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Of the millions of inventions, what are the ten greatest?
I aishwarya has drawn up a list. And there's one thing I know about
this list: You won't agree with it. Some of you will write to tell me I
forgot the gun, the airplane, or whatever.
Which is fine: A top-ten list is all about starting a good argument.
But to draw up (and then argue about) such a list, you have to set some
guidelines, and here are mine:
- What does "greatest" mean? I'm defining it as "most
consequential to who we are today." Some inventions have loomed
large in history because of the psychic jolt they delivered--the
telescope comes to mind: It revealed the Earth to be merely a ball
of rock hurling through empty space and not the center of anything,
much less the universe. Some of us have never recovered. I, for one,
trace my self-esteem problems right back to Galileo. But how does
the telescope affect my daily life? Not at all. That's why I'm
leaving it off my list. To me, the greatest inventions disappear
from view because they become an integral part of the environment.
And since we must adapt to our environment in order to function, the
greatest inventions end up inventing us. My list consists of the top
ten items like that.
- I'm starting at the year zero. Otherwise, we'd never get out of
prehistory. I mean, where would we be without the house? The plow?
Clothing? Shoes? Wheeled vehicles? Fire igniters? Ships? The knife?
The hammer? Money? All seminal, all still in use. So stipulated,
your honor. Let's move on.
- I'm limiting inventions to physical devices. The scientific
method, the university and electricity don't count--they are,
respectively, a concept, a social system, and something we
discovered but which existed all along.
- This is a list of end products. That is, I'm excluding components
with no independent function. Take the gear, for example. A
groundbreaking bit of technology to be sure. Without it, we'd
scarcely have any machines at all. But we never say, "Oh, darn,
I'm out of gears!" Ditto microchips, transistors, and ball
bearings.
Here, then, in no particular order, are my nominees as the ten
greatest inventions.
1. The Mechanical Clock. Before this
invention, time was inseparable from events, the main one being the Sun
crossing the sky. Only local time existed, no universal river of time.
If you agreed to meet someone at sunset, you had to say where, because
the Sun is always setting somewhere. The sundial merely divided the
Sun's daily journey into units, which meant the hour had no fixed
length: it swelled and shrank with the seasons. Besides, no one carried
a sundial around, so you never heard anyone say, "Can't talk now,
I'm on the sundial." Then, mechanical clocks came around--gears,
springs, pendulums, the works. Gradually, as these clocks all came to be
coordinated, they created public time, a thing in itself: one single,
universal current flowing everywhere throughout the universe, always at
the same pace. People could now communicate with each other by
coordinating to this universal frame of reference. Thus, clocks made
factories, offices, schools, meetings, and appointments possible. The
activities of millions could be meshed like, well, clockwork. And of
course, what clocks made possible, they soon made necessary. In a
clock-driven world, most of us are now either "on time,"
"ahead of schedule," or "running late."
2. The Toilet* and Modern Plumbing.* Go
ahead. Laugh. Then try to imagine New York City without toilets. You
can't. The ability to remove sewage from and bring clean water into
places of dense human habitation makes the modern city possible. Without
it, we'd still have cities, but not like the ones we know. A high-rise
building would be impossible, really, without toilets and plumbing.
Remove apartment buildings, office towers, and dense downtown cores from
your picture of the world and you have to change the whole rest of your
picture too, because the implications keep rippling.
3. The Printing Press. Unoriginal, I know,
but still it's true. Gutenberg's press, with its movable type, launched
publishing. In the short term, this made the Reformation possible
by putting a Bible in the hands of anybody who wanted one. The Church
lost its lock on truth, and the sovereign individual soon emerged as the
key unit of Western society. In the longer term, publishing
universalized literacy*. Before this invention, so few could read that,
effectively, even those few lived in a world of oral tradition and
memory. Humanity's consensual picture of reality was shaped by stories,
told and retold. In this fluid world, if the big picture shifted, no one
knew, because they had nothing to check it against. The proliferation of
text fixed objective reality. Now, when two people disagree about what
happened yesterday, they can look it up. Stories have survived, but
merely as entertainment. Our modern collective picture of reality is
founded on facts archived as text.
