essay on great invention

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 .

89 Invention Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for a topic about invention that changed the world? You’re in the right place! Find the best invention essay examples and title ideas below.

🏆 Top Invention Essay Examples

📱 interesting invention speech topics, 👍 good essay topics on invention, ❓ invention research questions.

An invention is an innovative method, device, or process. Whether it is a small improvement or a radical breakthrough, an invention is something that changes production processes and the everyday life of people. Both the wheel and a super-modern smartphone are examples of inventions.

In your invention essay, you might want to discuss the importance of inventing in our life. Another option is to talk about a famous or your favorite invention. Want to get more ideas? In this article, we’ve gathered the best invention essay examples, speech topics, and titles. Go on reading to learn more.

• Electricity Is the Most Important Invention 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 […]
• Ancient Chinese Contributions and Inventions Trying to point to ten most useful inventions and contributions of the Ancient China, it was really difficult to select the most necessary ones as Ancient China is famous for its contribution into the development […]
• Papyrus: Its Invention and Impact on the World The invention of papyrus paper by the Egyptians changed the scene since papyrus-paper proved to be the ideal writing material of the time.
• The Inventions of Thomas Edison Many new developments appeared due to Edison’s achievements, who was one of the founders of the practical application of current. The introduction of compressed current energy marked the transition to a new technological era.
• Dynamite Invention Influence on Politics, Society, and Economy The duality of the impact of the invention of dynamite is present in each of the three major civilizational areas mentioned above.
• The Invention of Internet Several events led to the advancement of the internet in the world today. The level of computer literacy in the world played a leading role in the advancement of internet as teachers and students wanted […]
• Inventions That the World Would Do Without For instance, the invention of communication technology has been of great help to the entire world because of the convenience and reliability it has come with.
• The Gunpowder Invention and Its Impacts on the World In the present times, the production of gunpowder still goes on as a continuation of the works of the ancient alchemists from China.
• Golden Age of Islam: Inventions and Success in Science The achievements of the Muslim technology and science contributed to the development of the Western society and helped Europe come out of the Dark Ages.
• The Flute Advancement and Its Invention The volume of the flute is dependent on the resonator’s size, the size of the air stream or the velocity of the air stream.
• Impact of the Invention of the Camera on Art The invention of the camera immensely impacted the arts, especially in terms of painting. On the other hand, the camera’s invention spurred the development of new art directions, namely, Realism and Impressionism.
• Invention of Light Bulbs by Davy: Ethical Issues This was a pivotal moment when Humphrey picked up an interest in the field of electrochemistry in the year 1808 because it led to discovery of the most famous invention in his life which was […]
• Invention of Photography and Its Social Impact Although photography was invented in its full form only in 1835, an understanding of the social impact that was a result of the invention of photography is rightly portrayed by Azoulay in his article “The […]
• Discovery Versus Invention: Understanding, Comparison and Principles of the Subject The earlier example of gods invented to explain cosmology is an area where the knowledge was true for its time in the sense that it organized the universe and the world, but was later replaced […]
• Invention in Writing It refers to the creation of new ideas in relation to the question given or the use of old ideas to come up with new ideas in writing.
• Umbrella and Its Invention in Different Cultures An umbrella in ancient China was not only the item of sun protection, but it was also a symbol of a high rank and nobility of its owner.
• The Invention of Development On being sworn in as the president of the United States, Rist notes, Truman introduced the term, underdevelopment, as a new concept of regarding the impoverished regions of the world.
• Alexander Graham Bell and the Passion for Invention It was a very short notice and since I had counted on working on my telephone project in the spring of 1870, I was at first not ready to move with my parents.
• Computers: The History of Invention and Development It is treated as a reliable machine able to process and store a large amount of data and help out in any situation.”The storage, retrieval, and use of information are more important than ever” since […]
• Phonograph Invention and Evolution The time period the phonograph was invented and the circumstances that led to the invention. The invention and advancement of the phonograph and its operations has had a part to play on other inventions.
• “John Koza Has Built an Invention Machine” by Jonathon Keat In other words, a new scientific solution of a genius can be appropriate only when the society draws to a head with a little bit mere understanding of the scientific flow at a definite epoch […]
• The Invention of Daguerreotypes Overall, the work on the daguerreotypes began in 1727, when Schulze introduced his important innovations into photography; it continued in the beginning of the 1800s, when the rudimentary camera obscura was created and actively used; […]
• The Invention of Television According to Street, Paul Nipkow developed the Nipkow disc in 1884, which was capable of transmitting pictures by use of a cable. In the earlier times, it was hard to send a message for its […]
• Nikola Tesla’s Inventions and Achievements It is interesting to discuss that Tesla’s AC system led to the event in the history of the scientific and commercial world called the war of the currents.
• The Progressive Era and Its Technological Inventions Moreover, the period marked the shift from the agrarian to the urban society, and many critics referred to it as the age of reforms in American history.
• The Enable Talk Gloves: Invention’s Pros & Cons The gloves have special sensors that turn the signs into texts on a smartphone that also turns the texts into speech. This invention will impact the participation of people with speech problems in the activities […]
• Two Inventions Comarison: Telephone and Internet However, the history of the first inventor of the telephone is shrouded in mystery with the name of Elisha Gray attached with the invention of the first telephone.
• Optical Tools: History of Invention and Consequential Development Nevertheless, as the socio-cultural progress in this part of the world continued to gain a powerful momentum, the idea of using lenses to create optical devices began to appeal to more and more intellectually advanced […]
• Biomimicry: Inventions Inspired by Nature The main idea or aim of biomimicry is that nature is able to provide humanity with brilliant solutions that can and need to be used.
• Ancient Chinese Inventions History In this article, I highlight some of the inventions and contributions and examine four that I consider to be outstanding. A sample of these inventions and contributions include “silk, tea, porcelain, paper, printing, gunpowder, the […]
• US Inventions: Electronic Appliances and Transport Facilities Fortunately, the inventions of recorders, compact disks, and radio led to the spread of the music in other parts of the world.
• Inventions of the Ancient Romans The Romans built some of the most impressive buildings in the world, including the Pantheon and the Colosseum. Thus, the Romans were ahead of their time, and their legacy continues to shape modern engineering and […]
• The Invention and the Power of Music This moment was the beginning of a practical study of the benefits of music therapy for the mental and physical condition of a person.
• Walter Benjamin’s Article: The Invention of Photography In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin discusses how the invention of photography and other mechanical reproduction forms has changed how people perceive works of art.
• Spectrophotometers: Invention and Development Jensen explains that spectrophotometers can be used to make measurements where previous methods were unable to, like measuring the amount of light absorbed by a substance at different wavelengths.
• The Motion Picture Invention and Inventors John Isaac played a key role in helping Eadweard to develop a technology used to take the first motion picture of a galloping horse.
• The Lego Company’s Inventions and Reinvention Hasbro and Barbie, the Lego company has the capacity to widen its range of products and diversify. The Lego company realized the importance of its community, and effectively used it in order to improve its […]
• Testing New Invention: Blender Switch The purpose of the analysis will be to determine if the proportion of returned blenders with new switches were deferent from the proportion of blenders with old switches.
• Social Needs: Inventions and Innovations The Pony Express was birthed in 1861 in the US with the primary goal of delivering mail and in the same breath, Coleman Sellers invented a Kinematoscope.
• Radio Technology Invention and Development In 1906 he broadcasted a Christmas concert, including his voice and violin play with the help of 400-foot towers to the ships of the United Fruit Company, which were equipped with Marconi’s radios. In 1922 […]
• Ancient Chinese Inventions and Contributions In spite of this stereotype, China is the Motherland of many inventions of the past. Gunpowder is one of the most significant and well-known inventions of ancient China.
• Photography: Brief History of Invention At that time all images produced were in black and white and eventually all masters of the art came to believe that the only artistic way to record photographic images was in black and white. […]
• Airplnane: Description of the Invention The credit for the invention of the first powered airplane goes to the Wright brothers Orville and Wilbur. The worlds first powered, sustained and controlled flight in a heavier-than-air airplane was achieved by the Wright […]
• Rome and the Invention of the West In ” The Aeneid,” Virgil tells of the adventures of the hero of the Trojan war, Aeneas, who was destined by the gods to stay alive after the destruction of Troy to come to Italy […]
• “Invention as a Social Act” Analysis The paper is divided into four parts: social aspects of the invention, invention as a dialectical process, invention as an act, and classical criteria for a social view of the invention.
• Sickle Cell Disease and Scientific Inventions The disease is caused by a gene that is linked to the production of mutant hemoglobin. This is due to advance treatment and management of the disease”.
• Television, Its Invention and Technical Evolution The history of television involves the contribution of several engineers from different parts of the world. This paper seeks to explore the technical evolution of the television from its invention to the current developments.
• Visual Communications and Technological Inventions The invention of the printing press altered the history of the world the most notable one being the reduction of the power of the church.
• The Invention of Cinema at the End of the XIX Century First attempt to introduce the idea of moving pictures traces back to middle of the seventeenth century, when Athanasius Kircher “who projected crude hand-painted images of the Devil…on the wall of a darkened chamber by […]
• New Product Invention: Australian Tourism This project will be beneficial because the hotels in the region have since been overwhelmed by the current flow of the visitors.
• Apple Company: Development, Inventions, Expansion This essay provides an insight into the development of the Apple Company and the various personalities that have contributed to its growth.
• Collective Invention During Industrial Revolution The major similarity between collective invention and heroic individual invention is that both provided important source of innovations during the early stages of industrialization.
• Telescope and Microscope Discovery Combo The paper will look into the history of the discoveries and their effects in the development of the human well beings as well as the enhancement of the human understanding of the surrounding nature in […]
• Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope As he famously used to say, the Kinetoscope did with the eye the same thing the phonograph did to the ear.
• Aviation Industry and Its Prominent Inventions The above are some of the most influential aviation inventions ever made in the history of the industry. Given the failure in the development of manned aircraft by Russia, it is safe to conclude that […]
• Marcel Duchamp’s Invention of ‘The Readymade’ In his invention of readymade art, Duchamp based his artwork on the belief that creative art was not made from the perspective of the artist but from the point of view of the spectator who […]
• Luc Sante “The Invention of the Blues” and John Jeremiah Sullivan “Unknown Bards” Personally, I have found the article “The Invention of the Blues” by Sante important because it explains in details the origin of the music genre.
• Modeling, Prototyping and CASE Tools: The Inventions to Support the Computer Engineering Despite the fact that the engineering is constantly being enriched with the new notions and techniques which add the new ways and methods to make the process of engineering quicker and flawless, the science still […]
• The Period Encompassing the Invention of Cinema Therefore, because of the establishment of the photographic film at that time that required the use of great illumination, the application of the electric spotlight that was introduced in 1904 in theatres became essential in […]
• How Did the Invention of Agriculture Allowed Stable?
• How Did the Invention of the First American Transcontinental Affect the Nation?
• How Has the Invention and Use of Television Affected Human Life?
• How Has the Invention of Contact Lenses Affected People’s Sight?
• How Has the Invention of Social Media Affected Human Life Over Time?
• How Has the Invention of Vaccines Helped the World?
• How Remix Culture Fuels Creativity and Invention?
• How Did Television Change Since Its Invention?
• How the Bit Was Born: Claude Shannon and the Invention of Information?
• How Has the Invention and Use of the Computer Changed Lives in the 21st Century?
• How Venture Capital Works: Invention and Innovation Drive?
• Was Modern Art Greater Influenced by the Invention of the Camera or Kindergarten?
• What Are the Invention That Changed the 20th Century?
• What Brought About the Invention of Response Cards?
• What Did the Invention of the Bicycle as an Alternative Model?
• What Can the Invention Be Made for a Healthier?
• What Inspires Leisure Time Invention?
• What Invention Would the World Be Better off Without, and Why?
• Which Invention Has Had the Most Significant Effect on Our Lives in the Last Two Hundred Years?
• Which Invention Was More Important: The Internet or the Telegraph?
• Which Invention Has Made the Most Impact on Our Lives?
• What Was Invented in 2021?
• Why Is the Internet Most Important Invention?
• Why the Gatling Gun Is an Invention of Great Importance to the Science of Warfare?
• Computers: The Greatest Invention of the Century?
• Does Compulsory Licensing Discourage Invention?
• The Microscope: Science’s Greatest Invention?
• Bicycle Research Topics
• Electronics Engineering Paper Topics
• Industrial Revolution Research Ideas
• Leonardo da Vinci Questions
• Inspiration Topics
• Software Engineering Topics
• Thomas Jefferson Ideas
• Vaccination Research Topics
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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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

Steven_Kriemadis/iStock  

• 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

LordRunar/iStock  

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

Diego Rayaces/iStock  

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

A330Pilot/iStock  

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

imagedepotpro/iStock  

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

alvarez/iStock  

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

Fahroni/iStock  

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

kojihirano/iStock  

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

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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

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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

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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

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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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20 inventions that changed the world

From the wheel 5,500 years ago to the birth control pill, these 20 inventions had huge ramifications and have helped humans shape the world around us.

