’ era? Today’s level of public debate? Music, architecture, literature, the fine arts—these and other manifestations of world culture continually change, without necessarily improving. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, versus whoever is the best-selling author in Moscow right now? The original, elegant Penn Station, versus its warehouse-like replacement?

A central question for technologists is whether innovation in the material and productive realms can be sustained—or whether we might, on the contrary, already be entering another of the long, stagnant eras that have marked much of human history, including the ones after times of rapid advance. Amid today’s onslaught of the new-and-improved, a slowdown of any sort might seem improbable—but possibly desirable. The argument that a slowdown might happen, and that it would be harmful if it did, takes three main forms.

The first is historical. Some societies have closed themselves off and stopped inventing altogether: notably China after its preeminence in the Ming era, and much of the Arab Islamic world starting just before the European Renaissance. By failing to move forward, they inevitably moved backward relative to their rivals and to the environmental and economic threats they faced. If the social and intellectual climate for innovation sours, what has happened before can happen again.

The second draws from the visible slowdown in the pace of solutions that technology offers to fundamental problems. Between 1850 and 1950, life expectancy nearly doubled in the United States, thanks to the combined effects of antibiotics, immunization, and public-health measures. Since then, it has only crept up. Between 1920 and 1970, improvements in cars, roads, airplanes, and even railroads made travel faster, cheaper, safer, and more comfortable. Since then, travel in the developed world has improved slowly at best. Crop yields per acre doubled within a generation of the green revolution but have not doubled again.

The third and broadest form of the argument is that a slowdown in, say, crop yields or travel time is part of a general pattern of what economists call diminishing marginal returns. The easy improvements are, quite naturally, the first to be made; whatever comes later is slower and harder.

The most systematic recent presentation of this view has come from the economist Robert J. Gordon, of Northwestern, who has argued that America’s history as a nation happens to coincide with a rare moment in technological history now nearing its end. “There was virtually no economic growth before 1750,” he writes in a recent paper. This, he said, left open the possibility that “the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well be a unique episode in human history rather than a guarantee of endless future advance at the same rate.” Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, says in The Great Stagnation that America’s long centuries of rapid growth amounted to harvesting the “low-hanging fruit” of open land, cheap energy, and industrial-era breakthroughs—harvesting that could not be sustained.

Everyone I spoke with was familiar with such cautionary analyses; none dismissed them out of hand. But when pressed, every one of them said they expected the pace of useful innovation to speed up, not slow down. Again, their explanations took three main forms.

First, and reassuringly, whatever field a panelist knew most about, he or she considered most promising. John Doerr emphasized the transformative potential of radically cheaper and more efficient batteries, which in turn are a crucial element of a cleaner-energy economy. (Wind turbines, solar panels, and other renewable sources don’t produce power on a schedule that matches the grid’s demands. Modern batteries cost too much, and store too little energy, to be useful in buffering undersupply. See "Technologies to Bet On" in this issue.) Others I spoke with saw similar prospects in other fields. Elon Musk, not officially one of our panelists, is perhaps this era’s most ambitious innovator. He simultaneously heads a company building rocket ships, SpaceX; another making a popular electric car, Tesla; and another that is a leading provider of solar power, SolarCity. When I asked him what innovation he hoped to live long enough to see but feared he might not, he said, “Sustainable human settlements on Mars.”

Most of these U.S.-based technologists thought prospects for innovation remained brighter in the United States than anywhere else. And this judgment came from people fully aware of the continued erosion of basic-research funding and other challenges. “We can be concerned about the last 1 percent of an environment for innovation, but that is because we take everything else for granted,” Leslie Berlin told me.

Second, many pointed out that ever cheaper, ever faster computing power could in itself promote innovation in all other fields—much as steam-powered engines did in the 19th century and electricity in the 20th. For one example: Eric S. Lander, the director of the Broad Institute for medical research in Cambridge, Massachusetts (also not on our panel), pointed out that in the past 12 years, the cost of sequencing human DNA has fallen to one one-millionth of its previous level. This reduction in cost, he says, means that the next decade should be a time of “amazing advances in understanding the genetic basis of disease, with especially powerful implications for cancer.”

Finally, the people I spoke with said that the very concept of an end to innovation defied everything they understood about human inquiry. “If you look just at the 20th century, the odds against there being any improvement in living standards are enormous,” Joel Mokyr told me. “Two catastrophic world wars, the Cold War, the Depression, the rise of totalitarianism—it’s been one disaster after another, a sequence that could have been enough to sink us back into barbarism. And yet this past half century has been the fastest-ever time of technological growth. I see no reason why that should be slowing down.”

George Dyson put it a different way, in a sense the most optimistic of all. “I am a technological evolutionist,” he said. “I view the universe as a phase-space of things that are possible, and we’re doing a random walk among them. Eventually we are going to fill the space of everything that is possible.”

