Mine is the computer. I continue to be amazed at what we can do with them.
Writing. Being able to record facts, thoughts, and stories that can be (mostly) read thousands of miles away and thousands of years later changed civilisation.
It is crazy that. For time immemorial we used to transmit information from our mouths or using hand signals, and receive that information through eyes and ears, all in realtime.
(side thought: how awesome would it be if we had a single organ for both? e.g. communication solely through blinking)
Then suddenly we have this system where someone can code meaning onto a sheet, and we can receive entire contexts from a glance alone, purely at our leisure. Nuts.
Glasses. The ability to see so much better than I otherwise could leaves me astonished every time I put them on.
Lenses also gave us telescopes and microscopes. Pretty amazing discovery.
I wouldn’t have survived childhood without glasses in a pre-modern era.
I’m not sure about the greatest invention but the second greatest is sliced bread!
Writing, it allowed for knowledge to travel across vast distances. And for that knowledge to remain available and accurate for far longer than any oral tradition would be capable of.
Soap
The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can’t take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.
It’s a toss up: either chalkboards or dry erase boards. Both are remarkable.
::groan::
Plumbing. I could live without almost every modern comfort but a flushable toilet
To expand a hair on this, modern waste disposal. So with plumbing comes sewage. Then the close child is refuse removal. We literally cannot live (healthily) without these things.
Side-bar, the folks that power waste removal are VASTLY under-paid.
Waste removal is usually a premo paid job, yeah they could be paid more, but still pretty cushy pay for most of them. It’s not some minimum wage job and the entry barrier is usually high school education.
I was going to say toilets/indoor plumbing. Necessary for survival? Maybe not. Best convenience ever invented? Probably.
I would rank plumbing pretty high to be sure, but without the steam engine to drive the water pumps, plumbing is limited to aqueducts, gravity sewers, and intermittent, low-volume supply from animal or wind-driven pumps.
Even today, the overwhelming majority of our energy passes through a steam phase at some point. Steam power is by far the most important discovery/invention of the modern world.
It’s pretty damn hard to pick just one thing, so my best-of list
There’s really basic foundational things like the wheel, cutting tools, fire (if we want to count it as an invention,) string/rope/cordage, writing, clothing, cooking, agriculture, metalworking, etc. the sort of things that are absolutely basic building blocks of civilization.
Moving a few milenia up, and in no particular order,
the Haber Process to synthesize ammonia, which allowed for the creation of synthetic fertilizers. If you’ve eaten any commercially grown food in the last century, you probably owe it to the Haber Process.
Antibiotics are another big one, as are vaccines.
Vaucason’s lathe arguably laid the foundation for a whole lot of fabrication techniques that led to the industrial revolution
Refrigeration
Steam engines and later internal combustion engines
Clocks
Compasses
Printing press
The telephone
Airplanes
Computers and the internet
Cameras
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Also it’s the one my parents talk about. They used to go out everyday and pluck food from the ground. Every day.
Fridge changed that overnight. Suddenly people had time to do other things (mostly chat with their friends in cafés)
Cordage/string. Way more useful than fire and arguably predates it.
Irrigation. But Iron Working and Celestial Navigation are good shouts too.
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One I didn’t see yet: Radio.
Less than 150 years old, and has vitally changed how we communicate, and has downstream effects on every other human activity.
Kind of magical having streams of information travelling all around us.
Yep, I was talking to my grandpa about what invention his parents thought was the most significant in their lifetime, and they had said the radio. They had lived through both world wars which had brought about many many inventions and that was the one they thought was most significant.
Up to that time news was incredibly slow and you couldn’t put what was going on on the other side of the country without a massive delay, let alone the world.
At first I thought you were talking about dating lmao
Hmm I definitely agree that computers, and especially smartphones, are pretty damn amazing inventions.
But I agree with another poster when it comes to the greatest invention. When we invented the printing press, it allowed our species to develop much quicker because we were able to share information/education much better.
In Electronics world? Bipolar junctionTransistors. Easily.
This led into having portable devices we have today.
Back then people used vacuum tubes for switching and amplification; of which were very expensive to run (used a lot of power when idle).
I mean, vacuum tubes where phenomenal when they came, allowed first long distance calls in 1915, but look at my phone now, fits on my hands, and has billions of transistors!
Its crazy that we’re now approaching 200 million transistors in a single square millimetre. Boggles the mind.