4. Immunization and Antibiotics. Three
centuries ago, almost everyone died of infectious diseases. When the
plague broke out in 1347, it killed nearly half of Europe--in about two
years. When diseases such as smallpox reached North America, they
reduced the indigenous population by about 90 percent within a century.
As late as 1800, the leading cause of death in the West was
tuberculosis. Hardly anyone died of old age back then, one reason why
elders were revered. Today, elders are a dime a dozen: nothing unusual
about surviving past 70. In the United States, 73 percent of people die
of heart failure, cancer, and stroke. Chronic respiratory illnesses
(related to smoking mostly) account for the fourth biggest slice of
funeral business. It's a different world, folks.
5. The Telephone. Lots of people imagined
the telephone before any telephone existed. Wouldn't it be cool, they
said, if you could talk to someone in another city without leaving home?
Once the device was invented, and businessmen had wrested it away from
the inventors, the Network began to form. That's the actual
invention--the Network. It enables anyone to talk to anyone anywhere at
any given moment. So today, anyone's real-time group includes people not
physically present, and they could be anywhere. The infrastructure took
some time to develop, but the telephone implied all this from the start.
Wireless cell phones don't change the core idea, they merely extend it.
The Network continues to deepen.
6. The Electrical Grid. Electricity existed all
along, but the system of devices needed to generate this force and
distribute it to individual buildings was an invention, launched
initially by Edison: He effectively turned electricity into a salable
commodity and his Pearl Street station was the world's first electric
power station. Nikola Tesla's invention of alternating current (AC)
technology then made it possible to transmit electricity over long
distances, leading to the nationwide grid we know today. Now, anyone in
the West and throughout most of the world can tap into the grid to power
everything from light bulbs to computers.
7. The Automobile. Once cars were
invented, roads were improved. Once roads were improved, cities sprouted
suburbs, because people could now live in the country, yet work in the
city. And thus we have become a nation of sprawl, rather than density.
Furthermore, as cars grew popular, the oil industry boomed. Oil
became a key to power and wealth--and one of the major factors for
political and economic unrest in the Middle East. And here we are
today.
8. The Television. Wherever a television
set is on, it absorbs attention like no other piece of furniture. Jane
Healy, in her book Endangered Minds, says television has
changed the human brain itself. Our neural networks are not hardwired at
birth but continue to develop for several years, new circuits forming in
response to our first interactions with the environment. In much of the
developed world, young children interact largely with television, so
their neural networks hardwire to accommodate its warm, one-way,
pacifying, activity-dampening stimulus.
9. The Computer. Okay, look. I'll come
clean: My deepest, richest, most diverse, and rewarding relationship is
with my computer. It plays games with me, tells me jokes, plays music to
me, and does my taxes. I have great conversations with it, too. These
conversations appear as e-mail and take on the personalities of supposed
"friends," but the human embodiments of those
"friends" are rarely with me. My concrete relationship is with
this object on my desk (or in my lap). Anyway, when we can take the
equivalent of our own brains onto an airplane with us in an attaché
case, that's got to be shaping who we are in some important way.
10. Something New. So many seminal new
inventions are coming into their own right now that one of them surely
belongs on this list, but which one? The Internet represents the
emergence of a global brain, separate from all the human cells
contributing to it. Birth control will ultimately transform the role
women play in society and history--and any transformation in who women
are will force a transformation in men, too. Genetic engineering can
potentially complete the metamorphosis of people into products. There's
no telling what such an objectification of ourselves will do to us. And
what about virtual reality? It's bidding to dissolve the age-old
distinction between what is real and what is imaginary. I can't imagine
how that will change our lives--no, really, I can't. Imagine.
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