The development of Nitrogen fertilizer. Kept the world from starving.
TOILET PAPER!
battery, compass, calendar, clock, telephone, telegraph, telescope/microscope, locomotive/steam engine, radio, television, light bulb, electric power generation/distribution, battery, electric motor, refrigerator, typewriter, camera, automobile/internal combustion engine/diesel engine, airplane, dynamite, vacuum tubes/transistor/integrated circuit, computer/personal computer, smartphone, printing press, X-Ray other imaging anesthesia, Penicillin/ antibiotics, polio vaccine, smallpox vaccine, DNA fingerprinting, pacemaker, angioplasty, cardiac stent, ocean going ships, space travel, water purification and sewers, map making, mathematics of algebra, geometry, and calculus, the concept of money, the concept of land ownership,
Humans need protection, gunpowder changed the world’s organizing. After gunpowder comes the rifled barrel.
Modern society increased it’s productivity the most by the availability of AC electricity.....Thanks to Tesla’s hydro generators and George Westinghouse’s motors and distribution.
The grandfather of all computers and electronics, and all communications is Fleming’s vacuum tube.
It has only been 200+ years or so since big changes started.
That was because the United States was created and people were free to do what they wanted to do which ended up benefiting all of mankind.
In all the thousands of years before hardly any changes happened. A horse and wagon and stone or straw or mud brick home was all you would have had. A struggle to get clean water and good food and live a long life.
Now we complain if the a/c is not just right in our car and home or the internet is a bit slow today.
Hopefully the dark ages do not descend again.
Monostable multivibrator.
Refrigeration, although probably not top 10, certainly has been important to modern society.
My favorite though, is the automatic water heater!