What innovation did Dyson most hope to see during his time in the phase-space of the living? He had obviously thought about this before, and answered immediately: “The return of sailing ships as a commercially viable transport system.” Even in the days of cloth sails and hemp rope, he said, clipper ships could convert 60 percent of the raw energy of the wind into useful work. With modern materials and design, they could capture more energy than they used en route. “When a fleet of ships got to port, they could not only deliver cargo but even put energy into the grid.” This is how innovators think.

The Atlantic asked a dozen scientists, historians, and technologists to rank the top innovations since the wheel. Here are the results.

You can also choose your own top five innovations, and see how the readers' choices stack up against the Atlantic experts'.

The printing press was nominated by 10 of our 12 panelists, five of whom ranked it in their top three. Dyson described its invention as the turning point at which “knowledge began freely replicating and quickly assumed a life of its own.”

2. Electricity, late 19th century

And then there was light—and Nos. 4, 9, 16, 24, 28, 44, 45, and most of the rest of modern life.

Accidentally discovered in 1928, though antibiotics were not widely distributed until after World War II, when they became the silver bullet for any number of formerly deadly diseases

The physical foundation of the virtual world

Refracting light through glass is one of those simple ideas that took a mysteriously long time to catch on. “The Romans had a glass industry, and there’s even a passage in Seneca about the optical effects of a glass bowl of water,” says Mokyr. But it was centuries before the invention of eyeglasses dramatically raised the collective human IQ, and eventually led to the creation of the microscope and the telescope.

“The idea of stamping images is natural if you have paper, but until then, it’s economically unaffordable.” — Charles C. Mann

Turned air and fuel into power, eventually replacing the steam engine (No. 10)

The British doctor Edward Jenner used the cowpox virus to protect against smallpox in 1796, but it wasn’t until Louis Pasteur developed a rabies vaccine in 1885 that medicine—and government—began to accept the idea that making someone sick could prevent further sickness.

9. The Internet, 1960s

The infrastructure of the digital age

Powered the factories, trains, and ships that drove the Industrial Revolution

The German chemist Fritz Haber, also the father of chemical weapons, won a Nobel Prize for his development of the ammonia-synthesis process, which was used to create a new class of fertilizers central to the green revolution (No. 22).

A major reason we live 40 years longer than we did in 1880 (see “Die Another Day”)

“Discovering how to make cold would change the way we eat—and live—almost as profoundly as discovering how to cook.” — George Dyson

Outsourced killing to a machine

Transformed travel, warfare, and our view of the world (see No. 40)

Like the lever (No. 48) and the abacus (No. 43), it augmented human capabilities.

Oriented us, even at sea

18. The automobile, late 19th century

Transformed daily life, our culture, and our landscape

Mass-produced steel, made possible by a method known as the Bessemer process, became the basis of modern industry.

Launched a social revolution

Gave humans new power for destruction, and creation

Combining technologies like synthetic fertilizers (No. 11) and scientific plant breeding (No. 38) hugely increased the world’s food output. Norman Borlaug, the agricultural economist who devised this approach, has been credited with saving more than 1 billion people from starvation.

It made maps out of stars.

Allowed our voices to travel

Made knowledge accessible and searchable—and may have contributed to the rise of societies that used phonetic letters over those that used ideographic ones

Before it, Joel Mokyr says, “information could move no faster than a man on horseback.”

It quantified time.

The first demonstration of electronic mass media’s power to spread ideas and homogenize culture

Changed journalism, art, culture, and how we see ourselves

The first plow that not only dug soil up but turned it over, allowing for the cultivation of harder ground. Without it, agriculture as we know it would not exist in northern Europe or the American Midwest.

The Greek scientist is believed to have designed one of the first water pumps, a rotating corkscrew that pushed water up a tube. It transformed irrigation and remains in use today at many sewage-treatment plants.

Institutionalized the cotton industry—and slavery—in the American South

One of the first practical applications of Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, this method for using heat to sterilize wine, beer, and milk is widely considered to be one of history’s most effective public-health interventions.

Debugged the Julian calendar, jumping ahead 10 days to synchronize the world with the seasons

Without it, oil drilling (No. 39) would be pointless.

A less heralded cousin of steam engines (No. 10), turbines are the backbone of today’s energy infrastructure: they generate 80 percent of the world’s power.

The foundation of civilization. Literally.

Humans have been manipulating plant species for nearly as long as we’ve grown them, but it wasn’t until early-20th-century scientists discovered a forgotten 1866 paper by the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel that we figured out how plant breeding—and, later on, human genetics—worked.

Fueled the modern economy, established its geopolitics, and changed the climate

Transformed travel, warfare, and our view of the world (see No. 15)

“Our only way off the planet—so far.” — George Dyson

The abstraction at the core of the modern economy

One of the first devices to augment human intelligence

Would you start a business in Houston or Bangalore without it?

