[bitt]

jump straight to the list:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#list

[mass55th]

I don’t see government sanctioned voter fraud on that list.

[EvilCapitalist]

Yoga pants, for ladies with a nice ass should be on the list.

[JoeVortex]

I stopped reading and hit the back button the second I saw the source.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

The Constitution of the United States of America. Should be #1 now and forever.

[Leep]

Please tell me transexuals, gay marriage or democracy are not on the list.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

26. The telegraph, 1837
Before it, Joel Mokyr says, “information could move no faster than a man on horseback.”

Mr. Mokyr is wrong. He needs to read "A Thread Across the Ocean."

French Semaphore Telegraph

During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars communication systems were pretty basic, mainly relying upon mounted despatch riders, although in 1793 a Frenchman came up with a suggestion that would transform long-distance communications.

Claude Chappe's semaphore telegraph took quite some time to be accepted by revolutionary officials, but once the teething problems had been ironed out it was rapidly adopted. By 1794 communications towers within line-of-sight of each other allowed the French to send a signal from Paris to Lille - a distance of some 191 kilometres - in five minutes. The success of the system meant new tower lines were constructed reaching out from Paris to Dunkirk, Brussels, Boulogne, Antwerp, Metz, Lyon, Milan, Venice and Mantua. A message could be sent to Venice in six hours!

Chappe's telegraph was a small tower upon which stood a black 9-metre mast with a moving wooden cross-piece, measuring 30cm by 4.5 metres. This regulator, as it was known, had a 1.8 metre indicator at each end and had four basic positions - horizontal, vertical or at 45-degree angles. When not in operation the indicators were left as horizontal extensions of the regulator and these would then be moved in seven combinations of angles at 45-degree tilts.

All up the Chappe semaphore tower had 196 combinations known as signs and would be worked by a series of pulleys and levers. Under a good operator three signs could be sent in a minute - providing the visibility was good - although turning the signs into code would further speed a message's journey.

The French spent some time trying to develop a wagon-mounted version of the Chappe system, but funding for research was limited.

[DenntOR]

I wonder how many of these inventions that have a specific known inventor or inventors were invented by white males.

[Steve_Seattle]

And Joe Biden had a hand in all of them!

[ModelBreaker]

They missed the innovation that has and will change the world more than any of the listed ones.

The Birth Control Pill.

I has already started a massive demographic crash across the entire world that will depopulate the world, changed the relationship between the sexes in unknown and bizarre directions, and forever altered politics by altering marriage and separating recreational sex from reproduction. Mankind evolved in a world where sex and reproduction were linked. Our physical differences, chemical differences, and emotional differences are tied to those millions of years of evolution.

The world will still be adapting to the changes fomented by the pill centuries from now.

Maybe not a great invention. But the one that has changed things forever.

[Bonemaker]

[Candor7]

I protest, they omitted Cialis and Viagra.

[Da Coyote]

The Atlantic?
May as well get my quantum physics articles there too.
Not.

[AlbertWang]

J M Browning. 1911. Government Model.

[Axenolith]

This is the first of these I’ve seen that actually had cement on it!

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Here are a few absolutely critical missing inventions:

• Interchangeable parts by Samuel Colt. Predecessor of the assembly line.
• Banking. They do have paper money on the list, but I'd include the broader banking.
• Double Entry Bookkeeping / Accounting. 1494 by Luca Pacioli, who is widely known today as the “Father of Accounting”
• Metallurgy. The list has industrial steel making on it, but I'd broaden this to the millennia-long effort to extract and refine ores to make metals. There was no single inventor.
• Marine ChronometerThis was the critical complement to the sextant (#23). The sextant alone gave you your location's latitude, but not your longitude. Before the Marine Chronometer, longitude was estimated by dead reckoning, often with disastrous results.

[whitney69]

This is, of course, impossible to do. Every invention, or recognition, is based not upon want but perceived need.

And if you put such a diverse crowd of “experts” into a room, scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others to assess the innovations, who is going to agree? Besides, the number one process in the invention of most products is accident. Same with the poll if anything matches.

Another wasted poll of worthless information from a company that has supported liberal causes and funded liberals for many years.

wy69

[Swordmaker]

Paper in the second century? Say what? Have they not heard of papyrus? Papyrus was in use since the 14th century BC.