What does "greatest" mean?
I’m defining it as "most defining of who we are today", something that dramatically changed the life of all humanity, and I will be referring only to inventions and not to discoveries such as the fire or the wheel.
10 – The Telescope - It revealed the Earth to be merely a ball of rock in space and not the center of anything, much less the universe. Some of us have never recovered.
9 - The Computer – Many people have the deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship with their computer. It plays games with them, tells them jokes, plays music to them, it does the taxes,
and sometimes it’ even used to work.
8 - The Television - Wherever a TV is on, it draws attention like no other piece of furniture. It can be source of amusement, knowledge, or, if misused, of violence and almost self-inflicted psychiatric disorders
7 - The Automobile - Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities developed suburbs and expanded, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth, and one of the major factors for political and economic conflicts in many parts of the world.
6 - The Use of Electricity - Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world's first electric power station. Now, anyone throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity
5 - The Telephone - Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Wouldn't it be cool, they said, if you could talk to someone in another city without leaving home? It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment, even if you can see the person, or even know ho he/she is.
4 – Antibiotics - Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly half of Europe in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the western hemisphere was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered.
3 - The Printing Press - Unoriginal, I know, but still it's true. Gutenberg's press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church no longer possessed the absolute truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy.
2 - The Mechanical Clock - Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. And of course, what clocks made possible, they soon made necessary. In a clock-driven world, most of us are now either "on time," "ahead of schedule," or "running late."
1 - The Toilet - Go ahead. Laugh. Then try to imagine New York, Paris or Tokyo without toilets. You can't. The ability to remove sewage and bring clean water into places of dense human population makes the modern city possible. Without toilets and plumbing any tall building would be impossible. Remove apartment buildings, office towers, and dense city centers from your picture of the world and you have to change the whole rest of your picture too, because the implications keep rippling.
Of course, this top isn’t an absolute one, and anyone could argue its classification, but, in fact, it all comes down to how important is this or that invention to a specific individual, and how it influences his way of perceiving the world.
I’m defining it as "most defining of who we are today", something that dramatically changed the life of all humanity, and I will be referring only to inventions and not to discoveries such as the fire or the wheel.
10 – The Telescope - It revealed the Earth to be merely a ball of rock in space and not the center of anything, much less the universe. Some of us have never recovered.
9 - The Computer – Many people have the deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship with their computer. It plays games with them, tells them jokes, plays music to them, it does the taxes,
and sometimes it’ even used to work.
8 - The Television - Wherever a TV is on, it draws attention like no other piece of furniture. It can be source of amusement, knowledge, or, if misused, of violence and almost self-inflicted psychiatric disorders
7 - The Automobile - Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities developed suburbs and expanded, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth, and one of the major factors for political and economic conflicts in many parts of the world.
6 - The Use of Electricity - Electricity existed all along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world's first electric power station. Now, anyone throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power everything from light bulbs to computers. We are, in fact, a social organism animated by electricity
5 - The Telephone - Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Wouldn't it be cool, they said, if you could talk to someone in another city without leaving home? It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment, even if you can see the person, or even know ho he/she is.
4 – Antibiotics - Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly half of Europe in about two years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century. As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the western hemisphere was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered.
3 - The Printing Press - Unoriginal, I know, but still it's true. Gutenberg's press, with its movable type, launched publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church no longer possessed the absolute truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy.
2 - The Mechanical Clock - Before this invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. And of course, what clocks made possible, they soon made necessary. In a clock-driven world, most of us are now either "on time," "ahead of schedule," or "running late."
1 - The Toilet - Go ahead. Laugh. Then try to imagine New York, Paris or Tokyo without toilets. You can't. The ability to remove sewage and bring clean water into places of dense human population makes the modern city possible. Without toilets and plumbing any tall building would be impossible. Remove apartment buildings, office towers, and dense city centers from your picture of the world and you have to change the whole rest of your picture too, because the implications keep rippling.
Of course, this top isn’t an absolute one, and anyone could argue its classification, but, in fact, it all comes down to how important is this or that invention to a specific individual, and how it influences his way of perceiving the world.
p)