2. Printing press

3. penicillin, 5. light bulb, 6. telephone, 7. internal combustion engine, 8. contraceptives, 9. internet, 11. use of fire, 12. concrete, 13. magnifying glass, 14. batteries, 15. marine chronometer, 16. airplane, 17. refrigerator, 18. nuclear energy, 19. vaccines.

Humans are naturally curious and creative, two traits that have led our species to many scientific and technological breakthroughs. Since our earliest ancestors bashed a rock on the ground to make the first sharp-edged tool, humans have continued to innovate. From the debut of the wheel to the launch of Mars rovers, several of these key advancements stand out as especially revolutionary. Some inventions are thanks to one eureka moment, but most of our most pioneering inventions were the work of several innovative thinkers who made incremental improvements over many years. Here, we explore 20 of the most important inventions of all time, along with the science behind the inventions and how they came about.

Before the invention of the wheel in 3500 B.C., humans were severely limited in how much stuff we could transport over land, and how far. The wheel itself wasn't the most difficult part of "inventing the wheel." When it came time to connect a non-moving platform to that rolling cylinder, things got tricky, according to David Anthony, an emeritus professor of anthropology at Hartwick College.

"The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," Anthony previously told Live Science . "But then making it was also difficult." For instance, the holes at the center of the wheels and the ends of the fixed axles had to be nearly perfectly round and smooth, he said. The size of the axle was also a critical factor, as was its snugness inside the hole (not too tight, but not too loose, either).

The hard work paid off, big time. Wheeled carts facilitated agriculture and commerce by enabling the transportation of goods to and from markets, as well as easing the burdens of people travelling great distances. Now, wheels are vital to our way of life, found in everything from clocks to vehicles to turbines.

David Anthony is professor emeritus and curator emeritus of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York. He has done extensive archaeological fieldwork in Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. Anthony is the author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language" (Princeton, 2007) and has co-authored studies including the finding that humans first rode horses 5,000 years ago .

German inventor Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press sometime between 1440 and 1450. Key to its development was the hand mold, a new molding technique that enabled the rapid creation of large quantities of metal movable type. Though others before him — including inventors in China and Korea — had developed movable type made from metal, Gutenberg was the first to create a mechanized process that transferred the ink (which he made from linseed oil and soot) from the movable type to paper.

With this movable type process, printing presses exponentially increased the speed with which book copies could be made, and thus they led to the rapid and widespread dissemination of knowledge for the first time in history. In her book “ The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe ” (Cambridge University Press, 2012), late historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein wrote, “printers’ workshops would be found in every important municipal center by 1500.”  It has been estimated that up to twenty million volumes had been printed in Western Europe by 1500, although Eisenstein estimates that it was around eight million.

Among other things, the printing press permitted wider access to the Bible, which in turn led to alternative interpretations, including that of Martin Luther, whose "95 Theses" a document printed by the hundred-thousand sparked the Protestant Reformation.

It's one of the most famous discovery stories in history. In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-filled Petri dish in his laboratory with its lid accidentally ajar. The sample had become contaminated with a mold, and everywhere the mold was, the bacteria was dead. That antibiotic mold turned out to be the fungus Penicillium, and over the next two decades, chemists purified it and developed the drug penicillin , which fights a huge number of bacterial infections in humans without harming the humans themselves.

Penicillin was being mass-produced and advertised by 1944. This poster attached to a curbside mailbox advised World War II servicemen to take the drug to rid themselves of venereal disease.

About 1 in 10 people have an allergic reaction to the antibiotic , according to a study published in 2003 in the journal Clinical Reviews in Allergy and Immunology. Even so, most of those people go on to be able to tolerate the drug, researchers said.

Related: What causes allergies?

Ancient mariners used the stars for navigation, but this method didn’t work during the day or on cloudy nights, making it dangerous to travel far from land. 

The first compass was invented in China during the Han dynasty between the 2nd Century B.C. and 1st Century A.D.; it was made of lodestone, a naturally-magnetized iron ore, the attractive properties of which they had been studying for centuries. However, it was used for navigation for the first time during the Song Dynasty, between the 11th and 12th centuries,

Soon after, the technology to the West through nautical contact. The compass enabled mariners to navigate safely far from land, opening up the world for exploration and the subsequent development of global trade. An instrument still widely used today, the compass has transformed our knowledge and understanding of the Earth forever.

The invention of the light bulb transformed our world by removing our dependence on natural light, allowing us to be productive at any time, day or night.  Several inventors were instrumental in developing this revolutionary technology throughout the 1800s; Thomas Edison is credited as the primary inventor because he created a completely functional lighting system, including a generator and wiring as well as a carbon-filament bulb like the one above, in 1879.

As well as initiating the introduction of electricity in homes throughout the Western world, this invention also had a rather unexpected consequence of changing people's sleep patterns . Instead of going to bed at nightfall (having nothing else to do) and sleeping in segments throughout the night separated by periods of wakefulness, we now stay up except for the 7 to 8 hours allotted for sleep, and, ideally, we sleep all in one go.

Several inventors did pioneering work on electronic voice transmission — many of whom later filed intellectual property lawsuits when telephone use exploded — but it was Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell who was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone on March 7, 1876 (his patent drawing is pictured above). Three days later, Bell made the first telephone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson, saying "Mr Watson, come here — I want to see you," according to author A. Edward Evenson in his book, “ The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray-Alexander Bell Controversy and Its Many Players ” (McFarland, 2015).

Bell’s inspiration for the telephone was influenced by his family. His father taught speech elocution and specialized in teaching the deaf speak, his mother, an accomplished musician, lost her hearing in later life and his wife Mabel, who he married in 1877, had been deaf since the age of five, according to Evenson. The invention quickly took off and revolutionized global business and communication. When Bell died on Aug. 2, 1922, all telephone service in the United States and Canada was stopped for one minute to honor him.

In these engines, the combustion of fuel releases a high-temperature gas, which, as it expands, applies a force to a piston, moving it. Thus, combustion engines convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Decades of engineering by many scientists went into designing the internal combustion engine, which took its (essentially) modern form in the latter half of the 19th century. The engine ushered in the Industrial Age, as well as enabling the invention of a huge variety of machines, including modern cars and aircraft.

Pictured are the operating steps of a four-stroke internal combustion engine. The strokes are as follows: 1) Intake stroke — air and vaporised fuel are drawn in. 2) Compression stroke - fuel vapor and air are compressed and ignited. 3) Power stroke — fuel combusts and the piston is pushed downwards, powering the machine. 4) Exhaust stroke — exhaust is driven out.

Not only have birth control pills, condoms and other forms of contraception sparked a sexual revolution in the developed world by allowing men and women to have sex for leisure rather than procreation, they have also drastically reduced the average number of offspring per woman in countries where they are used. With fewer mouths to feed, modern families have achieved higher standards of living and can provide better for each child. Meanwhile, on the global scale, contraceptives are helping the human population gradually level off; our number will probably stabilize by the end of the century. Certain contraceptives, such as condoms, also curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Natural and herbal contraception has been used for millennia. Condoms or ‘sheaths’ have existed in one form or another since ancient times, according to scholar Jessica Borge in her book “ Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business ” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020), with the rubber condom developed in the 19th century. Meanwhile, the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive pill in the United States in 1960 and by 1965, more than 6.5 million American women were on the pill, according to author Jonathan Eig in his book, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Pioneers Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015).  

Scientists are continuing to make advancements in birth control, with some labs even pursuing a male form of "the pill." A permanent birth-control implant called Essure was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2002, though in 2016, the FDA warned the implant would need stronger warnings to tell users about serious risks of using Essure. 

Related: 7 surprising facts about the pill

The internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that is used by billions of people worldwide. In the 1960s, a team of computer scientists working for the U.S. Defense Department's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) built a communications network to connect the computers in the agency, called ARPANET, the predecessor of the internet. It used a method of data transmission called "packet switching", developed by computer scientist and team member Lawrence Roberts, based on prior work of other computer scientists. 

This technology was progressed in the 1970s by scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, who developed the crucial communication protocols for the internet, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), according to computer scientist Harry R. Lewis in his book “ Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science ” (MIT Press, 2021). For this, Kahn and Cerf are often credited as inventors of the internet”.

In 1989, the internet evolved further thanks to the invention of the World Wide Web by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN (The European Organization for Nuclear Research). According to CERN , "the basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system." The development of the WWW opened up the world of the internet to everybody and connected the world in a way that it had never been before.  

Related: Inventor of World Wide Web snags computer science's top prize

This key invention dates back more than 2,000 years to the Ancient Roman period and became possible only after humans developed the ability to cast and shape metal. Previously, wood structures had to be built by interlocking adjacent boards geometrically a much more arduous construction process.

Until the 1790s and early 1800s, hand-wrought nails were the norm, with a blacksmith heating a square iron rod and then hammering it on four sides to create a point, according to the University of Vermont . Nail-making machines came online between the 1790s and the early 1800s. Technology for crafting nails continued to advance; After Henry Bessemer developed a process to mass-produce steel from iron, the iron nails of yesteryear slowly waned and by 1886, 10 percent of U.S. nails were created from soft steel wire, according to the University of Vermont. By 1913, 90 percent of nails produced in the U.S. were steel wire.

Meanwhile, the invention of the screw - a stronger but harder-to-insert fastener -  is usually ascribed to the Greek scholar Archimedes in the third century B.C., but was probably invented by the Pythagorean philosopher Archytas of Tarentum, according to David Blockley in his book “ Engineering: A Very Short Introduction ” (Oxford University Press, 2012).

The use of fire is one of humankind's most powerful early inventions and radically changed the way our ancient ancestors lived. Offering warmth and the ability to cook foods such as meat, the campfire was also a social gathering place. Fire also provided some protection against predators. 

The exact date fire was discovered has long remained a mystery, with some studies suggesting it was first used by hominins in Kenya 1 million years ago to cook meat. Other evidence suggests that Neanderthals in Europe and Asia harnessed fire , while Homo sapiens evolving in Africa mastered the skill of creating fire. More recently, archaeologists in Israel found evidence of hominin fire use dating to 1.5 million to 2 million years ago.

Ancient Romans are credited as one of the first societies to use concrete in architecture, with Roman bathhouses and iconic sites such as the Colosseumand Pantheon dome constructed using concrete mixed with volcanic ash, lime, and seawater. Incredibly, many of these ancient buildings are not only standing, but remain in good condition some 2,000 years later — a testament to the longevity of Roman concrete . However, the ancient Egyptians used a crude form of concrete in their buildings much earlier in 3000 B.C., employing forms of concrete mixed with ash and salt water to create mortar. One study concluded that parts of the Great Pyramids of Giza might have been built using concrete . Concrete is strong in compression but breaks easily in tension, so the invention of reinforced steel-concrete toward the end of the 19th century in France, which lends concrete some of steel's tensile strength, enabled concrete to be used more widely in construction.