Brought the world into people’s homes

In response to the first public demonstration of ether, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote: “The fierce extremity of suffering has been steeped in the waters of forgetfulness, and the deepest furrow in the knotted brow of agony has been smoothed for ever.”

“Extended lives by enabling people to have shelter.” — Leslie Berlin

The Egyptians had not yet discovered the wheel when they built their pyramids; they are thought to have relied heavily on levers.

Turned a craft-based economy into a mass-market one

Mechanized the farm, freeing people to do new types of work

Our Panel of Experts The scientists, historians, and technologists we consulted to make this list.

Michelle Alexopoulos Professor of economics, University of Toronto

Leslie Berlin Historian of business and technology, Stanford; author, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley

John Doerr General partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

George Dyson Historian of technology; author, Turing’s Cathedral and Darwin Among the Machines

Walter Isaacson President and CEO, the Aspen Institute; author, Steve Jobs , Einstein: His Life and Universe , and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Joi Ito Director, MIT Media Lab

Alexis Madrigal Senior editor, The Atlantic ; author, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology

Charles C. Mann Journalist; author, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovring the New World Columbus Created

Joel Mokyr Professor of economics and history, Northwestern University

Linda Sanford Senior vice president for enterprise transformation, IBM

Astro Teller Captain of moonshots, Google[x]; co-founder, Cerebellum Capital and BodyMedia

Padmasree Warrior Chief technology and strategy officer, Cisco Systems  

Premium Content

The 10 Inventions that Changed the World

The U.S. librarian of Congress ranks history's most important innovations.

Thomas Edison liked to say that he never failed. He succeeded every now and again with an invention that would change the world. The rest of the time, he tried thousands of other things with only one fault—that they would never work.

That’s the sort of spirit and tenacity that leads to progress, says Carla Hayden , the U.S. librarian of Congress. The library keeps archives of many of America’s copyrights and blueprints, so National Geographic asked Hayden to list what she considers 10 of the most meaningful advances in history—the inventions and innovations responsible for the trappings of modern life.

Ranking innovations is more art than science. Can you really compare a camera to an airplane? But while progress is incremental, it’s also exponential; it builds on itself. The printing press allowed literacy to spread and thinkers to share ideas and, thus, invent more things.

Modern inventions tend more toward improving than transforming: an app that connects the world in a better way, planes that fly farther, faster. But there’s still room, every so often, for dramatic advances like, say, 3-D printing or the Internet. “There will be more great leaps,” says Hayden. “We have a momentum and acceleration I think we can all feel.”

Top 10 innovations

• Printing press
• Personal computer
• Refrigeration

For Hungry Minds

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6 Inventions That Changed the World

Illustrations by Zohar Lazar

Most everything around you, from the smartest phone to the simplest sheet of paper, began life as an idea in someone’s mind. Throughout the ages, people around the world have dreamed up new ways to solve problems and satisfy needs, but some inventions do more than that—they alter the course of history. Here are the backstories of six of the most important innovations of all time.

Wheel & axle, invented in mesopotamia around 3500 b.c..

Jim McMahon

The wheel is often said to be humanity’s greatest invention, but the wheel alone isn’t what transformed the world. For a wheel to help people move objects using less force, it needs an axle, or a stationary pole, to turn on.

It was likely the people of ancient Mesopotamia—a historical region that includes present-day Iraq and parts of Iran, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey—who thought of putting the two together. A more than 5,500-year-old potter’s wheel found there suggests that Sumerians, who occupied the region from 4100 to 1750 B.C., had a handle on wheel and axle mechanics. Other modes of wheeled transport in the form of carts and wagons eventually followed.

“Most assume that the earliest wagons were invented in Mesopotamia, which was urban and therefore more sophisticated than the tribal societies of Europe [at the time],” writes anthropologist David Anthony in his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language . Still, he notes, there’s evidence that multiple cultures had similar ideas around the same period.

The ability to move heavy stuff on wheels was a game-changer for civilization. Previously, it might have taken a whole village to lug stones, lumber, or crops across land. But wheeled transport reduced people’s dependence on group labor to get things built, allowing societies to spread out. Single-family farms sprouted up, and trade expanded as people were able to carry large quantities of goods long distances on carts and wagons.

The wheel is often said to be humanity’s greatest invention. But the wheel alone isn’t what transformed the world. For a wheel to help people move objects using less force, it needs an axle, or a stationary pole, to turn on.

It was likely the people of ancient Mesopotamia who thought of putting the two together. The historical region includes present-day Iraq and parts of Iran, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey. Sumerians occupied the region from 4100 to 1750 b.c. A more than 5,500-year-old potter’s wheel found there suggests that they had a handle on wheel and axle mechanics. Other modes of wheeled transport in the form of carts and wagons eventually followed.

