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Most Important Invention/Discovery

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spec

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There have been many inventions and discoveries that have had a major impact on our lives. In your opinion which is the most important and far reaching: the wheel, penicillin, the aeroplane, the motorcar, paper & writing, or even the transistor. I think I know what it is, What do yo think?

spec
 
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Okay... For real..

I think some of the inventions / discoveries of late put us backwards not forwards... Take the transistor... Great invention..... But look at our society now... People can't do jack without it... If I took my daughters IPhone away, WOW.. She wouldn't be able to do anything..... Forwards??? I don't think so!!
 
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Take the transistor... Great invention..... But look at our society now... People can't do jack without it... If I took my daughters IPhone away, WOW.. She wouldn't be able to do anything..... Forwards??? I don't think so!!
An interesting thought.
However if an IPhone were to be built from discrete transistors, it would be rather large and use a lot of power.
To make the IPhone, you have to consider several generations of integrated circuits, each using a rather different technology from the original germanium point contact transistors.

Which brings me on to my view of the question "What is the most important invention /discovery?"
It is an impossible question to answer.
Most inventions/discoveries are based on bringing together two or more existing ideas.

JimB
 
Clothes.
How much of the world would we have colonised without them? And then, harsher climates have driven invention from then on.
 
Electricity - without it even today we would be plunged back into the dark ages.

What about metal extraction from ore? Without that, you wouldn't have metals to use as conductors, so electricity would be all but useless.

For that matter, what about fire? Without fire, metal smelting would never have been discovered.
 
All true but electricity has the most impact and far reaching affects on our lives, almost every person on the planet relies on it.
 
Writing.
Before affordable writing, information like (how do I build something) was handed down from father to son, and kept a well guarded secret.
To become a plumber, you had to apprentice for years. After affordable books you could just buy a book. The printing press spread information world wide much like the internet today.

Writing------communication. Is where a idea is no longer in the head of one man but potentially in the head of 1000s or millions. Ideas no longer get lost with death. With each idea spread out over the world, 1000s of people can add and improve and modify, then pass it along to the next 1000s of people. Information builds on old ideas.

Even the patent department was built for the purpose of spreading ideas to the masses. (not allowing ideas to be kept a secret) Most people think patents are to keep ownership of knowledge but it is to stop the secrets (after a time period).
 
Fire.
Okay, it shouldn't be called invention, because it's a phenomenon, but if you stay just a few moments and think, you will agree that the human's ability to use the fire was one of the most important achievements of mankind. With it, our ancestors could cook better, could make TOOLS out of metals and survive in winter, eliminating the need of migrating to other warmer places. This way, communities were born and from there many things happened. Imagine the life without fire: no electricity, no heat in our comfortable houses, cooking would be a lot harder... so the conclusion is tha the fire is probably the greatest discovery of all times.
It's just an idea, you can criticize me...

Andrei
 
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Fire.
Okay, it shouldn't be called invention, because it's a phenomenon, but if you stay just a few moments and think, you will agree that the human's ability to use the fire was one of the most important achievements of mankind. With it, our ancestors could cook better, could make TOOLS out of metals and survive in winter, eliminating the need of migrating to other warmer places. This way, communities were born and from there many things happened. Imagine the life without fire: no electricity, no heat in our comfortable houses, cooking would be a lot harder... so the conclusion is tha the fire is probably the greatest discovery of all times.
It's just an idea, you can criticize me...

Andrei

No criticism from me. The title is "Most Important Invention/Discovery". Fire was a discovery, so it fits.
 
Writing.
Before affordable writing, information like (how do I build something) was handed down from father to son, and kept a well guarded secret.
To become a plumber, you had to apprentice for years. After affordable books you could just buy a book. The printing press spread information world wide much like the internet today.

Writing------communication. Is where a idea is no longer in the head of one man but potentially in the head of 1000s or millions. Ideas no longer get lost with death. With each idea spread out over the world, 1000s of people can add and improve and modify, then pass it along to the next 1000s of people. Information builds on old ideas.

Even the patent department was built for the purpose of spreading ideas to the masses. (not allowing ideas to be kept a secret) Most people think patents are to keep ownership of knowledge but it is to stop the secrets (after a time period).

close :cool:
 
Fermenting of grains and fruit.
I have heard that farming is the first industry. Then they needed a way to store fruit and grain so fermenting solves that.
Men (farmers) would have never collected fruit and fermented it except they needed a way to pay the hoers. Coins had not been invented yet.
 
If you go back to the beginning of human history, that's hard to say, since many important invention/discoveries was often build on a previous invention/discovery.
In the last century I would say the development of electronics and all the followed.
It's amazing to me that the first crude triode vacuum tube (valve) amplifier was build only a little over a hundred years ago.
Going from one tube to being able to put billions of transistors in the same space (and probably using no more power) in a century is mind-boggling.
 
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