Franciscan friar and Oxford University scholar Roger Bacon first developed the magnifying glass in 1268. Sometimes dubbed "Britain's first scientist,"' Bacon's magnifying glass built on research by Muslim scholars .

However, the use of optical tools dates back much further. Evidence suggests that as early as 700 B.C., people in ancient Egypt noticed that they could look through crystals to improve vision.

The first battery dates back to 1800, when Italian physicist Alessandro Volta wrapped stacked discs of copper and zinc in a cloth, submerged it in salty water and discovered that it conducted energy. In 1802, Scottish professor William Cruickshank invented a variation of Volta's design known as the trough battery , which consisted of 50 discs of copper and zinc in a wooden box filled with a salt solution to conduct energy. However, it was French physicist Gaston Planté who invented the first practically used battery, in 1859. Modern variations on Planté's rechargeable lead-acid battery are still used in cars today.

The 15th century marked the beginning of the great voyages of discovery by adventurers and sea merchants and the development of a global ocean trade network . Trading vessels carried highly prized silk, spices, salt, wine and tea across often-treacherous seas for months on end. After the loss of four ships at sea in the Scilly naval disaster of 1707 , seafarers realized they needed an accurate way to determine longitude when out of sight of land.

In 1714, the British parliament offered a prize of 20,000 pounds to anyone who could solve the problem. Carpenter John Harrison won the bounty in 1735 with his marine chronometer. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that Harrison was a self-taught clockmaker. His ingenious timekeeping device was powered by the rocking motion of the ship rather than by gravity and could be used by sailors to accurately calculate longitude at sea.

The ability for humans to fly has captured the imagination of inventors for centuries, with the first human-operated flight taking place in 1783 when Joseph-Michael and Jacques-Ètienne Montgolfier took to the skies in a hot air balloon. In 1853 British engineer George Cayley designed the first glider to successfully take flight, but it wasn’t until 1903 that Orville and Wilbur Wright's plane became the first airplane to have a successful voyage. It not only took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina using its own power; it flew and landed without destruction, unlike many earlier aircraft inventions. The Wright brothers were inspired by watching' birds in flight. The glider took a page from birds' wings but had a 32-foot (10 meters) wingspan.

Refrigeration in some form has been around for thousands of years. Depending on the climate, ice or cold water was used to keep food cold in ancient times. But artificial refrigeration didn't come until 1748, when the physician William Cullen  first demonstrated evaporative cooling. Further breakthroughs came in 1834, when a vapor-compression system was developed by American engineer Jacob Perkins . In 1876, German engineer Carl von Linde came up with a process of liquifying the gas, ushering in the era of commercial refrigeration. In 1913, American engineer Fred Wolf invented the first domestic refrigerator , and as demand for fresh produce grew, so did the number of households with refrigerators.

Nuclear energy was first discovered in the 1930s by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi , who found that bombarding atoms with neutrons could split them, generating huge amounts of energy. He went on to develop the first nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. This successful experiment led to the development of several nuclear plants in the 1950s, with Idaho launching the first nuclear plant in 1951 with electricity produced from atomic energy at its Experimental Breeder Reactor I site. Obninsk in the former Soviet Union became the first grid-connected nuclear power plant in the world in 1954, while Shippingport nuclear plant, Pennsylvania became the first commercial nuclear plant in 1957.

Nuclear power remains widely used around the world today, generating approximately 10% of global energy .

One problem is that existing nuclear power plants use fission to split atoms, and this produces radioactive substances that take ages to decay. And the risks of nuclear disasters, such as those at Chernobyl and the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant, highlight the challenges of fission-based nuclear power.

So scientists are working to create usable nuclear fusion reactors, which could theoretically generate clean, limitless energy. In 2022, scientists reported a minor breakthrough: a fusion reactor that generated more energy than was put into it. However, we're still a long way from a usable fusion reactor , experts say.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that approximately 2 million to 3 million lives are saved annually thanks to vaccinations against contagious diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus and measles.

The earliest rudimentary vaccination is thought to date back to the 10th century in China, when people inoculated small scratches in the skin with small doses of smallpox to provide protection against the disease. But in 1796, English physician Edward Jenner discovered that milkmaids rarely caught or died of smallpox because they were previously infected by the cowpox virus , also called Vaccinia. So he used cowpox to develop a smallpox vaccine. He inoculated an 8-year-old boy with cowpox and then with smallpox, and the boy never caught the deadly scourge. Jenner's experiment led to the creation of a smallpox vaccine and his work is regarded as the start of immunology. In 1980, smallpox was declared officially eradicated by WHO. But scientists continue to develop new life-saving vaccines — most notably, the coronavirus vaccines that played a large role in combatting the pandemic .

Like many famous inventions, the X-ray was discovered by accident. In 1895, German engineer and physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was undertaking a two-month study into the potential of radiation. In an experiment testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass, he noticed that the radiation was able to pass through screens of considerable thickness, leaving a shadow of solid objects. He soon discovered that X-rays could pass through human tissues to show a clear picture of the skeleton and organs. A year later, a group of physicians took the earliest X-rays on patients . These observations led to the development of radiology as we know it today and has since helped medical professionals diagnose broken bones, tumors, organ failures and more.

Editor's Note: This story was updated to correct the location of Edison's lab. It was Menlo Park, New Jersey, not Menlo Park, California.

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Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012 and is currently a senior physics writer and editor for Quanta Magazine. She holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with the staff of Quanta, Wolchover won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory writing for her work on the building of the James Webb Space Telescope. Her work has also appeared in the The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best Writing on Mathematics, Nature, The New Yorker and Popular Science. She was the 2016 winner of the  Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists, as well as the winner of the 2017 Science Communication Award for the American Institute of Physics. 

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The Stories Behind 20 Inventions That Changed the World

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.

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

Related Topics

• HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION
• SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

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Top 10 Inventions of the Industrial Revolution

Server costs fundraiser 2024.

The British Industrial Revolution transformed life at work and at home for practically everyone. Noise, pollution, social upheaval, and repetitive jobs were the price to pay for labour-saving machines, cheap and comfortable transportation, more affordable consumer goods, better lighting and heating, and faster ways of communication.

Any shortlist of inventions is bound to be far from complete, but the following have been chosen not only for what they could do but also for how they permitted other inventions to become possible and how they transformed working life and everyday living for millions of people. The period under consideration is also important and here is taken as 1750 to 1860. With these criteria in mind, the top 10 inventions of the Industrial Revolution were:

• The Watt Steam Engine (1778)
• The Power Loom (1785)
• The Cotton Gin (1794)
• Gas Street Lighting (1807)
• The Electromagnet (1825)
• The First Photograph (c. 1826)
• Stephenson's Rocket (1829)
• The Electrical Telegraph (1837)
• The Steam Hammer (1839)
• Mass Steel Production (1856)

The Watt Steam Engine

The steam engine, which harnessed power from the expansion of heated water, is often cited as the single most important invention of the Industrial Revolution, principally because so many other important subsequent inventions used it as their power source. The steam engine was born from the necessity to pump out flooded mine shafts and enable deeper mining. The first steam pump was invented by Thomas Savery (c. 1650-1715) in 1698. In 1712, Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729) perfected his more powerful steam pump to drain coal mines of water in Dudley in the Midlands.

To make the steam engine more useful for other purposes, it had to be made more efficient both in terms of fuel consumption and power. The Scottish instrument maker James Watt (1736-1819) and Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) kept tinkering with the workings of the steam engine until, in 1778, they had perfected a separate condenser to vastly increase the engine's efficiency. Power was also increased by the steam powering the piston down not just up (hence its name, a double-acting engine), increasing the 'horsepower', a term coined by Watt. The engine also had its power converted to a more versatile rotary motion using a flywheel. Using just one-quarter of the fuel of Newcomen's engine, Watt's engine was cheap enough to use almost anywhere. Steam engines kept on evolving, notably with the expansion steam engine, and they benefitted from ever-better tool machinery that could make stronger and better-fitting parts.

By 1800, Britain boasted over 2,500 steam engines, most of them used in mines, cotton mills, and manufacturing factories. 500 of these engines were made by the Watt and Boulton factory in Birmingham. Every walk of life was affected. Steam now powered fountains, threshing machines, sewage pumps, and printing presses. Essentially, any work that required pushing, pulling, lifting, or pressing could be made much more efficient using steam-powered machines. Steam engines were harnessed for trains and steamships, and, aptly, all these uses caused a boom in the coal mining industry, which had been the origin of the machine in the first place.

The Power Loom

The textile industry in the British Industrial Revolution was transformed by machines. The power loom weaving machine was invented by Edmund Cartwright (1743-1823) in 1785. The machine doubled the speed of cloth production and meant that skilled handweavers were no longer needed. The fully automated machine only needed a single worker to change the full spindles. The power loom was first used effectively in factories owned by Richard Arkwright (1732-1792). The British government awarded Cartwright £10,000 in 1809 in thanks for the significant contribution the power loom made to British industry. Other inventors improved the efficiency of Cartwright's loom, such as Richard Roberts (1789-1864) who made a more reliable iron version in 1822. Textile factories everywhere were not slow to equip themselves with large numbers of power looms. By 1835, there were 50,000 power looms in use in Britain, and factories could produce cloth cheaper than anywhere else in the world.

The spread of the power loom meant that inventors were obliged to come up with better spinning machines to provide sufficient yarn for the insatiable looms. Machine operators no longer needed any textile skills and were there to only make sure the machines kept running, often 24 hours a day. New jobs were created as more factories sprang up. Textile products became cheaper to buy for everyone, and supply industries like cotton plantations and coal mines boomed. In another knock-on effect, the abuses of workers in the factory system by unscrupulous employers created the trade union movement to protect workers' rights and health.

The Cotton Gin

Now that spinning and weaving could be fully mechanised, the speed and quantity of textile production increased enormously. What was needed next was to provide the ever-hungry machines with enough raw material to work with, cotton, in particular. Cotton was picked, sorted, and cleaned by hand, usually using slave labour on large plantations in the southern United States. Eli Whitney (1765-1825) from Massachusetts, moved to a cotton plantation in Georgia where he created a way to speed up cotton production. The time-consuming process of separating the sticky seeds from cotton balls was now done by Whitney's Cotton Gin ('gin' meaning 'machine' or 'engine'), which he invented in 1794.

First powered by horses or water wheels, the cotton gin eventually harnessed steam power. The machine pulled raw cotton through a comb mesh where a combination of revolving metal teeth and hooks separated it and removed the troublesome seeds. A single cotton gin could process up to 25 kg (55 lbs) of cotton every day. As cotton production rocketed, so more and more slaves were used on the cotton plantations to pick the cotton balls that fed the insatiable gins. The machine was so successful, it was illegally copied by plantation owners everywhere. The slave population in America rose to nearly 4 million by 1860. Cotton was exported far and wide, the USA accounting for 75% of the world's cotton production. In Britain in 1790, cotton accounted for 2.3% of total imports; by 1830, that figure had rocketed to 55%. British textile mills worked the raw material and exported it out again with such success that cotton textiles accounted for half of Britain's total exports in 1830. As the historian R. C. Allen notes, in global terms, "Cotton was the wonder industry of the Industrial Revolution" (182).

Gas Street Lighting

The dimness of nighttime lighting, traditionally provided by burning oil or tallow candles, was finally lifted by the invention of gas lighting. Around 1792-4, the Scotsman William Murdock (1754-1839) discovered that coal dust gave off a gas that could be ignited. Murdock successfully used gas lights in his foundry in Birmingham. The idea to use coal gas for street lighting was pioneered by the German inventor Frederick Albert Winsor (1763-1830) from 1807. Winsor spectacularly demonstrated the potential of his idea by setting up gas streetlights from Pall Mall to St James' Park in London. The demonstration caused a sensation with the public, and Pall Mall received 13 permanent gas-lit lampposts, thus becoming the first street in the world to be so illuminated. By around 1820, London had 40,000 gas streetlights.