“Most assume that the earliest wagons were invented in Mesopotamia, which was urban and therefore more sophisticated than the tribal societies of Europe [at the time],” writes anthropologist David Anthony in his book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language . But, he notes, there’s proof that several cultures had similar ideas around the same period.

The ability to move heavy stuff on wheels was a game-changer for civilization. Before then, it might have taken a whole village to lug stones, lumber, or crops across land. But wheeled transport meant people depended less on group labor to get things built. That allowed societies to spread out. Single-family farms popped up. And trade stretched further as people were able to carry large amounts of goods long distances on carts and wagons.

Zohar Lazar

Papyrus Paper

Invented in egypt around 3000 b.c..

The ancient Egyptians discovered something life-altering right in their backyards when they found a tall green reed called papyrus growing on the muddy banks of the Nile River delta. It was sturdy, plentiful, and free—and Egyptians used it to construct huts, temples, and boats. Eventually, when the Egyptians began turning papyrus plants into paper around 3000 B.C., that humble swamp plant would change civilization.

“It was like a revolution in book production because suddenly you went from a solid medium like clay, stone, or wooden tablets to something that is soft and you can fold,” says Sofía Torallas Tovar, professor of classics and Near Eastern languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. “Imagine the revolution of using something that was easier to store and to archive,” she adds. “It allowed many aspects of literacy, including the circulation of literature and the extension of bureaucracy.”

Making the paper required soaking the papyrus stems, then peeling away the outer layers to reveal the inner white part, known as pith. The pith was thinly sliced and laid in strips parallel to each other, overlapping slightly to form a sheet. More strips were then placed on top, at right angles to the first layer, and then the two layers were pressed together until they dried to form a single page.

The ancient Egyptians discovered something life-altering right in their backyards. They found a tall green reed called papyrus growing on the muddy banks of the Nile River delta. It was sturdy, plentiful, and free. Egyptians used it to build huts, temples, and boats. Eventually, the Egyptians began turning papyrus plants into paper around 3000 b.c. It was then that the humble swamp plant changed civilization.

Making the paper required soaking the papyrus stems, then peeling away the outer layers to reveal the inner white part, known as pith. The pith was thinly sliced and laid in strips parallel to each other. The overlapping strips formed a sheet. More strips were then placed on top, at right angles to the first layer. Then the two layers were pressed together until they dried to form a single page.

‘It was like a revolution in book production.’

The Egyptians wisely kept their paper-making method a secret and made big bucks exporting their papyrus paper to other parts of the world for the next 4,000 years. That paper gave people near and far a standard, durable medium on which to record their ideas. The scrolls and sheets produced in Egypt preserved great works that might otherwise be lost, such as Aesop’s fables and Homer’s Odyssey . Scribes recorded news-making events on the paper—accounts that we now study as ancient history. Countless words written on papyrus continue to inform and inspire the world today. “The birth of this writing medium,” says Torallas Tovar, “is the seed of our current literate world.”

The Egyptians wisely kept their paper-making method a secret. They made big bucks exporting their papyrus paper to other parts of the world for the next 4,000 years. That paper gave people near and far a standard, durable medium on which to record their ideas. The scrolls and sheets produced in Egypt held great works that might otherwise be lost, such as Aesop’s fables and Homer’s Odyssey . Scribes recorded news-making events on the paper. We now study these accounts as ancient history. Countless words written on papyrus continue to inform and inspire the world today. “The birth of this writing medium,” says Torallas Tovar, “is the seed of our current literate world.”

Invented in China during the 11th century

As early as the Han Dynasty   (206 B.C.-220 A.D.), Chinese scholars began experimenting with what they thought was a magical type of rock. They discovered that a thin piece of the rock aligned itself north and south when suspended at its center by a thread. As it turned out, the rocks were lodestones, or naturally magnetized pieces of the mineral magnetite.

The stones also temporarily magnetized metal objects, such as needles, if rubbed against them. That discovery put China on a path to developing the first magnetic compasses centuries later.

Historians believe Chinese thinkers began rubbing lodestones against needles to magnetize them for navigation around the 11th century. By the Middle Ages, the magnetic compass had spread throughout the Middle East and Europe.

Before the compass, people used the sun, the stars, and familiar landmarks to find their way—or on dark, cloudy nights, they just hoped for the best.

The invention of the compass enabled sailors to confidently steer ships on a set course and goods to be transported long distances without being lost. These advancements stimulated foreign trade.

As compasses improved over time, they became essential. Even today, in a world of GPS and map apps, high-tech compasses are still built into airplanes and ships to help guide people and goods to their destinations all over the world.

As early as the Han Dynasty (206 b.c.-220 a.d.), Chinese scholars began experimenting with what they thought was a magical type of rock. They discovered that a thin piece of the rock lined up north and south when hung at its center by a thread. As it turned out, the rocks were lodestones, or naturally magnetized pieces of the mineral magnetite.

