Free Republic

If you think that the world's greatest inventions came from the fevered minds of solitary geniuses, think again. As you scan this list of the 10 inventions that changed the world, note how many of them perfected workable designs. 10. Plow Compared to some of the gleaming, electronic inventions that fill our lives today, the plow doesn't seem very exciting. It's a simple cutting tool used to carve a furrow into the soil, churning it up to expose nutrients and prepare it for planting. Yet the plow is probably the one invention that made all others possible. No one knows...

Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time -- it was the Bronze Age -- humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps. The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder. "The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at...

Humans existed as members of small bands of nomadic hunters and gatherers. They lived on deer in the mountains during the summer and would go to the coast and live on fish and lobster in winter. The 2 most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. The wheel was invented to get man to the beer. These were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into 2 distinct subgroups: Liberals and Conservatives. Once beer was discovered it required grain and that was...

On September 19, 1997, the New York Times announced the discovery of a group of earthen mounds in northeastern Louisiana. The site, known as Watson Brake, includes 11 mounds 26 feet high linked by low ridges into an oval 916 feet long. What is remarkable about this massive complex is that it was built around 3400 B.C., more than 3,000 years before the development of farming communities in eastern North America, by hunter-gatherers, at least partly mobile, who visited the site each spring and summer to fish, hunt, and collect freshwater mussels... Social complexity cannot exist unless I it...

World's oldest wheel found in Slovenia, claim archaeologists Archaeologists claim to have unearthed the world's oldest wheel in Slovenia. Experts estimate that the wheel is between 5,100 and 5,350 years old. That makes it just 100 years older than the previous record-holders from Switzerland and southern Germany. The wheel, which is made of ash and oak, has a radius of 70 centimetres and is five centimetres thick. It was found buried beneath an ancient marsh settlement near the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. Dr Anton Veluscek, from the Archeological Institute at the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, was part of...

Pope Benedict led Roman Catholics into Holy Week celebrations, telling a Palm Sunday crowd that man will pay the price for his pride if he believes technology can give him the powers of God. Under a splendid Roman sun, the German pope presided at a colourful celebration where tens of thousands of people waved palm and olive branches to commemorate Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem the week before he was crucified. The pope, who turned 84 on Saturday, wove his sermon around the theme of man’s relationship with God and how it can sometimes be threatened by technology. “From the beginning...