Hello again, it has been a while since I posted, which in future I will strive to correct, in fact I’ve set a target for myself to post at least once a week from now on.
So todays topic of ‘Inventions that changed the world.’ is something I often think about, after all Bio Cybertronics was built on ‘innovation through imagination’ and it is only natural that one day one I hope to see someone who valves our work here at Bio Cybertronics enough to put one of our products in that list.
So what did revolutionize our lives;
The Wheel.
I don’t think anyone can dispute the fact that the wheel changed the world, after all 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. Wheeled carts facilitated agriculture and commerce by enabling the transportation of goods to and from markets, as well as easing the burdens of people traveling great distances. Now, wheels are vital to our way of life, found in everything from clocks to vehicles to turbines.
The nail
If the wheel, gave mankind mobility, the nail gave us roots. Without nails, civilization would surely crumble. 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.
Before the iron age, humans had to build by interlocking adjacent boards geometrically a much more arduous construction process, which stopped people putting down roots, and a vast majority of the population were nomadic. Even more impressively was that a Greek scholar by the name of Archimedes had built a screw, in the third century BC.
The compass
So now mankind had the wheel to move around, and the nail to build structures when we colonize any new found land. However as the earths surface is mainly water and this created a number of problems.
Although not to be defeated by the sea, ancient mariners navigated by the stars, but that method didn’t work during the day or on cloudy nights, and so it was unsafe to voyage far from land, in fact most mariners had the policy that you always had to be able to see land. That was until the Chinese invented the first compass sometime between the 9th and 11th century; it was made of lodestone, a naturally-magnetized iron ore, the attractive properties of which they had been studying for centuries. Soon after, the technology passed to Europeans and Arabs through nautical contact. The compass enabled mariners to navigate safely far from land, increasing sea trade and contributing to the Age of Discovery.
The printing press
As someone who loves literature, the written word is so important to me, so much so that I am on the fence with eReaders. A book is a beautiful object, its smell and tactilely, and depending on the title, the words inside could be magical. Despite eBooks reducing the need to sell physical books, it is at least creating a generation of readers via eReaders/Tablets, and anything that encourages reading is an amazing thing.
So back to the printing press, which was invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440. instrumental to its development was the hand mold, a new molding technique that enabled the rapid creation of large quantities of metal movable type. 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. Twenty million volumes had been printed in Western Europe by 1500.
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.
The internal combustion engine
Anyone who knows me, knows I am a gear head or petrol head, depending what side of the pond you hail from. So naturally as I had the wheel on the list the internal combustion engine was the lifecycle of the wheel!
In these engines, the combustion of a 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 in to 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.
The telephone
I admit I hate cell phones, as they remove all etiquette of using a phone. Not that, that many people had it in the first place. The subject of the inventor of the telephone has always come under dispute as well.
Though several inventors did pioneering work on electronic voice transmission (many of whom later filed intellectual property lawsuits when telephone use exploded), Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone in 1876. The invention quickly took off, and revolutionized global business and communication, in fact so much of a revolution that I can not think of anyone without a home phone or a cell phone. At one time I had three cell phones and a land line because of work commitments. It has become engrained in our way of life, and I for one hate that.
The light bulb
When all you have is natural light, productivity is limited to daylight hours. Light bulbs changed the world by allowing us to be active at night. According to historians, two dozen people were instrumental in inventing incandescent lamps 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.
Penicillin
The is no disputing the fact that Penicillin is one 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.
Contraceptives
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.
Although they are not a new invention as you would typical think natural and herbal contraception has been used for millennia. Condoms came into use in the 18th century, while the earliest oral contraceptive “the pill” was invented in the late 1930s by a chemist named Russell Marker.
The Internet
Well without this discovery, you would not even be reading this. It needs no introduction in its self. The global system of interconnected computer networks known as the Internet is used by billions of people worldwide.
Countless people helped develop it and countless more are still working on its improvement, but the person most often credited with its invention is the computer scientist Lawrence Roberts. 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. It used a method of data transmission called “packet switching” which Roberts, a member of the team, developed based on prior work of other computer scientists. ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet.
So there you have my top ten. I know if I sit down and think about it again, I could end up with a completely different list, after all its often the simplest idea, that changed the world. So what would be your top ten?
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