The addition of light to previously dark streets transformed people's habits. No longer seeming quite so dangerous at night, more people ventured out to restaurants and places of entertainment. The idea quickly spread around the world, with Baltimore becoming the first city in the United States to use coal gas street lighting in 1816. In 1820, Paris installed its own gas lighting.

The Electromagnet

The Canadian engineer William Sturgeon (1783-1850) was inspired by the work of the French scientist André-Marie Ampère (1775-1836) and the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851) to create the first electromagnet in 1825. The device was a horseshoe piece of iron within a coil of wire that could carry electricity and so magnetise or demagnetise the iron. The magnetic force created could then be used to lift an object, but when Sturgeon invented the commutator, his electromagnet could now drive a motor making it a much more versatile power source. This power source has been used in everything from the telegraph (see below) to today's washing machines.

The First Photograph

The first photograph was taken using a camera obscura by the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) in 1826. The photograph, titled View from the Window at Le Gras , is a little blurred, but it is the oldest surviving photograph of a real view. The camera obscura, essentially a box with a small aperture covered by a lens, was not new since artists and engravers had been using them to help their work. What was new was Nièpce's idea to permanently capture the image projected through the lens onto light-sensitive silver chloride-coated paper. This new technique was called heliography, but it had two significant drawbacks. The first problem was the image faded away into black when exposed to light. The second problem was the image was captured in negative (light areas in real life were shown dark and vice-versa). Niépce solved the problem using a bitumen solution to cover a glass or pewter plate, and so he captured the view from his window. The photograph idea was further improved by Louis-Jacques Daguerre (1789-1851), who used copper plates treated with silver to capture a positive image. The daguerreotype was bought by the French government and made public, which resulted in a boom in photographic studios. In 1840, the English inventor William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) made the first paper negatives from which any number of prints could be made.

The arrival of the photographic camera not only permitted people of all classes to have their portraits taken but it revolutionised art. Many fine artists no longer wished to recreate the world around them as accurately as possible because the camera could easily achieve this. Instead, artists strove to capture the momentary effects of light and colour or communicate a certain emotion in their work. The arrival of the camera was one of the reasons for the development of impressionism and symbolism in the last quarter of the 19th century.

The first railways were short distances of tracks used at mines to transport material to where it could be shipped away. George Stephenson (1781-1848) owned a company in Newcastle that specialised in building railway trains to transport coal like this. Stephenson saw that passengers might travel in the same way as coal and designed the Locomotion 1 train engine, which was powerful enough to pull carriages. Locomotion 1 transported the first steam railway passengers from Stockton to Darlington in the northeast of England in 1825.

George's son Robert Stephenson (1803-1859) then outdid his father with Rocket , a pioneering steam-powered locomotive invented in 1829. The locomotive won the Rainhill Trials that year to see which machine would pull carriages on the world's first intercity line between Liverpool and Manchester. Rocket was the first powerful and reliable locomotive; it incorporated many new design features such as a multitubular boiler and a blast pipe that gave more power than rival locomotives. Rocket , capable of (at the time an amazing) 48 km/h (30 mph) top speed, deservedly won the Rainhill Trials cash prize of £500 (around £42,000 or $50,000 today). The Liverpool-Manchester line was soon carrying 1,200 passengers a day. It showed the way forward to revolutionise travel not only in Britain but worldwide.

'Railway mania' saw 24,000 kilometres (15,000 mi) of rail lines built across Britain by 1870. From 1848, passengers could travel from London to Glasgow in 12 hours, as trains reached speeds of 80 km/h (50 mph), a journey that would have taken five days or more by stagecoach. The railways created a boom in the production of coal (for fuel) and iron and steel (for rails, bridges, and trains). People began to take excursions to new places, especially the seaside. A massive quantity of jobs was created, everything from station masters to toilet cleaners. Letters could be delivered anywhere in Britain the next day, and the millions of tons of freight carried meant consumer goods became cheaper.

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The Electrical Telegraph

The railways greatly improved the speed not only of travel but also communication, as sacks of letters were moved around by train. Britain introduced the universal penny post system in 1840, which permitted next-day delivery, but there was already a serious rival to postage. The telegraph was invented in 1837 by William Fothergill Cook (1806-1879) and Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875). The first telegraph machine had only 20 letters, indicated in the message sent by the slight movement of two needles (from the machine's set of five) towards a particular letter. The needles were moved by electrical impulses sent down the telegraph line connecting two machines. Short messages could now be sent quickly and were first used on the railways to communicate instructions to drivers and stations.

The first successful use of the machine was for the Great Western Railway in 1838, used between Paddington Station and West Drayton, a distance of 21 kilometres (13 miles). The cables were first laid underground but then adapted with insulation for hanging in the open air between what became known as telegraph poles. As the system was adopted across the British railway network, so for the first time it was possible to have a universal time when previously, town clocks had all varied. Consequently, the telegraph made Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) possible. Information could be sent wherever there were telegraph machines, meaning that news of events spread far quicker than previously. The speed of telegraph communication was also very useful for the police who could alert fellow officers far away of criminal activity and even to capture escaping criminals. Telegraph communication made a step forward when Samuel Morse (1791-1872) of Massachusetts, with the assistance of Alfred Vail, first put his Morse code into action in 1844. The giant steamship SS Great Eastern , designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), laid the first cross-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1866, and this now allowed fast intercontinental communication. Suddenly, the world seemed a little smaller and life a lot faster.

The Steam Hammer

The steam hammer is not the most glamorous of inventions in this list, but it was crucial to making many other inventions possible. Developed in 1839 by the Scotsman James Nasmyth (1808-1890), this relatively simple device used a steam engine to let fall (and later push) with a precision of both speed and direction a great weight capable of forging or bending large pieces of metal resting on an adjustable anvil plate. As the steam hammer could be made in any size required, metal pieces could be worked that would not have been possible by any other means. In addition, the accuracy of the hammer meant different pieces of metal could be bent in exactly the same way, essential for components of large machines like giant steam engines, trains, iron ships, heavy weapons, and bridge girders.

Nasmyth's machine was so precise he could demonstrate to visitors to his foundry that a 2.5-ton weight could crush an eggshell sitting in a wine glass and do no harm to the glass. This precision meant a steam hammer could take on smaller tasks that required more finesse, like minting coins and printing banknotes. Another advantage was the speed the hammer could operate, sometimes delivering 220 blows per minute. No matter what the operation involved, all that was needed in terms of labour was one person casually operating a simple lever. Unlike so many of the other inventors in this list, Nasmyth made a staggering fortune from the hammer which revolutionised industrial production.

Steel Production

Iron was used throughout the Industrial Revolution for all manner of machines and construction projects, but steel is far superior in strength and malleability, and it is lighter. This meant that steel was particularly useful for larger projects like bridge-building and weight-bearing items like rail tracks. The problem was that making steel was an expensive process. As so often with inventions in the Industrial Revolution, a new idea was based on a pyramid of earlier inventions and produced because of the search for efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) invented a converter in 1856 that made steel production much cheaper and more reliable. The bigger Bessemer converters, filled with molten pig iron, could make up to 30 tons of steel in 20 to 30 minutes, removing carbon and other impurities by forcing air under high pressure through the molten metal. The impurities form oxides and so are separated as slag, leaving behind pure and strong steel. After Bessemer's invention, the cost of steel fell from £50 a ton to just £4 by 1875. Sheffield became one of the biggest steel producers in the world, making, in particular, railway tracks for Britain, the United States, and many other countries around the world.

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Bibliography

• Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Cambridge University Press, 2009.
• Corey, Melinda & Ochoa, George. The Encyclopedia of the Victorian World. Henry Holt & Co, 1996.
• Dugan, Sally & Dugan, David. The Day the World Took Off. Channel 4 Book, 2023.
• Forty, Simon. 100 Innovations of the Industrial Revolution. Haynes Publishing UK, 2019.
• Hepplewhite, Peter. All About. Wayland, 2016.
• Horn, Jeff. The Industrial Revolution . Greenwood, 2007.
• Yorke, Stan. The Industrial Revolution Explained. Countryside Books, 2005.

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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. 

Essay on Invention

Students are often asked to write an essay on Invention in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

100 Words Essay on Invention

The magic of inventions.

Inventions are the creations of brilliant minds. They are new devices, methods, or processes made from innovative ideas. Inventions have shaped our world, making life easier and more interesting.

Types of Inventions

Inventions can be physical, like the telephone, or conceptual, like mathematical formulas. They can also be improvements of existing things, like the smartphone.

Impact of Inventions

Inventing the future.

Inventing is about solving problems and imagining new ways to do things. It’s a key part of progress and the future of our world.

250 Words Essay on Invention

The genesis of invention, the role of necessity.

The axiom “necessity is the mother of invention” holds true. The need to solve problems or improve existing conditions often sparks the flame of invention. For instance, the invention of the wheel was driven by the need for easier transportation, while the development of the internet was a response to the need for global connectivity.

The Power of Curiosity

However, necessity alone can’t fuel invention. It’s the marriage of necessity and curiosity that truly births invention. Curiosity pushes us to question the status quo, to seek answers, and to venture into the unknown. It’s this curiosity that led to inventions like the telescope, which expanded our understanding of the cosmos.

The Impact of Invention

Conclusion: the continuum of invention.

Invention is a continuum, a never-ending journey of discovery and improvement. Every invention is a stepping stone to the next, creating a chain reaction of progress. As we stand on the brink of a new era of innovation, the power of invention promises to continue shaping our collective destiny.

500 Words Essay on Invention

Introduction to invention.

Invention is a creative process that has been the cornerstone of human progress. It is the act of bringing ideas or objects together in a novel way to create something that did not exist before. Inventions have shaped and reshaped our world, influencing every aspect of our lives, from communication and transportation to healthcare and entertainment.

The Essence of Invention

Invention and society.

Inventions have profound impacts on society. They can stimulate economic growth, improve living standards, and even redefine societal norms. The invention of the printing press, for instance, revolutionized information dissemination, fostering literacy and the spread of new ideas. Similarly, the invention of the internet transformed the way we communicate, access information, and conduct business.

Invention and Technological Advancement

Technological advancements are often the result of inventions. For instance, the invention of the transistor led to the development of the digital computer, which has since revolutionized many fields, from data processing to artificial intelligence. Technological inventions, in turn, often spur further inventions, creating a cycle of innovation.

The Role of Invention in Scientific Discovery

Challenges and ethical considerations in invention.

However, invention is not without its challenges and ethical considerations. The process of invention often requires significant resources, and there is always the risk of failure. Moreover, some inventions can be used for harmful purposes or have unintended negative consequences. For example, the invention of nuclear technology has brought both the potential for clean energy and the threat of nuclear weapons. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the ethical implications of inventions and to strive for responsible innovation.

In conclusion, invention is a powerful force that drives human progress. It is a process of creative problem-solving that leads to new products, technologies, and scientific discoveries, with far-reaching impacts on society. However, it also brings challenges and ethical considerations that need to be carefully managed. As we continue to invent and innovate, we must strive to do so in a way that benefits society and minimizes potential harm.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Alexander Graham Bell

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 25, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Alexander Graham Bell, best known for his invention of the telephone, revolutionized communication as we know it. His interest in sound technology was deep-rooted and personal, as both his wife and mother were deaf. While there’s some controversy over whether Bell was the true pioneer of the telephone, he secured exclusive rights to the technology and launched the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Ultimately, the talented scientist held more than 18 patents for his inventions and work in communications.

Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland , on March 3, 1847. Bell’s father was a professor of speech elocution at the University of Edinburgh and his mother, despite being deaf, was an accomplished pianist.

