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Asked by anon-251040 on 2 Apr 2020.
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Simone Sturniolo answered on 2 Apr 2020:
Hard to say! There are so many inventions that are fundamental to our lives now, it’s hard to imagine us without. I tend to think of the very early things – the oldest inventions, on top of which everything else is built.
Perhaps the greatest invention ever might be writing. Fire or the wheel or agriculture could be invented by observing nature and imitating them – they were important things for us, but none of them was exclusively a human thing. But writing is 100%, entirely human made. Someone just started making signs on wood or clay and over the years (and centuries!) that ended up transforming into a full system for recording our thoughts and messages. And without writing, almost no other science and invention would be possible – how could you learn so much if you couldn’t just read books, after all, but had to be taught everything from someone else’s mouth? It would put a much tighter limit on how much we can advance.
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Philip Denniff answered on 2 Apr 2020:
Is that invention or discovery. The greatest discovery must be controlling fire. With out fire nothing else would be possible. One of Isaac Newton’s sayings was If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. and the giants stood on others. Right at the bottom was fire. JJ Thompson, one of my science heros, discovered the electron using his invention the mass spectrometer.
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Lucy Kelly answered on 2 Apr 2020:
I think that technology that makes sure our water is clean and safe to drink is the greatest invention ever! Without this a lot more people would die from diseases which are completely preventable.
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Edoardo Vescovi answered on 2 Apr 2020:
We usually tell apart discoveries (= find things that already exist before humans find them) and inventions (= human-made things that didn’t exist beforehand). I’d name writing because it keeps record of anything imaginable in human history, so that every generation has never to re-discover or re-invent from scratch. Writing makes possible to see things changing as time flows, speak “back in time” with people lived before us and learn from them. Books and other forms of written communication, like internet nowadays, are a sort of a natural evolution.
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Carol Wallace answered on 2 Apr 2020:
good question, thinking about this before I logged on and looked at the other answers, I thought I’ll choose the microscope because of what we’ve discovered using them – BUT looking at what has already been said – I think I’d go for communication.
without being able to tell or communicate our ideas, we’d all be living in individual bubbles with no way of passing on our great ideas -
Robert Ives answered on 2 Apr 2020:
There are so many. How about an accurate way to measure time, such as clocks. Thousands of years ago, people used the position and movement of the sun in the sky to both tell the time and measure how long things took. This might be accurate to a few minutes, but that was it. People couldn’t really tell how fast someones heart was beating, other than guessing. Now we have atomic clocks that can measure to tiny fractions of a second and we are able to measure virtually everything, even the rate of decay of super heavy elements (very short lived elements). And we can now measure exactly how fast someones heart is beating 🙂
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Oli Wilson answered on 2 Apr 2020:
I don’t know about greatest ever, but antibiotics utterly, utterly changed our world – and they’ve only been available for 80 years. The story of the first antibiotic helped me realise their importance.
Penicillin, the first medical antibiotic, was first tested on a policeman called Albert Alexander in 1941. He was in hospital in Oxford, dying from a catastrophic infection that had already cost him an eye. Penicillin was still a new invention but Albert had nothing to lose, so the doctors and scientists tried it on him. Within 24 hours he was starting to recover, which must have seemed like a miracle! But because penicillin was so new the scientists only had tiny quantities – in fact they had so little, they tried to recover some from his urine. But it wasn’t enough. By the fifth day they had completely run out. The infection came roaring back and a few weeks later PC Alexander was dead. And how did he get such a devastating, deadly infection? He scratched himself on a rose.
Nowadays tiny accidents like this don’t have to spiral into deadly bacterial infections – and it’s all thanks to antibiotics. But we’ve taken them for granted and we’re in danger of making these incredible medicines useless; antibiotic (and antimicrobial) resistant infections are a huge threat to modern medicine – and all of us. This is a great video about the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znnp-Ivj2ek
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Michael Schubert answered on 2 Apr 2020:
It’s hard to say, but I think all of our communication technologies are great inventions. For a very long time, people who were far away from each other couldn’t communicate at all – if you wanted to speak to someone in America, you would have to go there yourself (which was obviously not much good before we invented things like ships to take us there). Eventually, we invented paper and writing and could send each other letters – but a person still had to carry the letter all the way from one place to the next. Imagine how much faster things became when we invented telegrams, telephones, and radios – and then imagine how much more amazing emails and instant messaging and text messaging is now! Not that long ago, people could never have imagined talking to someone on the other side of the world. Now, many of us do it every day.
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Lauren Burns answered on 6 Apr 2020:
Other than the machine they use to make ice-cream?! I would say renewable energy sources – such as tidal lagoons, solar panels, wind turbines etc…
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Judith Sleeman answered on 7 Apr 2020:
So many brilliant inventions! For me, the most important in my life time would be the internet, though, and all this communication we can have now even though we’re stuck in our houses and away from work and families. I remember first hearing about the internet/www as a PhD student. Then our department got access…..and there was nothing to see! Hardly any pages and any there were took about 10 minutes to load. I remember being very underwhelmed….but now??? The changes and progress in the last two or three decades are staggering.
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