Amazing and occasionally unconventional innovations have been imagined and made by humans. From the instant someone smashed a rock on the ground to create the first tool with a sharp edge through the invention of the wheel, Mars rovers, and the Internet, a few significant developments stand out as extremely revolutionary. Here are our top recommendations for the most significant innovations of all time, along with information on the science and development of each one.
The wheel
The amount and distance of what people could move over land was severely constrained until the creation of the wheel about 3500 B.C. The most challenging aspect of “creating the wheel” was not the wheel itself. Things got complicated when it came time to attach a stationary platform to the rolling cylinder, claims David Anthony, an anthropology professor at Hartwick College.
The wheel-and-axle design was “the stroke of genius,” Anthony previously told Live Science. But creating it was equally challenging. He cited the need for practically flawless roundness and smoothness in the holes in the center of the wheels and the ends of the fixed axles as an example. Another important consideration was the axle’s size and how tightly it fit in the hole (not too tight, but not too loose, either).
The effort was well worth it. Wheeled carts made it easier for people to travel long distances and allowed for the movement of commodities to and from marketplaces, which promoted trade and agriculture. Wheels are now an essential part of our way of life, appearing in everything from clocks to turbines to cars.
The nail
This important creation stretches back more than two thousand years to the time of the Ancient Romans and was only made feasible once people learned how to cast and shape metal. In the past, wood buildings had to be made by geometrically joining neighboring boards, which was a considerably more laborious procedure.
According to the University of Vermont, until the 1790s and the beginning of the 1800s, hand-wrought nails were the standard. A blacksmith would heat a square iron rod and then hammer it on all four sides to form a point. Between the late 1790s and the beginning of the 1800s, nail-making machines went online. The ability to mass-produce steel from iron, invented by Henry Bessemer, caused the use of iron nails to gradually decline. According to the University of Vermont, by 1886, 10% of nails in the United States were made from soft steel wire. Steel wire made up 90% of the nails made in the United States by 1913.
In contrast, David Blockley writes in “Engineering: A Very Short Introduction” that the Pythagorean philosopher Archytas of Tarentum was likely the inventor of the screw, a stronger but more difficult-to-insert fastener, which is typically attributed to the Greek scholar Archimedes in the third century B.C. (Oxford University Press, 2012).
The compass
It was risky to sail far from shore in the days before satellite navigation, as ancient mariners relied on the stars for guidance.
Between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D., the Han dynasty in China developed the first compass. It was made of lodestone, a naturally magnetic iron ore whose appealing qualities had been studied for years. However, throughout the 11th and 12th centuries, during the Song Dynasty, it was first utilized for navigation.
Then, via maritime interaction, the technology reached the West. The rise of global trade was facilitated by the compass, which allowed seamen to navigate securely far from land. The compass, a device that is still frequently used today, has permanently altered our perception of the Earth.
The printing press
Between 1440 and 1450, German inventor Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press. The hand mold, a revolutionary molding method that made it possible to quickly produce lots of metal moveable type, was essential to its growth. Gutenberg was the first to design a mechanical method that transported the ink (which he created from linseed oil and soot) from the moveable type to the paper, even though others had done it before him, including innovators in China and Korea.
For the first time in history, printing presses enabled the quick and extensive distribution of knowledge by exponentially speeding up the production of book copies through the use of moveable type. The late historian Elizabeth L. Eisenstein stated in her book “The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe” (Cambridge University Press, 2012) that “printers’ workplaces will be present in every large city town by 1500.” Up to twenty million volumes are thought to have been produced in Western Europe by the year 1500, but Eisenstein places the number closer to eight million.
The printing machine, among other things, made the Bible more widely available, which in turn gave rise to alternative interpretations, such as Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” a text printed in thousands that started the Protestant Reformation.
The internal combustion engine
When fuel is burned in these engines, a high-temperature gas is released. As the gas expands, it exerts pressure on a piston, which moves it. By converting chemical energy into mechanical work, combustion engines. The internal combustion engine took on its (basically) contemporary shape in the second part of the 19th century after decades of engineering by several scientists. The engine brought about the Industrial Age and made it possible to create a large range of devices, such as contemporary automobiles and aircraft.
The procedures needed to operate a four-stroke internal combustion engine are shown. These are the strokes:
1) Air and vaporized gasoline are brought in during the intake stroke.
2) Fuel vapor and air are compressed and ignited during the compression stroke.
3) The machine is powered by the third power stroke, in which the fuel burns and the piston is driven downward.
4) The exhaust stroke drives the exhaust out.