Young Alexander was an intellectually curious child who studied piano and began inventing things at an early age. Both of his brothers passed away from tuberculosis by the time Bell was in his early twenties.

Initially, Bell’s education consisted of homeschooling. Bell didn’t excel academically, but he was a problem solver from an early age.

When he was just 12, the young Alexander invented a device with rotating paddles and nail brushes that could quickly remove husks from wheat grain to help improve a farming process. At age 16, Bell began studying the mechanics of speech.

He went on to attend Royal High School and the University of Edinburgh. In 1870, Bell, along with his family, moved to Canada. The following year, he settled in the United States.

While in the United States, Bell implemented a system his father developed to teach deaf children called “visible speech”—a set of symbols that represented speech sounds.

In 1872, he opened the School of Vocal Physiology and Mechanics of Speech in Boston , where deaf people were taught to speak. At age 26, the budding inventor became Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at the Boston University School of Oratory, even though he didn’t have a university degree.

While teaching, Bell met Mabel Hubbard, a deaf student. The couple married on July 11, 1877. They went on to have four children, including two sons who died as infants.

When Was the Telephone Invented?

In 1871, Bell started working on the harmonic telegraph — a device that allowed multiple messages to be transmitted over a wire at the same time. While trying to perfect this technology, which was backed by a group of investors, Bell became preoccupied with finding a way to transmit human voice over wires.

By 1875, Bell, with the help of his partner Thomas Watson , had come up with a simple receiver that could turn electricity into sound.

Other scientists, including Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray , were working on similar technologies, and there’s some debate over who should be credited with the invention of the telephone. It’s said that Bell raced to the patent office to be the first to secure the rights to the discovery.

On March 7, 1876, Bell was granted his telephone patent . A few days later, he made the first-ever telephone call to Watson, allegedly uttering the now-famous phrase, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”

By 1877, the Bell Telephone Company, which today is known as AT&T , was created. In 1915, Bell made the first transcontinental phone call to Watson from New York City to San Francisco .

Did you know? Alexander Graham Bell refused to have a telephone in his study, fearing it would distract him from his scientific work.

Legal Headaches

The inventor faced a nearly 20-year legal battle with other scientists, including Gray and Meucci, who claimed they created telephone prototypes prior to Bell’s patent.

In 1887, the U.S. government moved to withdraw the patent issued to Bell, but after a series of rulings, the Bell company won in a Supreme Court decision. While the Bell Company faced over 550 court challenges, in the end, none were successful.

Inventions and Accomplishments

In addition to the telephone, Bell worked on hundreds of projects throughout his career and received patents in various fields. Some of his other notable inventions were:

• The metal detector: Bell initially came up with this device to locate a bullet inside of assassinated President James A. Garfield .
• Photophone: The photophone allowed transmission of speech on a beam of light.
• Graphophone: This improved version of the phonograph could record and play back sound.
• Audiometer: This gadget was used to detect hearing problems.

In 1880, Bell was awarded the French Volta Prize , and with the money, he founded a facility devoted to scientific discovery, the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Bell invented numerous techniques to help teach speech to the deaf and even worked with well-known author and activist Helen Keller . He also helped launch Science magazine , and from 1896 to 1904 served as president of the National Geographic Society .

Quotes by Bell

While Bell is typically known for what he invented, he’s also remembered for what he said and wrote. Some famous quotes attributed to Bell include:

• “When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

• “A man's own judgment should be the final appeal in all that relates to himself.”

• “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.”

• “Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to focus.”

• “Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the cooperation of many minds.”

• “The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion.”

• “The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action.”

• “You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth.”

• “The inventor looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea. The spirit of invention possesses him, seeking materialization.”

HISTORY Vault: Alexander Graham Bell: Voice Of Invention

The remarkable story of the man whose driving passion—to enable the deaf to communicate—led to the invention of the telephone.

Death and Legacy

Bell died on August 2, 1922, at the age of 75 in Nova Scotia, Canada. The cause of his death was complications from diabetes. He was survived by his wife and two daughters.

During Bell’s funeral, every phone in North America was silenced to pay tribute to the inventor.

Today, the famous scientist is remembered for his groundbreaking work in sound technology and improving education for the deaf. His best-known invention, the telephone, forever changed the way humans communicate with each other.

Alexander Graham Bell. PBS . History: Alexander Graham Bell. BBC . Alexander Graham Bell. Famous Scientists . Who is credited with inventing the telephone? Library of Congress .

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What’s the greatest invention of all time?

We have been inventing things for millions of years. but which is the best of them.

An introduction by Samantha Weinberg

Nearly two thousand years ago, three elderly Chinese men sat in the gardens of Changle Palace, arguing about what was the greatest invention of all time.

“Tools made of rock,” said one, banging his fist on the delicate carved table.

“Paper,” said another, slamming the side of his hand.

“No, scissors!” cried the third, making chopping movements in the air. And so a game was invented.

This little tale is an invention too. We do not know exactly when Rock, Paper, Scissors was dreamed up, nor how, since in the time of Han there were fewer ways of recording the events of the day: no photographs (invented by Louis Daguerre in 1836), no sound recordings (the phonautograph was first used in 1857) and no reliable method of storing and passing on information (more of that later).

But the fact that the game existed then, and did not before, means that it is an invention. It may not be a contender for the greatest of all time, but rock, paper and scissors most certainly are. Inventions, for the purposes of this debate, are tangible—technologies and processes, rather than more nebulous things such as ideas, principles and imaginings. Children might feel that Father Christmas (first recorded in 1616) is the greatest invention of all time, but we are ruling him out.

Tools fashioned of rock, or stone, were probably the earliest inventions worthy of the name. First used in the Paleolithic Age, around 2.6m years ago, they mark an essential progression, from proto-human to human. With simple tools, fashioned by pummelling one piece of rock against another to produce a sharp edge, early man began to shape the world according to his needs, to build rudimentary shelters, to hunt and flay animals for food and clothing. Just about everything else followed from there. There is virtually nothing about the way we live today that would have been possible without those first stone tools.

But does longevity alone qualify stone tools for the crown? I’m not convinced; theirs was a long, slow grind to efficacy, and in most forms they’ve long been eclipsed. The blade, however—of which scissors are just a manifestation, albeit an ingenious one—has been in constant use since it was first invented at the start of the Ages of Metal, some 400,000 years ago. Think of knives, swords, spears, axes, the guillotine…uh-oh. Although we depend on the blade for much of what we now take for granted, from cutting up our food to making the electronics which crowd our daily life, there’s a little too much of the chop and slash about blades to make them my greatest of all time.

So how about the third of our Chinese gents’ suggestions: paper? Invented by an imperial courtier named Ts’ai Lun in 105AD, it was deemed so precious and important that successive Chinese dynasties kept it secret for six centuries. Not something that the Dragons of today’s Den, with their greedy eyes and piles of cash, would be inclined to do.

It is thanks to paper that we know about its invention. The ability to keep a written record is the foundation of mass learning. While the alphabet was invented around 2,000BC (at the same time as another useful device, the umbrella), it wasn’t easy to pass around heavy stone tablets, or to manufacture and preserve papyrus scrolls in great numbers. The invention of paper led inexorably to books, the printing press, newspapers and magazines, to sacred texts, art, photography and music scores, handed down through generations. And yet, here we are at the dawn of what may, finally, become a paperless society. Paper may cover stone, but it is cut by scissors and burned by fire—another of the foundations of our society.

There are more. Tracing a line through time, you keep bumping into inventions that precipitate many others. Invention nearly always fulfils a need, but it is also an agent of change and how you measure that change depends on who you are and when you lived. Let’s move our game to 1820s London; three learned gentlemen are gathered at the new headquarters of the Royal Society, in Burlington House, scratching their wigs over what was the greatest invention of the previous century.

“ ’Tis surely the internal combustion engine [1794],” said one, “for ’tis changing the nature of transport. Men and goods can move great distances in the wink of an eye.”

“Nay! Consider vaccination [1796],” his friend responded. “Jenner’s work is saving lives.”

“Aye, and what of the electrical motor?” said the third. “The implications of what young Faraday is doing today will light up the lives of our grandchildren.”

Three more worthy contenders. But change the cast again, and the suggestions will be different. Put women on the chairs, and we might vote for the contraceptive pill (Carl Djerassi, 1960) which, by handing us the responsibility for our own fertility, freed us to run our own lives. Blind people might point to Braille (1824), astronomers to the telescope (1609), miners to the safety lamp (1815). Around my kitchen table, the suggestions were diverse and revealing: the Xbox 360 (son, aged 11), the bridle (daughter, 9), and the iPad (father, 80). Or not so diverse in the case of the menfolk.

In December 1999, the writer and thinker Umberto Eco was asked to name his greatest inventions of the millennium. He plumped for four things: the stern-mounted rudder, without which, he said, “Columbus could not have sailed to America and the history of the millennium would have been rather different”, and, more important than the rudder even, beans, peas and lentils. Pulses, in my book, although important both for nutrition and genetics, cross the line from invention to discovery, so they’re out.

There is hardly any concrete thing in our world today that didn’t start off as an invention, from the fish hook (c. 35,000BC) to a particular favourite of mine, the ice-rink cleaning machine (1948). The difficulty comes in picking the greatest. How do you measure the wheel against the space shuttle? I am taking the greatest to mean the invention that has had the greatest impact on the most people in a relatively immediate sense; power equals energy over time. And for that, we don’t have to look very far back at all.

If I had been writing this article 22 years ago, it would have taken much longer. I would have had to traipse around libraries, wade through encyclopedias and newspaper cuttings, and bother a host of people with a stack of questions. Instead, I’ve been sitting at home, in front of a flickering fire (c. 1.4m BC), drinking tea (first recorded in the 10th century BC; teabags patented 1903), tapping at my laptop (1983), and distilling what I’ve found by trawling the world wide web.

In 1989, a youngish British physicist, Tim Berners-Lee, was trying to work out a way to share information with colleagues at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN (1954). They were already using the internet (1972), then a sort of scaled-up messaging facility that enabled files to be sent from one computer network to another. But Berners-Lee devised a way to store the pages in a central information bank, much like the great library of Alexandria (3rd century BC), only infinitely bigger.

Knowledge and information are in themselves of incalculable value, and sometimes danger, but the web is much, much more. Already this morning, I have performed all the vital functions of the home-worker: checked the weather forecast, bought a train ticket, played a game of Scrabble and sent a birthday message to a friend across the world. Thanks to the web, we can sit at home and be connected; we can work and be parents at the same time. I can share videos of my children with friends and family around the world, whether they like it or not, and send an article to a young scientist living in the Comoro Islands, halfway from Tanzania to Madagascar.

The web has transformed at least a dozen fields: education, news, book publishing, music, finance, networking, dating, charity donations, shopping, language-learning, cartography, medicine, hypochondria and the way we talk to friends. But above all it has fanned the movement for democratic change in countries whose inhabitants used to be hobbled by the fear that they were alone. The web enabled them to reach out, find support at home and abroad, and muster the courage to overthrow their tyrants. It helped them bring in the promise, at least, of a brighter dawn. Ask a young Egyptian, Tunisian or Libyan to name the greatest invention, and they might well choose the world wide web.

Paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors, scissors cut paper, but the web trumps them all.

Edward Carr The Blade

Go into the kitchen and find a chopping board, a tomato—not too ripe—and your favourite knife. To be sure that the knife is sharp, run the tip of your finger down the edge and feel it catch the tiny ridges on your skin. Place the tomato on the board and draw the blade across it. At first, you will sense the surface resistance, then a slight give as blade eases through flesh to the board beneath, like the keel of a boat running into the sand.

The stainless-steel blade in your hand barely differs from the sharp-edged flint and obsidian that our ancestors knapped from a core of rock two or three million years ago. The first flints were scrapers and knives for skinning and butchering animals. Larger stones, fixed to wooden handles, served as axes for chopping and adzes for smoothing rough wood. The smallest became arrowheads and spear-tips. From the beginning, technology both brought life and took it away.