Before the compass, people used the sun, the stars, and familiar landmarks to find their way. On dark, cloudy nights, they just hoped for the best.

The invention of the compass helped sailors confidently steer ships on a set course. It also made it possible for goods to be transported long distances without being lost. These advancements gave way to foreign trade.

As compasses improved over time, they became essential. They’re even important today. In a world of GPS and map apps, high-tech compasses are still built into airplanes and ships to help guide people and goods to places all over the world.

Printing Press With Movable Type

Invented in germany around 1439.

In the early 1400s, many books were still made by copying text entirely by hand. But German inventor Johannes Gutenberg had a better idea: He developed a printing press with individual metal letters that could be rearranged and reused countless times. The letters were set in place to spell the words on a page, coated with ink, then hand-cranked down onto paper, making a copy. The press could print about 250 copies an hour, an advance that made it possible to mass produce printed materials for the first time.

In 1455, Gutenberg had a hit with his first major effort: a book now known as the Gutenberg Bible, which is widely considered the first modern book. He printed about 180 copies, and they sold out quickly. (An original copy is worth more than $35 million today.)

Gutenberg’s invention not only made books cheaper and more accessible for everyday people, but it also allowed scholars to more easily share their knowledge. That helped spread the wealth of innovations in art, culture, and science that sprung up in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries (a period known as the Renaissance), which ushered in the modern age.

In the early 1400s, many books were still made by copying text entirely by hand. But German inventor Johannes Gutenberg had a better idea. He built a printing press with individual metal letters that could be rearranged and reused countless times. The letters were set in place to spell the words on a page. Then they were coated with ink and hand-cranked down onto paper to make a copy. The press could print about 250 copies an hour. This advance made it possible to mass produce printed materials for the first time.

In 1455, Gutenberg had a hit with his first major effort: a book now known as the Gutenberg Bible. It is widely considered the first modern book. He printed about 180 copies, and they sold out quickly. (An original copy is worth more than $35 million today.)

Gutenberg’s invention made books cheaper and more accessible for everyday people. It also allowed scholars to more easily share their knowledge. That helped spread the wealth of innovations in art, culture, and science that sprung up in Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. This period, known as the Renaissance, led to the modern age.

Electric Light Bulb

Invented in the united states in 1879.

In the mid-1800s, when Thomas Edison was a young man, people depended on fire-prone candles, oil lamps, or gas lamps for indoor light. But Edison—an inventor who would come to hold a whopping 1,093 U.S. patents in his lifetime—knew electricity was the answer, and other inventors at the time knew this too. The basic idea: Wires would carry electric currents to a filament inside a glass bulb, and as the filament grew hotter, it would glow, producing light.

The ideal filament material had to burn brightly, last for hours at a time, and be affordable. Many people around the world were hard at work on a practical electrical light bulb. Edison was determined to be the first to succeed.

“We tend to think that these transformative inventions come from the mind of single geniuses,” says University of Tennessee history professor Ernest Freeberg. “It takes an entire culture to create these inventions, and Edison was building on a process that many people created.”

Edison and his team spent more than a year testing out some 3,000 filament materials—from spiderweb to human hair—before discovering that cotton thread covered in carbon and baked to the right temperature did the trick. On October 22, 1879, Edison’s electric light bulb lit up—and shone brightly for more than 13 hours.

Edison and other inventors continued to improve on the bulb, and as they did, it allowed people to light entire homes, buildings, and even cities—no matter the time of day. For the first time, people could work—and play—around the clock.

“Like every other invention that comes along, it was both incredibly exciting and disruptive,” Freeberg says. “Every aspect of life was changed by access to light.”

Thomas Edison was an inventor who held a whopping 1,093 U.S. patents in his lifetime. In the mid-1800s, when he was a young man, people depended on fire-prone candles, oil lamps, or gas lamps for indoor light. But Edison knew electricity was the answer, and other inventors at the time knew this too. The basic idea: Wires would carry electric currents to a filament inside a glass bulb. As the filament grew hotter, it would glow, producing light.

The ideal filament material had to burn brightly, last for hours at a time, and be affordable. Many people around the world were hard at work on a practical electrical light bulb. Edison wanted to be the first to succeed.

Edison and his team spent more than a year testing out some 3,000 filament materials. They tried everything from spiderweb to human hair. They then discovered that cotton thread covered in carbon and baked to the right temperature did the trick. On October 22, 1879, Edison’s electric light bulb lit up. It shined brightly for more than 13 hours.

Edison and other inventors continued to improve on the bulb. As they did, it allowed people to light entire homes, buildings, and even cities anytime of the day. For the first time, people could work and play around the clock.

The Internet: A Modern Invention Takes Shape

It’s hard to picture life before certain inventions, even relatively new ones such as the internet. the internet has transformed society, and it continues to shape our world as it evolves. here, a few key dates in its creation..

