Posted on 09/04/2022 9:39:15 AM PDT by gunsequalfreedom
While the Internet and the World Wide Web have certainly impacted the lives of many millions of people it is certainly not the greatest invention of the past millennium, in fact it might not even make the the top ten.
Central air conditioning should be on the list, too.
Or how about just toilets? Think there could be high rise apartments or office buildings without toilets? And even with houses, how would you like to still walk out in your backyard to an outhouse? An outhouse that would probably ruin the well water near you.
Electric motor, used in countless places.
In days old
When knights were bold
And toilets weren’t invented
You wiped your a**
On a tuft of grass
And went away contented.
I find the most important inventions were ideas which ushered in fantastic physical things. If I had to pick the number one invention of the
last 1000 it would be the US Constitution.
The worst. All the sh***y ideas that led to Marxism.
I forgot the great Ronco Ice Cream Maker And Tire Retreader.
The development of Nitrogen fertilizer. Kept the world from starving.
The sippy cup and wheeled suitcases.
.
TOILET PAPER!
battery, compass, calendar, clock, telephone, telegraph, telescope/microscope, locomotive/steam engine, radio, television, light bulb, electric power generation/distribution, battery, electric motor, refrigerator, typewriter, camera, automobile/internal combustion engine/diesel engine, airplane, dynamite, vacuum tubes/transistor/integrated circuit, computer/personal computer, smartphone, printing press, X-Ray other imaging anesthesia, Penicillin/ antibiotics, polio vaccine, smallpox vaccine, DNA fingerprinting, pacemaker, angioplasty, cardiac stent, ocean going ships, space travel, water purification and sewers, map making, mathematics of algebra, geometry, and calculus, the concept of money, the concept of land ownership,
Bingo!
Everything else pales in comparison to this. The invention of the Haber Process in the early 1900's by Fritz Haber allowing the synthesis of ammonia fertilizer from natural gas and nitrogen is what allowed us to feed the world. Before that it took an inordinate amount of human labor to produce food, after chemical fertilizer became widespread a lot fewer farmers could feed a large number of people. This allowed labor to move off the farm and into industry while supporting a massive population boom. Without fertilizer there'd be about a quarter the current population on the planet and most would be engaged in farming to keep themselves fed.
Certainly transistors...
That list is abbreviated.
It doesn’t make the list very credible that the named inventor of seven of the first 10 is wrong.
Instinct, same way the deep water knows to stay out of the shallow end of the pool.
Radio should be Nikola Tesla. In 1943 the US Supreme Court awarded the discovery to Tesla because that filthy thieving WOP illegally used 7 of Tesla’s patents.
Baird mechanical television based on the Nipkow disk, didn’t record anything. A thin spinning disk about the size of an LP with a spiral pattern of holes provided the proper timing and positioning of a flying raster dot as in later electronic versions. At its height of popularity which was short lived, the BBC for example would instruct listeners to tune into one station for the audio, and another for the ‘video’. A second radio with the speaker replaced with a small NE-2 style neon bulb in conjunction with the spinning Nipkow disk, when tuned to the ‘video’ signal, which sounds like grating noise to the human ear, would provide a very crude live motion picture when viewed through a peep-hole/magnifier lens arrangement. Needless to say, it didn’t really catch on, and the development of the vacuum triode and later the vidicon tube quickly made Baird TV a fossil. There exist hobby groups that still make and hack them.
Humans need protection, gunpowder changed the world’s organizing. After gunpowder comes the rifled barrel.
Modern society increased it’s productivity the most by the availability of AC electricity.....Thanks to Tesla’s hydro generators and George Westinghouse’s motors and distribution.
The grandfather of all computers and electronics, and all communications is Fleming’s vacuum tube.
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