The blade is so familiar that we tend to overlook its technical refinement. Pressure equals force divided by area: the thin surface at the cutting edge concentrates moderate forces into extreme pressures. By minimising the area, the teeth of a serrated blade concentrate the force still further. With a blunt knife, you have to exert a large force to make a cut—and you have a squashed tomato. But a sharp one can give us a surgeon’s incision; axes and saws generate enough pressure to slice through trees and rock; fine wires shave off a wafer of silicon for etching integrated circuits.

Some technologies, like steam-power and the candle, have come and mostly gone. Others have been optional—the Incas, Aztecs and Native Americans got by without the wheel. Only the blade has been with people everywhere and throughout history. In fact, as the first tool, the blade opened a new world bursting with unimagined possibilities—and we are not done exploring them yet. Elegant and enduring, the blade was the breakthrough on which everything else is built.

Roger Highfield The Scientific Method

All great inventions rest on understanding how things work. And the greatest of all is the über-invention that has provided the insights on which other inventions depend: the modern scientific method, the realisation that we cannot grasp the way the world works by rational thought alone.

To gain meaningful insights into the scheme of things, logic has to be accompanied by asking probing questions of nature. To advance understanding, we need to devise rational conjectures and probe them to destruction through controlled tests, precise observations and clever analysis. The upshot is an unending dialogue between theory and experiment.

Unlike a traditional invention, the scientific method did not come into being at a particular time: its history is complex and stretches back long before 1833, when the term “scientist” was coined by the English polymath William Whewell. The method is not a concrete gadget like Gutenberg’s press, the computer or the Pill. Nor is it a brainwave like the non-geocentric universe, the Indo-Arab counting system or the theory of evolution. It is a fecund way of thinking on which the modern world rests. In relatively few generations, the rigorous application of the method has bootstrapped modern society through a non-linear accumulation of both knowledge and technology. Its impact on everyday life is ubiquitous and indisputable, even though a surprising number of people, including some senior politicians, have only a feeble grasp of its significance.

As one example, let’s look forward a few decades to an invention which is destined to end the energy crisis, change the global economy and curb climate change at a stroke: commercial fusion power. This invention, like nearly all others, is inconceivable without the scientific method, in this case the insights that it gives into the process by which the Sun and other stars transmute matter, transforming hydrogen into helium to release astounding amounts of energy. This invention will rest on the application of a diverse range of scientific insights, whether in the creation of reactor materials that can withstand unbelievable pummelling by subatomic particles or the design of affordable superconducting magnets that can confine plasma ten times hotter than the Sun’s core.

The scientific method has changed life, culture and everything, and set the stage for a reassessment of our place in the universe. It is the mother of all invention.

Tom Standage Writing

The greatest invention of all must surely be writing. It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.

Its origins are prosaic: it was invented by accountants, not poets, in the 4th millennium BC, as a spur of the counting system with which farming societies kept track of agricultural goods. At first transactions were recorded by storing groups of shaped clay tokens – representing wheat, cattle or textiles – in clay envelopes. But why use tokens when pressing one into a tablet of wet clay would do instead? These impressions, in turn, were superseded by symbols scratched or punched into the clay with a stylus. Tokens had given way to writing.

As human settlements swelled from villages to the first cities, writing was needed for administrative reasons. But it quickly became more flexible and expressive, capable of capturing the subtleties of human thought, not just lists of rations doled out or kings long dead. And this allowed philosophers, poets and chroniclers to situate their ideas in relation to those of previous thinkers, to argue about them and elaborate upon them. Each generation could build on the ideas of its forebears, making it possible for there to be species-wide progress in philosophy, commerce, science and literature.

The amazing thing about writing, given how complicated its early systems were, is that anyone learned it at all. The reason they did is revealed in the ancient Egyptian scribal-training texts, which emphasise the superiority of being a scribe over all other career choices, with titles like “Do Not Be Soldier, Priest or Baker”, “Do Not Be a Husbandman” and “Do Not Be a Charioteer”. This last text begins: “Set thine heart on being a scribe, that thou mayest direct the whole earth.” The earliest scribes understood that literacy was power – a power that now extends to most of humanity, and has done more for human progress than any other invention.

Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu The Transistor Radio

The greatest invention of all is the transistor radio (and radio wave signals), first developed by Bell Laboratories in the 1940s. I admire straightforward technology that solves complex, human problems. Where there are still holes in the web, radio waves travel powerfully around the world. And one of the wonderful things about the transistor is that it is portable.

Spreading conversations to improve access to knowledge and quality of life is a huge task. Information opens the mind and motivates the spirit. A more informed person can make a better choice. Radio is the only way to reach so many people at the same time with the same information. It made news instant. It changed the way we listened to music. It spoke the language of the people. In rural Africa, where I live, radio is still the most pervasive, accessible, affordable and flexible mass medium. It gives people a louder voice to air and solve agricultural problems, improve farm production, strengthen specialist knowledge in their communities, protect their health and reduce poverty.

Radio is sustainable, interactive and inclusive. Even illiterate smallholder farmers can suddenly be both heard and informed. They can shape opinions, enjoy the give-and-take of informed dialogue and become decisive agents in their industry’s development. People tend to relate to information best when it originates from their own communities.

I was inspired to launch a network that gives poor rural farmers, especially women, daily access to information on crop production, livestock rearing, soil management, national and international markets. This information is used to negotiate with traders, to decide whether to go to market, and which market to visit or supply. It has been used to analyse prices over time, to help make decisions about diversifying or producing out-of-season crops. It can even be used to help subsistence farmers find opportunities for alternative income. Educational programmes broadcast over simple radios have improved crop and livestock yield and household income.

Nick Valéry The Flush Toilet

More even than the miracle of antibiotics, the flush toilet has done most to rid us of infectious disease. Without plumbed sanitation within the home to dispose of human waste, we would still be living in a brutal age of cholera, dysentery, typhus and typhoid fever—to say nothing of bubonic plague.

The flush toilet was invented, and re-invented, many times. Indoor toilets first appeared in the Indus Valley over 4,000 years ago. The Romans built their latrines over drains carrying running water that discharged into a fetid Tiber. Legend has it that Queen Elizabeth I was too embarrassed to use the flush toilet built for her by her godson, Sir John Harington, for fear that the roar of the rushing water would inform the palace of the royal bowels being evacuated.

But it is only in the past century and a half that the water closet has graced more humble abodes. After Prince Albert died of typhoid in 1861, a grief-stricken Queen Victoria demanded that piped water and sewage treatment be installed throughout Britain. A decade later, her son Prince Edward came close to dying of the same disease, and word about the need for flush toilets went out across the land. From Britain, it spread to France, and thence the rest of Europe and the world.

The father of the modern lavatory was not, as myth would have it, Thomas Crapper, whose name, in blue Gothic script, embellished the inside of many a Victorian lavatory bowl. If anyone can lay claim to the title, it is Alexander Cummings, a watchmaker in Bond Street, who was granted the first patent for a flush toilet in 1775. The popular toilets made by Crapper’s workshop in Chelsea were based on a later siphon design, patented in 1819 by an employee named Albert Giblin.

The lavatory has changed little since Crapper’s time. Water trapped in an S-shaped bend keeps the stench at bay, while allowing the waste to be siphoned off. Pulling a chain, or pressing a handle, opens a valve that causes water in a cistern to gush into the bowl. When it is empty, a floating ballcock closes the valve, and the tank refills under pressure from the water supply. Tweaks over the years have simplified the valve system and reduced the water needed. The flushing toilet still hasn’t reached everyone, but it has done billions a great service.

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Collection Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies

Life of thomas alva edison.

One of the most famous and prolific inventors of all time, Thomas Alva Edison exerted a tremendous influence on modern life, contributing inventions such as the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improving the telegraph and telephone. In his 84 years, he acquired an astounding 1,093 patents. Aside from being an inventor, Edison also managed to become a successful manufacturer and businessman, marketing his inventions to the public. A myriad of business liaisons, partnerships, and corporations filled Edison's life, and legal battles over various patents and corporations were continuous. The following is only a brief sketch of an enormously active and complex life full of projects often occurring simultaneously. Several excellent biographies are readily available in local libraries to those who wish to learn more about the particulars of his life and many business ventures.

Edison's Early Years

Thomas A. Edison's forebears lived in New Jersey until their loyalty to the British crown during the American Revolution drove them to Nova Scotia, Canada. From there, later generations relocated to Ontario and fought the Americans in the War of 1812. Edison's mother, Nancy Elliott, was originally from New York until her family moved to Vienna, Canada, where she met Sam Edison, Jr., whom she later married. When Sam became involved in an unsuccessful insurrection in Ontario in the 1830s, he was forced to flee to the United States and in 1839 they made their home in Milan, Ohio.

Thomas Alva Edison was born to Sam and Nancy on February 11, 1847, in Milan, Ohio. Known as "Al" in his youth, Edison was the youngest of seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood. Edison tended to be in poor health when young.

To seek a better fortune, Sam Edison moved the family to Port Huron, Michigan, in 1854, where he worked in the lumber business.

Edison was a poor student. When a schoolmaster called Edison "addled," his furious mother took him out of the school and proceeded to teach him at home. Edison said many years later, "My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me, and I felt I had some one to live for, some one I must not disappoint." 1 At an early age, he showed a fascination for mechanical things and for chemical experiments.

In 1859, Edison took a job selling newspapers and candy on the Grand Trunk Railroad to Detroit. In the baggage car, he set up a laboratory for his chemistry experiments and a printing press, where he started the Grand Trunk Herald , the first newspaper published on a train. An accidental fire forced him to stop his experiments on board.

Around the age of twelve, Edison lost almost all his hearing. There are several theories as to what caused his hearing loss. Some attribute it to the aftereffects of scarlet fever which he had as a child. Others blame it on a conductor boxing his ears after Edison caused a fire in the baggage car, an incident which Edison claimed never happened. Edison himself blamed it on an incident in which he was grabbed by his ears and lifted to a train. He did not let his disability discourage him, however, and often treated it as an asset, since it made it easier for him to concentrate on his experiments and research. Undoubtedly, though, his deafness made him more solitary and shy in dealings with others.

Telegraph Work

In 1862, Edison rescued a three-year-old from a track where a boxcar was about to roll into him. The grateful father, J.U. MacKenzie, taught Edison railroad telegraphy as a reward. That winter, he took a job as a telegraph operator in Port Huron. In the meantime, he continued his scientific experiments on the side. Between 1863 and 1867, Edison migrated from city to city in the United States taking available telegraph jobs.

In 1868 Edison moved to Boston where he worked in the Western Union office and worked even more on his inventions. In January 1869 Edison resigned his job, intending to devote himself fulltime to inventing things. His first invention to receive a patent was the electric vote recorder, in June 1869. Daunted by politicians' reluctance to use the machine, he decided that in the future he would not waste time inventing things that no one wanted.

Edison moved to New York City in the middle of 1869. A friend, Franklin L. Pope, allowed Edison to sleep in a room at Samuel Laws' Gold Indicator Company where he was employed. When Edison managed to fix a broken machine there, he was hired to manage and improve the printer machines.

During the next period of his life, Edison became involved in multiple projects and partnerships dealing with the telegraph. In October 1869, Edison formed with Franklin L. Pope and James Ashley the organization Pope, Edison and Co. They advertised themselves as electrical engineers and constructors of electrical devices. Edison received several patents for improvements to the telegraph. The partnership merged with the Gold and Stock Telegraph Co. in 1870. Edison also established the Newark Telegraph Works in Newark, NJ, with William Unger to manufacture stock printers. He formed the American Telegraph Works to work on developing an automatic telegraph later in the year. In 1874 he began to work on a multiplex telegraphic system for Western Union, ultimately developing a quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in both directions. When Edison sold his patent rights to the quadruplex to the rival Atlantic & Pacific Telegraph Co., a series of court battles followed in which Western Union won. Besides other telegraph inventions, he also developed an electric pen in 1875.