An experimental computer network called ARPANET, which becomes the foundation for the internet, goes online with funding from the Pentagon. Its initial purpose is to link computers over telephone lines, allowing them to share information.

An experimental computer network called  ARPANET,  which becomes the foundation for the internet, goes online with funding from the Pentagon. Its initial purpose is to link computers over telephone lines, allowing them to share information.

The first email is sent and received. Working with Arpanet engineers, computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sends a test message from one computer to another using the @ symbol in an email address. The message says something like “QWERTYUIOP.”

The  first email  is sent and received. Working with Arpanet engineers, computer programmer Ray Tomlinson sends a test message from one computer to another using the @ symbol in an email address. The message says something like “QWERTYUIOP.”

The World Wide Web begins as a project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The world’s first web browser and website go live at CERN in 1990, and the World Wide Web opens to the public in 1991.

The World Wide Web  begins as a project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The world’s first web browser and website go live at CERN in 1990, and the World Wide Web opens to the public in 1991.

Carl Court/AFP via Getty Images

What is thought to be the first smartphone, created by IBM, goes on sale. The bulky phone—named Simon—contains a touch screen, email capability, and some built-in applications, such as a calculator.

What is thought to be the  first smartphone,  created by IBM, goes on sale. The bulky phone—named Simon—contains a touch screen, email capability, and some built-in applications, such as a calculator.

Wi-Fi, which allows devices to communicate over a wireless signal, is invented and first released to customers. It transforms the way people connect and communicate, allowing easy access to the internet from home and on the go.

Wi-Fi,  which allows devices to communicate over a wireless signal, is invented and first released to customers. It transforms the way people connect and communicate, allowing easy access to the internet from home and on the go.

Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg (left) and other students at Harvard University launch Facebook, which goes on to become the world’s largest social networking site, ushering in the age of social media.

Mark Zuckerberg  (left)  and other students at Harvard University launch  Facebook,  which goes on to become the world’s largest social networking site, ushering in the age of social media.

Continue the Learning Journey

• Pick one of the inventions in the article, and imagine what the world would be like without it. Write a first-person narrative describing what an average day might look like for you without that invention. 
• Papyrus paper, the printing press with movable type, and the internet are three inventions that have altered the ways we communicate. But there have been many more advancements in writing and communication over time. Do some research on how communication has evolved throughout history, and create a timeline of your findings. 

Electricity Is the Most Important Invention: Essay Example

Electricity is the most important invention: essay introduction.

The contemporary world and its society are known for the highly developed technologies that make people’s lives easier and simpler. The number of useful and sophisticated inventions grows nearly every day. The scientists work on new ways of studying the world we live in, exploring its resources and using them to improve our quality of life.

This process began centuries ago, yet its most active stage was launched in the middle of the nineteenth century, and one of the major moving forces of the rapid technological development was the reception and application of electricity.

Electricity Is the Most Important Invention: Essay Main Body

The period of time when the scientists of Europe first started using electricity to create powerful engines and high functioning mechanisms gave a push to such processes as industrialization, urbanization, and globalization; it made a massive impact on the world’s society, its way of living, and habits, it produced massive cultural, political and economic changes.

There is a common misconception that electricity actually may be an invention, but it is one of the natural forms of energy, it has always existed on our planet so it could not possibly be “invented”. The most influential and powerful invention was the discovery of electricity and of ways of using it for various technologies.

Historically, some of the first encounters humans made with electricity date back to Ancient Greece, when people first discovered the rubbing fur and amber together created the attraction between the two surfaces and also lighter objects, which occurred due to static electricity (Atkinson, 2014). This cannot be called a discovery because the reasons or practical use of this phenomenon were not understood.

The more recent interest towards electricity started to form in the 1600s when William Gilbert, inspired by the writings of ancient Greeks created his own work about magnetism, he also was the one who introduced the term “electrical” (Bellis, 2014). After that, such scientists as Descartes, Fermat, Grimaldi, Hooke, Von Guericke and Gray developed the knowledge about electricity.

In 1747 came Franklin’s theory of positive and negative electric charges (History of Electricity from its Beginning, 2012). This theory was followed by Faraday’s discovery of electric induction and the work of electric currents. Finally, the geniuses of Edison and Tesla brought light to all the average households and made the first hydroelectric engines and plants possible (The History of Electricity, 2014).

Ever since electricity and its qualities and possibilities were discovered the speed of technological progress in our world has been growing. The discovery of electricity became the necessary basis for the occurrence of multiple other sciences and inventions that are constantly used and are of crucial meaning in the contemporary world.

The modern society, its life and well being depends on electricity wholly. We cannot imagine our lives without cell phones, computers, the internet, coffee makers, toasters, washing machines, and microwave ovens, and all of these devices work due to electricity, but we often forget that more crucial needs of ours are fulfilled with the help of this discovery (Electricity, women and the home, n. d.).