The telephone
Several innovators contributed to the development of electronic voice transmission; however, it was Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell who received the first patent for the telephone on March 7, 1876. Many of these innovators later sued for intellectual property when the use of telephones skyrocketed (his patent drawing is pictured above). According to historian A. Edward Evenson’s book, “The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray-Alexander Bell Controversy and Its Many Players,” Bell made the first telephone call to his helper, Thomas Watson, three days later, stating, “Mr Watson, come here – I want to see you” (McFarland, 2015).
Bell’s family had an impact on the invention of the telephone. His mother, a talented pianist, lost her hearing later in life, and his wife Mabel, whom he married in 1877, had been deaf since she was five years old, according to Evenson. His father also taught voice elocution and specialized in teaching the deaf to talk. The creation immediately gained popularity and transformed international trade and communications. Bell died on August 2, 1922, and all phone calls in the US and Canada were suspended for one minute in his memory.
The light bulb
Our reliance on natural light was removed by the development of the light bulb, which allowed us to be productive day or night. Several inventors contributed to the creation of this ground-breaking technology throughout the 1800s, but Thomas Edison is recognized as the primary inventor because in 1879 he developed a fully operational lighting system that included a generator, wiring, and a carbon-filament bulb similar to the one above.
This innovation led to the widespread use of electricity in Western homes and also had the fairly unanticipated effect of altering sleep habits. We no longer stay up past the 7 to 8 hours allocated for sleep and, in a perfect world, we sleep all at once. In the past, when we had nothing better to do, we went to bed at nightfall and slept intermittently throughout the night.
Penicillin
One of the most well-known historical discovery tales is this one. In his lab in 1928, the Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming discovered a Petri dish full of germs with its lid inadvertently ajar. The sample had developed a mold contamination, and wherever the mold was present, bacteria had died. In the following two decades, scientists refined the antibiotic mold, which turned out to be the fungus Penicillium, and created the medicine penicillin. Penicillin treats a wide range of bacterial illnesses in people without endangering the patients.
By 1944, penicillin was being manufactured in large quantities and promoted. In order to prevent venereal disease, this message on a curbside mailbox instructed World War II personnel to take the medication.
According to a 2003 study in the journal Clinical Reviews in Allergy and Immunology, about 1 in 10 persons experience an allergic reaction to the antibiotic; nevertheless, most of these patients go on to be able to take the medication, researchers stated.
Contraceptives
Birth control pills, condoms, and other contraceptives have not only encouraged men and women to engage in sexual activity for pleasure rather than reproduction in the developed world, but they have also significantly decreased the average number of children born to each woman in the nations where they are used. Modern families have greater standards of living and can better care for each child since there are fewer mouths to feed. Contraceptives are enabling the human population globally to level off, and by the end of the century, our population will likely have stabilized. The use of condoms and other contraception helps to stop the spread of STDs.
The use of natural and herbal contraception dates back thousands of years. According to researcher Jessica Borge’s book “Protective Practices: A History of the London Rubber Company and the Condom Business” (McGill-University Queen’s Press, 2020), condoms or “sheaths” have existed in some form or another since ancient times. The rubber condom was created in the 19th century. According to author Jonathan Eig’s book, “The Birth of the Pill: How Four Pioneers Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution,” the FDA authorized the first oral contraceptive pill in the US in 1960, and by 1965, more than 6.5 million American women were using it (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015).
Researchers are working to develop a male version of “the pill” as birth control technology advances.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Essure, a permanent birth control implant, in 2002, however the FDA cautioned in 2016 that the device would require stronger warnings to inform patients about significant risks associated with using Essure.
The Internet
Billions of people throughout the world utilize the internet, a global network of linked computer networks. The first version of the internet, known as ARPANET, was created in the 1960s by a group of computer scientists working for the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) of the U.S. Defense Department. It made use of a data transfer technique called “packet switching,” created by team member and computer scientist Lawrence Roberts based on earlier work by other computer scientists.
According to computer scientist Harry R. Lewis’ book “Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science,” this technology was advanced in the 1970s by scientists Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who created the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), two vital internet communication protocols (MIT Press, 2021). Kahn and Cerf are frequently referred to as the “inventors of the internet” because of this.
The World Wide Web, created by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN in 1989, helped the internet advance (The European Organization for Nuclear Research). The fundamental concept behind the WWW, according to CERN, was to combine the rapidly developing fields of computers, data networks, and hypertext into a robust and user-friendly worldwide information system. The creation of the WWW united the world in a way that had never been possible before and made the internet accessible to everyone.