His personal life during this period also brought much change. Edison's mother died in 1871, and later that year, he married a former employee, Mary Stilwell, on Christmas Day. While Edison clearly loved his wife, their relationship was fraught with difficulties, primarily his preoccupation with work and her constant illnesses. Edison would often sleep in the lab and spent much of his time with his male colleagues. Nevertheless, their first child, Marion, was born in February 1873, followed by a son, Thomas, Jr., born on January 1876. Edison nicknamed the two "Dot" and "Dash," referring to telegraphic terms. A third child, William Leslie was born in October 1878.

Edison opened a new laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ, in 1876. This site later become known as an "invention factory," since they worked on several different inventions at any given time there. Edison would conduct numerous experiments to find answers to problems. He said, "I never quit until I get what I'm after. Negative results are just what I'm after. They are just as valuable to me as positive results." 2 Edison liked to work long hours and expected much from his employees.

In 1877, Edison worked on a telephone transmitter that greatly improved on Alexander Graham Bell's work with the telephone. His transmitter made it possible for voices to be transmitted at higer volume and with greater clarity over standard telephone lines.

Edison's experiments with the telephone and the telegraph led to his invention of the phonograph in 1877. It occurred to him that sound could be recorded as indentations on a rapidly-moving piece of paper. He eventually formulated a machine with a tinfoil-coated cylinder and a diaphragm and needle. When Edison spoke the words "Mary had a little lamb" into the mouthpiece, to his amazement the machine played the phrase back to him. The Edison Speaking Phonograph Company was established early in 1878 to market the machine, but the initial novelty value of the phonograph wore off, and Edison turned his attention elsewhere.

Edison focused on the electric light system in 1878, setting aside the phonograph for almost a decade. With the backing of financiers, The Edison Electric Light Co. was formed on November 15 to carry out experiments with electric lights and to control any patents resulting from them. In return for handing over his patents to the company, Edison received a large share of stock. Work continued into 1879, as the lab attempted not only to devise an incandescent bulb, but an entire electrical lighting system that could be supported in a city. A filament of carbonized thread proved to be the key to a long-lasting light bulb. Lamps were put in the laboratory, and many journeyed out to Menlo Park to see the new discovery. A special public exhibition at the lab was given for a multitude of amazed visitors on New Year's Eve.

Edison set up an electric light factory in East Newark in 1881, and then the following year moved his family and himself to New York and set up a laboratory there.

In order to prove its viability, the first commercial electric light system was installed on Pearl Street in the financial district of Lower Manhattan in 1882, bordering City Hall and two newspapers. Initially, only four hundred lamps were lit; a year later, there were 513 customers using 10,300 lamps. 3 Edison formed several companies to manufacture and operate the apparatus needed for the electrical lighting system: the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York, the Edison Machine Works, the Edison Electric Tube Company, and the Edison Lamp Works. This lighting system was also taken abroad to the Paris Lighting Exposition in 1881, the Crystal Palace in London in 1882, the coronation of the czar in Moscow, and led to the establishment of companies in several European countries.

The success of Edison's lighting system could not deter his competitors from developing their own, different methods. One result was a battle between the proponents of DC current, led by Edison, and AC current, led by George Westinghouse . Both sides attacked the limitations of each system. Edison, in particular, pointed to the use of AC current for electrocution as proof of its danger. DC current could not travel over as long a system as AC, but the AC generators were not as efficient as the ones for DC. By 1889, the invention of a device that combined an AC induction motor with a DC dynamo offered the best performance of all, and AC current became dominant. The Edison General Electric Co. merged with Thomson-Houston in 1892 to become General Electric Co., effectively removing Edison further from the electrical field of business.

An Improved Phonograph

Edison's wife, Mary, died on August 9, 1884, possibly from a brain tumor. Edison remarried to Mina Miller on February 24, 1886, and, with his wife, moved into a large mansion named Glenmont in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison's children from his first marriage were distanced from their father's new life, as Edison and Mina had their own family: Madeleine, born on 1888; Charles on 1890; and Theodore on 1898. Unlike Mary, who was sickly and often remained at home, and was also deferential to her husband's wishes, Mina was an active woman, devoting much time to community groups, social functions, and charities, as well as trying to improve her husband's often careless personal habits.

In 1887, Edison had built a new, larger laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. The facility included a machine shop, phonograph and photograph departments, a library, and ancillary buildings for metallurgy, chemistry, woodworking, and galvanometer testings.

While Edison had neglected further work on the phonograph , others had moved forward to improve it. In particular, Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter developed an improved machine that used a wax cylinder and a floating stylus, which they called a graphophone. They sent representatives to Edison to discuss a possible partnership on the machine, but Edison refused to collaborate with them, feeling that the phonograph was his invention alone. With this competition, Edison was stirred into action and resumed his work on the phonograph in 1887. Edison eventually adopted methods similar to Bell and Tainter's in his own phonograph.

The phonograph was initially marketed as a business dictation machine. Entrepreneur Jesse H. Lippincott acquired control of most of the phonograph companies, including Edison's, and set up the North American Phonograph Co. in 1888. The business did not prove profitable, and when Lippincott fell ill, Edison took over the management. In 1894, the North American Phonograph Co. went into bankruptcy, a move which allowed Edison to buy back the rights to his invention. In 1896, Edison started the National Phonograph Co. with the intent of making phonographs for home amusement. Over the years, Edison made improvements to the phonograph and to the cylinders which were played on them, the early ones being made of wax. Edison introduced an unbreakable cylinder record, named the Blue Amberol, at roughly the same time he entered the disc phonograph market in 1912. The introduction of an Edison disc was in reaction to the overwhelming popularity of discs on the market in contrast to cylinders. Touted as being superior to the competition's records, the Edison discs were designed to be played only on Edison phonographs, and were cut laterally as opposed to vertically. The success of the Edison phonograph business, though, was always hampered by the company's reputation of choosing lower-quality recording acts. In the 1920s, competition from radio caused business to sour, and the Edison disc business ceased production in 1929.

Other Ventures: Ore-milling and Cement

Another Edison interest was an ore-milling process that would extract various metals from ore. In 1881, he formed the Edison Ore-Milling Co., but the venture proved fruitless as there was no market for it. In 1887, he returned to the project, thinking that his process could help the mostly depleted Eastern mines compete with the Western ones. In 1889, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania Concentrating Works was formed, and Edison became absorbed by its operations and began to spend much time away from home at the mines in Ogdensburg, New Jersey. Although he invested much money and time into this project, it proved unsuccessful when the market went down and additional sources of ore in the Midwest were found.

Edison also became involved in promoting the use of cement and formed the Edison Portland Cement Co. in 1899. He tried to promote widespread use of cement for the construction of low-cost homes and envisioned alternative uses for concrete in the manufacture of phonographs, furniture, refrigerators, and pianos. Unfortunately, Edison was ahead of his time with these ideas, as widespread use of concrete proved economically unfeasible at that time.

Motion Pictures

In 1888, Edison met Eadweard Muybridge at West Orange and viewed Muybridge's zoopraxiscope. This machine used a circular disc with still photographs of the successive phases of movement around the circumference to recreate the illusion of movement. Edison declined to work with Muybridge on the device and decided to work on his own motion picture camera at his laboratory. As Edison put it in a caveat written the same year, "I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." 4

The task of inventing the machine fell to Edison's associate William K. L. Dickson. Dickson initially experimented with a cylinder-based device for recording images, before turning to a celluloid strip. In October of 1889, Dickson greeted Edison's return from Paris with a new device that projected pictures and contained sound. After more work, patent applications were made in 1891 for a motion picture camera, called a Kinetograph, and a Kinetoscope, a motion picture peephole viewer.

Kinetoscope parlors opened in New York and soon spread to other major cities during 1894. In 1893, a motion picture studio, later dubbed the Black Maria (the slang name for a police paddy wagon which the studio resembled), was opened at the West Orange complex. Short films were produced using variety acts of the day. Edison was reluctant to develop a motion picture projector, feeling that more profit was to be made with the peephole viewers.

When Dickson aided competitors on developing another peephole motion picture device and the eidoloscope projection system, later to develop into the Mutoscope, he was fired. Dickson went on to form the American Mutoscope Co. along with Harry Marvin, Herman Casler, and Elias Koopman. Edison subsequently adopted a projector developed by Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins and re-named it the Vitascope and marketed it under his name. The Vitascope premiered on April 23, 1896, to great acclaim.

Competition from other motion picture companies soon created heated legal battles between them and Edison over patents. Edison sued many companies for infringement. In 1909, the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Co. brought a degree of cooperation to the various companies who were given licenses in 1909, but in 1915, the courts found the company to be an unfair monopoly.

In 1913, Edison experimented with synchronizing sound to film. A Kinetophone was developed by his laboratory which synchronized sound on a phonograph cylinder to the picture on a screen. Although this initially brought interest, the system was far from perfect and disappeared by 1915. By 1918, Edison ended his involvement in the motion picture field.

Edison's Later Years

In 1911, Edison's companies were re-organized into Thomas A. Edison, Inc. As the organization became more diversified and structured, Edison became less involved in the day-to-day operations, although he still had some decision-making authority. The goals of the organization became more to maintain market viability than to produce new inventions frequently.

A fire broke out at the West Orange laboratory in 1914, destroying 13 buildings. Although the loss was great, Edison spearheaded the rebuilding of the lot.

When Europe became involved in World War I, Edison advised preparedness, and felt that technology would be the future of war. He was named head of the Naval Consulting Board in 1915, an attempt by the government to bring science into its defense program. Although mainly an advisory board, it was instrumental in the formation of a laboratory for the Navy which opened in 1923, although several of Edison's suggestions on the matter were disregarded. During the war, Edison spent much of his time doing naval research, in particular working on submarine detection, but he felt that the navy was not receptive to many of his inventions and suggestions.

In the 1920s, Edison's health became worse, and he began to spend more time at home with his wife. His relationship with his children was distant, although Charles was president of Thomas A. Edison, Inc. While Edison continued to experiment at home, he could not perform some experiments that he wanted to at his West Orange laboratory because the board would not approve them. One project that held his fascination during this period was the search for an alternative to rubber.

Henry Ford, an admirer and friend of Edison's, reconstructed Edison's invention factory as a museum at Greenfield Village, Michigan, which opened during the 50th anniversary of Edison's electric light in 1929. The main celebration for Light's Golden Jubilee, co-hosted by Ford and General Electric, took place in Dearborn along with a huge celebratory dinner in Edison's honor attended by notables such as President Hoover, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., George Eastman, Marie Curie, and Orville Wright. Edison's health, however, had declined to the point that he could not stay for the entire ceremony.

For his last two years, a series of ailments caused his health to decline even more until he lapsed into a coma on October 14, 1931. He died on October 18, 1931, at his estate, Glenmont, in West Orange, New Jersey.

• Martin V. Melosi, Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization of America , (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown Higher Education, 1990) p. 8. [ Return to text ]
• Poster for Thomas A. Edison 150th Anniversary, 1847-1997, United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, New Jersey. [ Return to text ]
• Melosi, p. 73. [ Return to text ]
• Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography , (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1959) p. 386. [ Return to text ]

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• Introduction

Building models of what might be

What inventors are, serendipity and inspiration, the quickening pace of invention.

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• Table Of Contents

invention , the act of bringing ideas or objects together in a novel way to create something that did not exist before.

Ever since the first prehistoric stone tools, humans have lived in a world shaped by invention. Indeed, the brain appears to be a natural inventor . As part of the act of perception, humans assemble, arrange, and manipulate incoming sensory information so as to build a dynamic , constantly updated model of the outside world. The survival value of such a model lies in the fact that it functions as a template against which to match new experiences, so as to rapidly identify anything anomalous that might be life-threatening. Such a model would also make it possible to predict danger. The predictive act would involve the construction of hypothetical models of the way the world might be at some future point. Such models could include elements that might, for whatever reason, be assembled into novel submodels (inventive ideas).

