What do you consider the most important invention of all time?

[MyWarmOchreHare]

Have been pondering this and wondered what others thought. I know many stand on the shoulders of others, but what do people think?

The internet? Radio or TV? Cars, planes, steam engines? The flushing toilet? Clocks or watches? Wheels? Washing machines? Ships? Paper? Mobile phones? I keep coming back to the wrist watch.

Then people start to figure out fulcrums, winches, pulleys. Applied physics!

Antibiotics

Imagine a pre anaesthesia world! 😱

Do you have some scientific evidence to support that hypothesis?

I can't imagine a hunter-gatherer lifestyle was exactly conducive to either good health, or giving women freedom to make their own choices in life.

Depends what you mean by health really.

Could we have got to the discovery of antibiotics without the invention of the wheel?

My dc and I sometimes try to figure out which animal we can remove from the earth without upsetting the entire ecosystem. Sadly it's dogs 🤷🏼‍♂️

Or humans?

I remember my Dad telling me in the 70s that electric cars were possible. And that one day there would be a computer in every house. The 20th century had exponential progress in communication.

Paper tissues.

I often wonder how many of these things were invented and used locally but were never passed on. People only know about inventions when wealthy people documented them or they were implemented on a large scale, which could only be achieved by landowners or wealthy classes.

Mumsnet

Writing, Mathematics and Algebra.

Clean water

Vaccination

Anti-biotics

I was replying to someone else who suggested that people were healthier before the advent of agriculture, so maybe ask them?

First electric car was invented in 1832. First PCs were sold in the early 70s.

Transportation starting with the wheel
Medicine

Transportation starting with the wheel

Transportation started with the domestication of horses, which were then used for riding and carrying goods. The wheel came in handy later on, after carts were invented.😂

When it comes to inventions... maybe the saddle and bridle should be right up there.

I had an Usborne book about electricity from the 1970s, which described "electric cars of 1997". In that description however, cars were not recharged at home, but you took the car to a "filling station" which swapped an old battery for a charged one. I suppose the thinking then was that they would take days to charge.

It’s got to be the wheel.

Fire and Electricity aren’t inventions as has been said. The skills to manipulate them aren’t really inventions either, although semiconductors, capacitors and resistors have played a big part with electricity.

Mathematics (discovery or invention?) undoubtedly played a big part with our evolution, esp Pythagoras.

Paper, or rather papyrus transformed writing and language.

Steam power

The refining of fossil fuels to give us the internal combustion engine too.

Nuclear power- again, not sure if discovery or invention

And most recently; AI. Definitely an invention.

As to which is the most important; I guess you’ll have to travel into the future a few thousand years once we’ve wiped ourselves out and make that call..

In other countries there are systems of battery swapping and it might take off further here. There are several companies working on it. It means batteries would probably have to be standardised further than they are.

It only seems obvious because we see them around (!) all the time.

Controlled fire.

First - the wheel
Second - the steam engine

The one thing that should NEVER have been invented is religion - the cause of most of the World's problems over the centuries.

In reality this would have been simply to be at the right place when an Eg lightning strike or volcanic eruption took place..

And wave some wood about in the right direction. So not really an invention.

could it be argued that religion wasn’t invented, it’s always been there?

My add would be the wheel.