Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest
A I"ve drawn up a list, And there"s one thing I know about this list: You won"t agree with it, Some of you will write to tell me I forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever, Which is fine: A top-eight list is all about starting a good argument, But to draw up such a list, you have to set some guidelines, and here are mine; I"m starting at the year zero, Otherwise, we"d never get out of prehistory, And I"m limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific method, the university and electricity don"t count—they are, respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we discovered but which existed all along.
B This is a list of end products. That is, I"m excluding components with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we"d scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, , I"m out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball bearings. Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the eight greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock
C Before this invention, time was inseparable from s, the main one being the Sun crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time. If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because the Sun is always setting somewhere. Then, mechanical clocks came around. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single, universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible.
2. The Printing Press
D 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 lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing universalized literacy. Before this invention, so few could read that, effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and memory. Humanity"s consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories, told and retold. In this fluid world, if the big picture shifted, no one knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what happened yesterday, they can look it up. Our modern collective picture of reality is founded on facts archived as text.
3. Immunization and Antibiotics
E Three centuries ago, almost everyone died of infections diseases. When the plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly haft 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 West was tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. It"s a different world, folks.
4. The Telephone
F Lots of people imagined the telephone before any telephone existed. Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from the inventors, the Network began to form. That"s the actual invention—the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at any given moment. So today, anyone"s real-time group includes people not physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
5. The Electrical Grid
G 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. Nikola Tesla"s invention of alternating current (AC) technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in the West and 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.
6. The Automobile
H Once cars were invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density. Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the off industry boomed. Oil became a key to power and wealth—and one of the major factors for political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are today.
7. The Television
I Wherever a television set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane Healy, in her book Enered Minds , says television has changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the developed world, young children interact largely with television, so their neural networks can accommodate its warm, one-way, pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
8. The Computer
J My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is with my computer. It plays s with me, tells me jokes, plays music to me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed "friends," but the human embodiments of those "friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with this object on my desk (or in my lap). Of the millions of inventions, what are the eight greatest1. The Mechanical Clock2. The Printing Press3. Immunization and Antibiotics4. The Telephone5. The Electrical Grid6. The Automobile7. The Television8. The ComputerGear, though a great invention, is excluded from the list because it doesn"t have independent function.