For example, light in our cities, streets, and homes is electricity, water in our taps is running because of electrical pumps. The impact of electricity on the society of the world and its lifestyle is hard to overestimate. Today it is responsible for our survival.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century at least eighty percent of the population of our planet lived in rural areas and worked in agriculture, the appearance of electric engines created many workplaces in the cities and enforced the process of urbanization. In the modern world, the majority of people live in or close to urban areas.

This is how electricity changed our social geography. Besides, electricity has made an impact on the taste of our food, our education, our medicine and communication (Valdes, 2012). Electricity in hospitals helps to save millions of lives every day. The internet and cell phones have speeded up the world’s communication massively, changed the way people interact with each other. Electricity gave us new modes of transportation too – trams, trains, and trolleybuses function due to electric power.

Basically, the major electric generators are responsible for human life support. Besides, such huge inventions as nuclear power and space exploration are possible because of the discovery of electric power. Electricity and the knowledge of its current, its qualities and effects, its structure and capacities are the discoveries that influenced our world, changed it, shaped it into what we know today. Every human-made object we can touch or see today was made with the help of electricity one way or another.

Our culture and art also depend on electricity a lot, for example, some of the most ancient paintings and manuscripts are preserved with the help of refrigerators working from electricity. The modern mass media such as radio and television exist because of electricity. The music is written, played and delivered to the audiences today with the help of electricity.

Electricity Is the Most Important Invention: Essay Conclusion

Finally, neurosurgery works through the understanding of electric impulses human brain sends to the body making it function. Electricity constantly penetrates humans, this world, and every aspect of life; this is why its discovery can be considered the most influential and important invention.

Reference List

Atkinson, N. (2014). Who Discovered Electricity? Web.

Bellis, M. (2014). History of Electricity . Web.

Electricity, women and the home. (n. d.). Science Museum . Web.

History of Electricity from its Beginning . (2012). Scholz Electrical. Web.

The History of Electricity , (2014). Code-Electrical . Web.

Valdes, C. (2012). Electricity: How it Changed the World Forever . Web.

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Vaccination — Vaccination – the Greatest Invention of All Times

Vaccination – The Greatest Invention of All Times

• Categories: Invention Vaccination

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Published: Apr 2, 2020

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11 Innovations That Changed History

By: Evan Andrews

Updated: May 5, 2023 | Original: December 18, 2012

1. The Printing Press

Prior to the rise of the Internet, no innovation did more for the spread and democratization of knowledge than Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press . Developed around 1440 in Mainz, Germany, Gutenberg’s machine improved on already existing presses through the use of a mold that allowed for the rapid production of lead alloy-type pieces. This assembly line method of copying books enabled a single printing press to create as many as 3,600 pages per day. By 1500 over 1,000 Gutenberg presses were operating in Europe, and by 1600 they had created over 200 million new books. The printing press not only made books affordable for the lower classes, but it helped spark the Age of Enlightenment and facilitated the spread of new and often controversial ideas. In 1518 followers of the German monk Martin Luther used the printing press to copy and disseminate his seminal work “ The Ninety-Five Theses ,” which jumpstarted the Protestant Reformation and spurred conflicts like the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48). The printing press proved so influential in prompting revolutions, religious upheaval and scientific thought that Mark Twain would later write, “What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg.”

2. The Compass

Magnetic compasses may have been made somewhat obsolete by satellites and global positioning systems, but their impact on early navigation and exploration was inestimable. Originally invented in China , by the 14th century compasses had widely replaced astronomical means as the primary navigational instrument for mariners. The compass provided explorers with a reliable method for traversing the world’s oceans, a breakthrough that ignited the Age of Discovery and won Europe the wealth and power that later fueled the Industrial Revolution . Most importantly, the compass allowed for interaction—both peaceful and otherwise—between previously isolated world cultures.

3. Paper Currency

Throughout much of human history, money took the form of precious metals, coins and even raw materials like livestock or vegetables. The inception of paper money ushered in a bold new era—a world in which currency could purchase goods and services despite having no intrinsic value. Paper currency was widely used in China in the ninth century, but did not appear in Europe until the late 1600s. Spurred on by frequent shortages of coins, banks issued paper notes as a promise against future payments of precious metals. By the late 19th century many nations had begun issuing government-backed legal tender that could no longer be converted into gold or silver. The switch to paper money not only bailed out struggling governments during times of crisis—as it did for the United States during the Civil War —but it also ushered in a new era of international monetary regulation that changed the face of global economics. Perhaps even more importantly, paper currency was the vital first step in a new monetary system that led to the birth of credit cards and electronic banking.

