1. Languages (natural e.g. English, and formal e.g. Mathematics, Python etc) 2. Music 3. Cuisine 4. Transistors 5. MS Excel 6. Rockets 7. P2P file sharing 8. Encryption
What do you think? I think I'm missing historical inventions e.g. Gutenberg press
Materials: concrete, petroleum, steel, aluminum, cotton, plastic Music: 12 tone equal temperament Food: Cereal crops, food preservation (canning, pasteurization), fermentation Technology: batteries (lead-acid, lithium-ion, alkaline), circuitry, GPS Transportation: internal combustion engine, asphalt road engineering, flight, rocketry
Lists like this, or “tech trees” as you might find in Civilization-type games, are hard in part because language is insufficient to map technological progress. There’s also no version of modernity that could exist without some form of philosophy, pedagogy, and cultural development, but naming “most significant” ones in a modern context involves going back to very ancient and deeply opinionated texts that include the Bible, Koran, Torah and so on.
Controlled fire (if you can consider it a "man-made creation") -> essential for food and a lot of manufacturing
Wheel -> essential for transportation, but also to make flour (millstones), and a lot of other stuff (e.g. turbines are, basically, specialized wheels)
Controlled electricity and electromagnetism -> artificial light, modern communications, not to mention medical advancements like X-rays
Insulin and pecillin -> millions of lives saved
the printing press -> knowledge becomes easier to spread
If we extend this to all kinds of human "inventions", including law, philosophy, religion, and so on, the list is even longer.
Other highly consequential inventions: the printing press, the wheel, agriculture, money, the internet.
Notice something subtle. Early inventions extend coordination. Middle inventions extend memory. Later inventions extend reasoning. The latest inventions extend agency. This suggests that human history is less about tools and more about outsourcing parts of the mind into the world.
w.o that (and other agri improvements) we wouldnt have enough spare calories as a species to devote to these other non food production related activities, like say poking rocks with electrons until they can become computers that can run excel. its really hard to visualize how much of human effort across history has just been about food production.
1. The Steam engine and later ICE engines that started and sustained the industrial revolution and the modern world.
2. Electricity (generation, control), this led to the telegraph (our first internet), radio, and of-course electrical switching components that form basis of modern semiconductors.
The steam engine wouldn't have had its impact without the possibility for e.g. precision engineered pistons, and any industrialization would have been severely impaired without the possibilities that the distributed production of exchangeable parts (even as simple as screws, nuts and bolts) to established norms came with.
The printing press, as you mentioned, cannot be understated. Related to this would be the ballpoint pen, which had a massive impact on democratizing literacy. The humble Bic Cristal being the foundation of much of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
Machine tools, a cutting tool following a fixed path
Double entry book keeping, VisiCalc, and Excel
Data management as a science, the index, filing cabinets, and computing.
If you look at the dependency chain to accomplish the task, it’s a true yardstick for any modern civilization,economy,nation.
We’re the only animals that can coordinate by the millions because we all agreed to believe in "invisible" things like money, corporations, and human rights. Without that shared social software, you don't get rockets or transistors; you just get small tribes fighting over berries. We essentially found a way to "patch" human behavior without waiting for evolution, turning abstract ideas into the glue that builds civilizations.
Also mass communication although that hasn’t turned out so well.
And yeah, call it engineering. Started with the wheel. Thanks for the reminder in thread.
basically work your way forward from caveman