One of the earliest and most literal examples of this model-building paradigm in action was the ancient Mesopotamian invention of writing . As early as 8000 bce tiny geometric clay models, used to represent sheep and grain, were kept in clay envelopes, to be used as inventory tallies or else to represent goods during barter. Over time, the tokens were pressed onto the exterior of the wet envelope, which at some point was flattened into a tablet. By about 3100 bce the impressions had become abstract designs marked on the tablet with a cut reed stalk. These pictograms, known today as cuneiform , were the first writing. And they changed the world.

Inventions almost always cause change. Paleolithic stone weapons made hunting possible and thereby triggered the emergence of permanent top-down command structures. The printing press , introduced by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, once and for all curtailed the traditional authority of elders. The typewriter , brought onto the market by Christopher Latham Sholes in the 1870s, was instrumental in freeing women from housework and changing their social status for good (and also increasing the divorce rate).

Inventors are often extremely observant. In the 1940s Swiss engineer George de Mestral saw tiny hooks on the burrs clinging to his hunting jacket and invented the hook-and-loop fastener system known as Velcro.

Invention can be serendipitous. In the late 1800s a German medical scientist, Paul Ehrlich , spilled some new dye into a Petri dish containing bacilli, saw that the dye selectively stained and killed some of them, and invented chemotherapy . In the mid-1800s an American businessman, Charles Goodyear , dropped a rubber mixture containing sulfur on his hot stove and invented vulcanization .

Inventors do it for money. Austrian chemist Auer von Welsbach , in developing the gas mantle in the 1880s, provided 30 extra years of profitability to the shareholders of gaslight companies (which at the time were threatened by the new electric light).

Inventions are often unintended. In the early 1890s Edward Acheson , an American entrepreneur in the field of electric lighting , was seeking to invent artificial diamonds when an electrified mix of coke and clay produced the ultrahard abrasive Carborundum . In an attempt to develop artificial quinine in the mid-1800s, British chemist William Perkin ’s investigation of coal tar instead created the first artificial dye , tyrian purple—which later fell into Ehrlich’s Petri dish.

Inventors solve puzzles. In the course of investigating why suction pumps would lift water only about 9 metres (30 feet), Evangelista Torricelli identified air pressure and invented the barometer .

Inventors are dogged. The American inventor Thomas Edison , who tested thousands of materials before he chose bamboo to make the carbon filament for his incandescent lightbulb , described his work as "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” At his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey , Edison’s approach was to identify a potential gap in the market and fill it with an invention. His workers were told, “There’s a way to do it better. Find it.”

The key to inventive success often requires being in the right place at the right time. Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos Glidden took their invention to arms manufacturer Remington just when that company’s production lines were running down after the end of the American Civil War . A quick retool turned Remington into the world’s first typewriter manufacturer.

An invention developed for one purpose will sometimes find use in entirely different circumstances. In medieval Afghanistan somebody invented a leather loop to hang on the side of a camel for use as a step when loading the animal. By 1066 the Normans had put the loop on each side of a horse and invented the stirrup . With their feet thus firmly anchored, at the Battle of Hastings that year Norman knights hit opposing English foot soldiers with their lances and the full weight of the horse without being unseated by the shock of the encounter. The Normans won the battle and took over England (and made English the French-Saxon mix it is today).

One invention can inspire another. Gaslight distribution pipes gave Edison the idea for his electricity network. Perforated cards used to control the Jacquard loom led Herman Hollerith to invent punch cards for tabulator use in the 1890 U.S. census.

Above all, invention appears primarily to involve a “1 + 1 = 3” process similar to the brain’s model-building activity, in which concepts or techniques are brought together for the first time and the outcome is more than the sum of the parts (e.g., spray + gasoline = carburetor ).

The more often ideas come together, the more frequently invention occurs. The rate of invention increased sharply, each time, when the exchange of ideas became easier after the invention of the printing press, telecommunications , the computer , and above all the Internet . Today new fields such as data mining and nanotechnology offer would-be inventors (or semi-intelligent software programs) massive amounts of “1 + 1 = 3” opportunities. As a result, the rate of innovation seems poised to increase dramatically in the coming decades.

It is going to become harder than ever to keep up with the secondary results of invention as the general public gains access to information and technology denied them for millennia and as billions of brains, each with its own natural inventive capabilities, innovate faster than social institutions can adapt. In some cases, as occurred during the global financial crisis of 2007–08 , institutions will face severe challenges from the introduction of technologies for which their old-fashioned infrastructures will be ill-prepared. It may be that the only safe way to deal with the potentially disruptive effects of an avalanche of invention, so as to develop the new social processes required to manage a permanent state of change, will be to do what the brain does: invent a comprehensive virtual world in which one can safely test innovative ideas before applying them.

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Essay on Scientific Discoveries

• Updated on  
• Feb 7, 2024

Writing and speaking skills are the most important skills in the world. It shows how well a student will convey his or her ideas, experiences and thoughts. Essays are one of the most popular forms of writing to ascertain an applicant’s general knowledge, experiences, writing style and language skills. It is used in many entrance exams like SAT, IELTS, TOEFL and in college applications as well. From a very early age, school curriculums have been encouraging students to write essays and give speeches. Sometimes the topics provided to students can be complicated. So, today we have come up to help the students with an essay on Scientific Discoveries.

Check out our 200+ Essay Topics for School Students in English

Five Qualities of A Good Essay

Before we provide you with an essay on scientific discoveries. Let’s learn about essay writing. Writing an essay is a difficult thing. The writing should be rich in content plus should not bore its readers. Here are the five qualities a perfect essay should have:-

• Focus: All of your writing should come under one single topic. No matter how vast your essay is, it should always revolve around the topic of the essay. Avoid unnecessary details.
• Development: Every paragraph of your essay should centre the topic of your essay. Try to use examples, details and descriptions.
• Free composition: Always follow a basic structure. Before finalising your essay, jot down the points you would like to mention and then make a series. Do not surprise the reader with complicated words, try to keep it as simple as possible. 
• Correctness: Make sure your essay is free from any grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, mismatched sentences, etc. Always use standard English and complete sentences.
• Introduction and Conclusion: The introduction and the conclusion of the writing are the most important parts of the essay. The first impression is always the last, and so is the introduction of your writing. After reading the first two or three lines, if the reader gets bored, he may not read your whole essay. So make sure your essay contains a crispy beginning. Alternatively, make the conclusion so strong and effective that the reader never forgets your essay. Don’t feel afraid to use quotes, catchy lines, slogans and all. They are the cherry on the cake for your essay.

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Sample Essay on Scientific Discoveries

Here is an example of an essay on scientific discoveries to help them out in their school assignments.

Everything around us is a great discovery. Be it a necessity, comfort, or luxury, they all came from different scientific discoveries that took place over some time. Starting from a small pin to a big ship, everything is just a mere invention to make the lives of humans easier. Scientistic discoveries take place in every arena of thought so before we talk about these inventions. Let’s examine what is science. What is science? Science is a system for acquiring knowledge. We use observations, and experimentation to come to a conclusion and explain any natural phenomenon. In simple language, science is the systematic field of study or knowledge gained from experimentations, observations and some accepted facts. And so scientific discoveries have done miracles in human lives.  Scientific discoveries and inventions have made our lives easier and more comfortable than we could have ever imagined. Scientific equipment accomplishes lengthy tasks in just minutes. Be it in the health sector, education, transportation, and more. All the inventions are just the gifts of science. Nowadays we are in a situation where without science, we cannot imagine our survival. In the absence of Science, no country, and no single person would have made progress. Scientific discoveries and inventions are machines that accomplish any task of humans either fully or partially. According to the business dictionary, the word ‘invention’ is “a new scientific or technical idea and the means of its embodiment or accomplishment. To be patentable, an invention must be novel, have utility, and be non-obvious. To be called an invention, an idea only needs to be proven as workable. But to be called an innovation, it must also be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. That’s why only a few inventions lead to innovations because not all of them are economically feasible.” Wikipedia further says, “An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition or process. It may be an improvement upon a machine or product or a new process for creating an object or a result. An invention that achieves a unique function or result may be a radical breakthrough. Such works are novel and not obvious to others skilled in the same field.” These definitions made us clear about how important scientific discovery is for us. Due to science, we can get all kinds of things we desire for. Electricity is a miracle that gives us light even in the dark. It further helps us to run industries conserve the environment and control pollution .  A cricket match is going on in America and we can watch it. Why? Inventions! Nowadays medical science is doing its best all over the world. Let us not forget computers, which is the greatest invention of mankind.  However, it is rightly said that every coin has two sides. Scientific discoveries and inventions have given us a lot and at the same time created a lot of disadvantages too. Nowadays people have become so dependent on technology that even walking has become difficult. Inventions made people so lazy, especially the young generation. All they could think about now is sitting at their home, with their computers and tablets on.

Gone are the days when people used to go out, play and have actual fun in life. Also, scientific inventions have made people jobless. Employers are substituting their employees with heavy machines. And this is the sad reality everywhere. Along with a luxurious life, technology has made our lives more complicated. People nowadays catch the disease early due to no exercise and sitting in front of their computer the whole day.  The biggest and most disastrous inventions are weapons, guns and bombs. What’s worse than taking the life of people? It has ruined unity, peace and harmony all over the world.  Scientific discoveries and inventions have contributed so much that my essay would never be enough to explain it. Ultimately, I would like to say that do not take up the monstrous side. Try the blessing of discoveries and make your life better in every aspect.

Also Read: Essay on Information Technology in 400 Words

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Inventors And Inventions Essay & Paragraph In English

In this article you can read a brief paragraphs essay about inventors and inventions. I hope you will find following composition a meaningful for all class students.

The process of creating something new that has value is known as invention. This could be a new product , a new process, or a new way of doing something. Taking what already exists and making it better, faster, or cheaper is a common method of invention.

Table of Contents

500 Words Paragraph Inventions

Individual inventors’ hard work and dedication have resulted in many great inventions. These inventors are frequently enthusiastic about their work and devote a significant amount of time to developing their concepts. Thomas Edison, who invented the light bulb, and Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin, are two well-known inventors.

Individuals do not, however, create all inventions. Sometimes groups of people collaborate to create new products or processes. The Wright brothers, for example, were not the only people involved in the development of the first airplane. They had a team of people who helped them with their ideas and prototypes.

Inventions have transformed society as we know it, making life easier and more efficient for people. Some inventions, such as cell phones and televisions, have changed the world so dramatically that they have become an essential part of everyone’s daily lives. Inventions improve our lives in a variety of ways, including improved health care, transportation, communication , and more!

As you can see, great inventors create some of the most important things in life. People make the world go round by creating new things that benefit everyone, whether they do so alone or as part of a team. Whether it is cute cat videos on YouTube, an app to help you hail a Left, or even a good old- fashioned light bulb inventions have improved our lives!

What do they imply? Is not invention the process of creating something new and valuable? Is this to say that anything goes?

No way, no how. For example, if I went outside right now and made fire out of thin air, I would be creating something new, but it would be worthless, so it would not be an invention. Something must be valuable to someone in order to meet the definition of invention. It could be value to the creator, such as a new toy they created for themselves, or value to others, such as a new medical procedure that saves lives. Creating things that are useful and valuable to someone is what invention is all about.

Who was the inventor of the light bulb? The light bulb was invented by Thomas Edison. He spent a lot of time working on different versions of the light bulb and came up with the idea of using electricity to power lights.

Hello! Welcome to my Blog StudyParagraphs.co. My name is Angelina. I am a college professor. I love reading writing for kids students. This blog is full with valuable knowledge for all class students. Thank you for reading my articles.

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