1 Printing Press 1450 Johannes Gutenberg allowed literacy to greatly expand
2 Electric Light 1879 Thomas Edison powered countless social changes
3 Automobile 1885 Karl Benz increased personal mobility and freedom
4 Telephone 1876 Alexander Graham Bell spread communication across wide areas
5 Radio and Television 1895 & 1926 Guglielmo Marconi & John Baird made the world smaller
6 Vaccination 1796 Edward Jenner protected people from disease
7 Computer 1939 John Atanasoff, et al. transformed business world; predecessor to the Internet
8 Airplane 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright allowed people and products to quickly move
9 Gas powered tractor 1892 John Froelich started agricultural mechanization
10 Anesthesia 1844 Horace Wells provided a great leap forward for medicine
I wonder where sliced bread falls... it’s probably number 1.
Cheap Microprocessors and software to run on them are a great innovation.
The printing press and moveable type really are the game changers. The internet has had a similarly disruptive effect. Knowledge and information (different things) is not under control of a small clique.
Espresso machine.
Steam engine.
#1> Waterborne ships and the navigational skills to go to where you wanted go, and the ability to come home to your home port.
Surviving clay tablets and containers record the use of waterborne vessels as early as 4000 BCE.
Boats are still vital aids to movement, even those little changed in form during that 6,000-year history. The very fact that boats may be quite easily identified in illustrations of great antiquity shows how slow and continuous had been this evolution until just 150 years ago. And though that was the time when steam propulsion became predominant, it never was anywhere universal in local transport.
Because some solutions to the problem of providing water transport were eminently successful and efficient several millennia ago, there are a number of boats still in use whose origins are lost in prehistory.
The above enabled us to be here today and have the rest of the list.
Screw the internet. It’s a natural outcome
Vaccinations against small pix, chicken pox, and polio are waaaay more important
I vote for blogs.
They’re great.
You betcha.
AC
Dehydrated Water?
The Thermos. It keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold.
How do it know?
Firearms
Yoga pants for ladies of the appropriate figure.
Worst inventions: I’ll start...
Government.
Underarm deodorant.
The plow.
The field effect transistor is the fundamental invention that made modern microprocessors and ask the technology around us possible. Microprocessors were a natural evolution of the capability to highly integrate FETs.