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.

Re. electricity, think about lightning ⚡🌩️🙂

Vaccines

This is a salient reminder of how incredibly clever human beings are.

Ah yes, Snow is a good call. And of course more recently Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin were both British as well and ultimately will probably have as big a role (or bigger) the their illustrious predecessors (we'll ignore James Watson and Maurice Wilkins and their part in discovering the structure of DNA - can't be doing with furriners helping out with discoveries).

Florence Nightingale too.

You think humans invented electricity and think the wrist watch might be the most important invention of all time, and you also think you would have been ahead of the game in coming up with the wheel. Sorry just made me chuckle.

The watch is an important invention. Until the invention of the watch, people had to find clocks on churches etc, and time varied between towns. The watch led to the coordination of train travel, shift work, military coordination and so on.

I also think I’d have stuck the wheels on suitcases much earlier too.

Electricity

I have been thinking. It would be quite nice to thought of in history as a great inventor and my own innovation, which I call the, "Doctozap" in which your medical symptoms would be transmitted to the health care professional via Elon Musk's Neurolink brain chip is very much a work in progress.

We can't have

Oh, I pressed the wrong button and cut myself off. Anyway. "Doctozap" is one of my ideas. I admit it needs refining for ethical puposes.

I dont think the wrist watch did that just clocks in general. Communication was the big thing needed to link people or towns/cities/countries. E.g radio communication, phones and now internet.

Calendars

Clean water, treated and piped into homes.
Safe disposal and forward treatment of foul water.

No, it needed watches. Each town’s clocks were slightly different to each other before the watch.

Im going to add pottery to my list, whenever there's pottery found during a dig they wet their pants over it 😇

Already been said but the more I think of it the more I realise the printing press changed everything. Sharing information and knowledge, educating people, influencing power and culture, it was the very first form of media. Before this each town and village was isolated.

Gunpowder. Whoever had their hands on this won the battles, then the wars and ultimately control of the world.

So for a brief moment in history a wrist watch made it easier to make sure that all clocks are showing the right time so that all town clocks, wall clocks and wrist watches are all showing the right time (apart from when they would need wound up/new batteries) is what you think is the most important invention?

I'm not that old, (48) but you had to have a watch in my young day. You set in a "Few minutes before" to make sure that you weren't late for work or the children weren't late for school, or you didn't miss the train.

Being late was a cardinal sin.

Fire

Agriculture means living in close proximity to domesticated animals. Lots more diseases transmitted from one species to another. Humans were taller before we developed agriculture. I think that's the combined effect of more disease and a change in diet - a lot more grain, less protein, far less variety of fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts etc than when we were hunter gatherers.

I posted on this earlier.

What 😆 this is nonsense.

One day they’ll dig up my shit pottery and discuss how thick and uneven the walls are demonstrating it was probably made by a child.

Still - look on the bright side, with a reliable source of food available so that every waking moment wasn't entirely taken up with either finding something to eat or defending themselves against large predators trying to eat them, they had more time on their hands to sit and think.

They were able to find time for such things as developing more sophisticated languages and methods of making a permanent records of thoughts and ideas, increasing their understanding of mathematics, coming up with the concept of barter and money, learning how to crush rocks and heat them up to extract metals, making things out of that metal, using metal implements to fashion things out of wood, using a combination of wood & metal and inventing the wheel...

As @orangewaspsays, the printing press was revolutionary, and so was the telephone.

In my recent lifetime, the invention of the SatNav has made a big impact and made travel so much easier.