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.

Although there are possibly some draw backs I'm happy to be living in a period of civilisation. For me the benefits far outweigh the negatives, but appreciate it's potentially unfair for some.

Yes I was very independent as a child but still never needed a watch. But my mum was pretty laid back so we would just go out to play/explore and just came home when we got tired or fed up or hungry. Walking to school took 30 minutes but you would just check the time before you left home.

Ah come on , it’s inventions , not invention , & there’s a lot hell of a lot of fields ..

Yes writing is a good one. Vaccinations also for something global. On a more mundane day to day basis I'm glad we have lightbulbs.

Okay. Well, thanks for that. Very insightful.

Antibiotics and vaccinations

That’s ok , you’re welcome 😂 😂

Yes, the constant re-capping drives me nuts. Five minutes at the start telling us what they're going to say - just get on and say it! I'm sure Horizon wasn't like that back in the 1970s.

Penicillin

I agree that too many programmes do the constant recaps. Even worse on advert channels as it’s a recap each time after a break :( so annoying
Anyway , the wheel aside , so many things have been discovered or invented it’s hard to pin down the most important, but when they don’t work we do miss them. Some things we can’t live without and it’s a scary thought how we rely on them working.

The container - bowl, bag, pot, pouch, cup, basket, cooking vessel ... the idea that you could make a thing to put stuff in.

The more people you gather, the lower you have to aim.

1970s-era BBC2 was so niche you'd need a diving suit and flashlight to find it. Especially on a Saturday afternoon (when they repeated Horizon). Hence me turning up at middle school next Monday asking about quarks and if we could make some in class.

Nowdays that 50 minute no-nonsense "let's just deal with the science" programme would probably be a 3 part BBC4 series with slow-mo, balloons, flutey music and some sort of "angle". Maybe getting a personality to look suitably baffled or impressed depending on the lighting.

Yes.

living in a country with 50 degree heat i would 100% electricity.

There is also the possibility that natural selection was at play. Taller people were the ones more likely to survive as hunter-gatherers, since they could see their prey over longer distances, throw spears further, had long legs and could run faster, therefore more likely to reproduce and pass on that characteristic. But with the advent of agriculture, the short of stature were less disadvantaged and were able to survive long enough to pass their 'short' genes on. That would bring the average height of the population down over time.

Just a thought.

Possibly although the information available seems to suggest it was to do with a period of increased disease and restricted diet. Both not a problem anymore hence we are now taller again.

There is also the possibility that natural selection was at play. Taller people were the ones more likely to survive as hunter-gatherers, since they could see their prey over longer distances, throw spears further, had long legs and could run faster, therefore more likely to reproduce and pass on that characteristic. But with the advent of agriculture, the short of stature were less disadvantaged and were able to survive long enough to pass their 'short' genes on. That would bring the average height of the population down over time.

Yet one of the hunter-gatherer groups to maintain that lifestyle into the modern age, the San, are very short. So are the Yanomami and inuit on average. It's probably more complex than height being an advantage for hunting, and depends on multiple factors like the climate, availability of water, what you're hunting and how, and the dangers to you of being spotted by wildlife.

Some are! I have always thought if it had been up to me to work things out hominids would still be swinging around in the trees, if they'd not become extinct in the mean time. I'm not bad at using other people's inventions, but that blue sky thinking stuff is not me.

Its absolutely amazing what human beings have achieved. Its mind blowing a lot of it. Exploring space, deep underwater, the internet, global TV, our understanding of DNA, history and time, surgery, complex languages the list is endless. A few very intelligent people then teaching others and groups of people working together to come up with ideas and solutions, knowledge being passed on and things constantly improving and becoming more advanced.

Cooking
Agriculture
Hygiene
Vaccinations
Printing

Humans carry each other forward.

Penicillin

No, it wasn't. I was also an avid watcher of The World About Us.

Thank goodness Sir David Attenborough made Life on Earth when he did.

It wasn’t the invention of the wristwatch that standardised time. The standardisation of time was forced by the pressures of shipping and train schedules. There were master clocks, which took their time from observatories (eg Greenwich) and slave clocks which were connected to the master.

In Dublin, for a period there were two time zones, as one set of clocks were tuned to Greenwich (English time) and another to Dunsink (Irish time) with twenty something minutes in between. After independence the govt settled on English time to avoid a difference with the North.

The internet has driven even more precision as international stock markets can now coordinate to the second. I still think of time in quarter hour segments and it drives my dc daft if I say it’s nearly a quarter to four, and they’ll correct me and say, it’s 17 minutes to four.

The invention of the wheel may be part of the story of time, but there were many ways to measure time that didn’t rely on wheels. It fascinates me how time can be (and was) conceived differently in the past. Particularly as I have adhd and time doesn’t tick the same way in my brain!

It’s also fascinating how much was achieved without the wheel. Newgrange was built without the benefit of wheels or horses, using stone quarried from miles away. And the roof is still dry, thousands of years later! There’s a theory that the wheel could have been invented as a child’s toy.

I certainly agree on the point about over-reliance on tech. The cashless society is all very well…. Until your WiFi goes down, your phone is stolen, or you are de-monied because the government does not like you. We’ve seen it happen when whole supermarkets have been down for a day, and very recently the entire Post office Horizon software was down across the entire country, enhancing its bad reputation even further.