While early human societies made extensive use of stone, bronze and iron, it was steel that fueled the Industrial Revolution and built modern cities. Evidence of steel tools dates back 4,000 years, but the alloy was not mass-produced until the invention of the Bessemer Process, a technique for creating steel using molten pig iron, in the 1850s. Steel then exploded into one of the biggest industries on the planet and was used in the creation of everything from bridges and railroads to skyscrapers and engines. It proved particularly influential in North America, where massive iron ore deposits helped the United States become one of the world’s biggest economies.

5. The Electric Light

While they are easy to take for granted, all it takes is a short power outage to remind us of the importance of artificial lights. Pioneered in the early 19th century by Humphry Davy and his carbon arc lamp, electric lights developed throughout the 1800s thanks to the efforts of inventors like Warren de la Rue, Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Alva Edison . It was Edison and Swan who patented the first long-lasting light bulbs in 1879 and 1880, liberating society from a near-total reliance on daylight. Electric lights went on to be used in everything from home lighting and street lamps to flashlights and car headlights. The complex networks of wires erected to power early light bulbs also helped lead to the first domestic electrical wiring, paving the way for countless other in-home appliances.

6. Domestication of the Horse

Since their domestication some 5,500 years ago, horses have been inextricably tied to human development. They enabled people to travel great distances and gave different cultures the chance to trade and exchange ideas and technology. Equine strength and agility meant that horses could also carry cargo, plow farmland and even clear forests. Perhaps most influential of all, horses changed the nature of war. Nothing was more feared than a horse-drawn chariot or a mounted warrior, and societies that mastered the use of cavalry typically prevailed in battle.

7. Transistors

A criminally under-appreciated innovation, the transistor is an essential component in nearly every modern electronic gadget. First developed in late 1947 by Bell Laboratories, these tiny semiconductor devices allow for precise control of the amount and flow of current through circuit boards. Originally used in radios, transistors have since become an elemental piece of the circuitry in countless electronic devices including televisions, cell phones and computers. The amount of transistors in integrated circuits doubles nearly every two years—a phenomenon known as Moore’s Law—so their remarkable impact on technology will only continue to grow.

8. Magnifying Lenses

Magnifying lenses might seem like an unremarkable invention, but their use has offered mankind a glimpse of everything from distant stars and galaxies to the minute workings of living cells. Lenses first came into use in the 13th century as an aid for the weak-sighted, and the first microscopes and telescopes followed in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Figures like Robert Hook and Anton van Leeuwenhoek would go on to use microscopes in the early observance of cells and other particles, while Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler employed the telescope to chart Earth’s place in the cosmos. These early uses were the first steps in the development of astonishing devices like the electron microscope and the Hubble Space Telescope . Magnifying lenses have since led to new breakthroughs in an abundance of fields including astronomy, biology, archeology, optometry and surgery.

9. The Telegraph

The telegraph was the first in a long line of communications breakthroughs that later included radio, telephones and email. Pioneered by a variety of inventors in the 18th and 19th centuries, the telegraph used Samuel Morse’s famous Morse code to convey messages by intermittently stopping the flow of electricity along communications wires. Telegraph lines multiplied throughout the 1850s, and by 1902 transoceanic cables encircled the globe. The original telegraph and its wireless successors went on to be the first major advancements in worldwide communication. The ability to send messages rapidly across great distances made an indelible impact on government, trade, banking, industry, warfare and news media, and formed the bedrock of the information age.

10. Antibiotics

A giant step forward in the field of medicine, antibiotics saved millions of lives by killing and preventing the growth of harmful bacteria. Scientists like Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister were the first to recognize and attempt to combat bacteria, but it was Alexander Fleming who made the first leap in antibiotics when he accidentally discovered the bacteria-inhibiting mold known as penicillin in 1928. Antibiotics proved to be a major improvement on antiseptics—which killed human cells along with bacteria—and their use spread rapidly throughout the 20th century. Nowhere was their effect more apparent than on the battlefield: While nearly 20 percent of soldiers who contracted bacterial pneumonia died in World War I , with antibiotics—namely Penicillin—that number dropped to only 1 percent during World War II . Antibiotics including penicillin, vancomycin, cephalosporin and streptomycin have gone on to fight nearly every known form of infection, including influenza, malaria, meningitis, tuberculosis and most sexually transmitted diseases.

11. The Steam Engine

Cars, airplanes, factories, trains, spacecraft—none of these transportation methods would have been possible if not for the early breakthrough of the steam engine. The first practical use of external combustion dates back to 1698, when Thomas Savery developed a steam-powered water pump. Steam engines were then perfected in the late 1700s by James Watt, and went on to fuel one of the most momentous technological leaps in human history during the Industrial Revolution . Throughout the 1800s external combustion allowed for exponential improvement in transportation, agriculture and manufacturing, and also powered the rise of world superpowers like Great Britain and the United States. Most important of all, the steam engine’s basic principle of energy-into-motion set the stage for later innovations like internal combustion engines and jet turbines, which prompted the rise of cars and aircraft during the 20th century.

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