Asklemmy

Plumbing. I could live without almost every modern comfort but a flushable toilet

It’s a toss up: either chalkboards or dry erase boards. Both are remarkable.

Writing. Being able to record facts, thoughts, and stories that can be (mostly) read thousands of miles away and thousands of years later changed civilisation.

Technically I would say the harnessing and utilization of fire. It arguably changed our evolution requiring less energy to digest food.

The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can't take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.

Glasses. The ability to see so much better than I otherwise could leaves me astonished every time I put them on.

Vaccines

I'm always blown away by how discoveries like antibiotics changed our lives. And writing too. Mind blowing that we can record, discern, and communicate so much information from marks on a surface

One I didn't see yet: Radio.

Less than 150 years old, and has vitally changed how we communicate, and has downstream effects on every other human activity.

Kind of magical having streams of information travelling all around us.

Writing, it allowed for knowledge to travel across vast distances. And for that knowledge to remain available and accurate for far longer than any oral tradition would be capable of.

It's pretty damn hard to pick just one thing, so my best-of list

There's really basic foundational things like the wheel, cutting tools, fire (if we want to count it as an invention,) string/rope/cordage, writing, clothing, cooking, agriculture, metalworking, etc. the sort of things that are absolutely basic building blocks of civilization.

Moving a few milenia up, and in no particular order,

the Haber Process to synthesize ammonia, which allowed for the creation of synthetic fertilizers. If you've eaten any commercially grown food in the last century, you probably owe it to the Haber Process.

Antibiotics are another big one, as are vaccines.

Vaucason's lathe arguably laid the foundation for a whole lot of fabrication techniques that led to the industrial revolution

Refrigeration

Steam engines and later internal combustion engines

Clocks

Compasses

Printing press

The telephone

Airplanes

Computers and the internet

Cameras

Antibiotics. Turned so many lethal wounds into minor cuts.

This was the topic of discussion between an historian, a mathematician and a mystic.

The historian said, "writing. The ability to put words on paper to be communicated to people who never even met the 'speaker', is the single greatest achievement of mankind."

The mathematician said, "no, numbers. The ability to express and develop truly abstract concepts, which in turn leads to Incredible real applications. Numbers are the single greatest invention of mankind."

The mystic said, "the Thermos flask."

"The Thermos flask?"

"The Thermos flask. It keeps hot drinks hot in the winter, and cold drinks cold in the summer. But think - that little flask - how does it know?"

In Electronics world? Bipolar junction Transistors. Easily.

This led into having portable devices we have today.

Back then people used vacuum tubes for switching and amplification; of which were very expensive to run (used a lot of power when idle, while having a very short lifespan of less than 48 hrs).

I mean, vacuum tubes where phenomenal when they came, allowed first long distance calls in 1915.

Look at my phone now, fits on my hands, and has billions of transistors!

Post script: lately I've been thinking, what if we remove cell towers as middle men? Because nowadays privacy is somewhat dead. People have been using radio frequency for walkie-talkies even before 1st generation communication (1G) was a thing.

This video enlightened my day 😊

It's just a matter of time now

Soap easily. God the lives it saved and continues to save easily makes it the best invention imo

The Fast Fourier Transform.

HANDS DOWN CAPSLOCK

The atomic theory of matter, because It is so foundational to the technology of the modern world. It allowed the development of modern chemistry, and with it pharmaceuticals, chemical engineering (e.g. the Haber-Bosch process), electronics/semiconductors, genomics, medical science, and more. It's been an enormous force-multiplier to improve technologies we already had by providing prospective insight into how they work, so we can do better than iterative trial and error. Virtually everything that we touch or use in a day, from coffee to clothing to computers, was enabled or improved through knowledge of the system of atomic elements.

I would argue fire. Its arguably the gate technology and higher brain power.

Probably the steam engine as far as actual innovation and all but my answer is air conditioning

Anesthetics. Yeah, vaccines are cool, but given the choice of a world without vaccines and a world without anesthetic I'm ditching vaccines every time.

Agricolture.
It's what brought us working together in the first place, shifting our habits from nomadic to sedentary and started the concept of civilization.

Bread.

I love bread.

Gotta be vaccines for me.

Either fire or the wheel. Not sure which I would place higher. But both really are the two greatest inventions/discoveries. Without either you basically don't have future discoveries or inventions.

The Internet.

Computers do a lot of things. But the Internet specifically is the aspect of the computer that revolutionized the world.

Didn't see it in the thread, but aqueduct are pretty fire. They allowed empires to grow large and far away from a source of drinking water. Also improved sanitation allowing people to live longer and healthier.

The bicycle.

Hear me out:
Before the invention of the bicycle, the vast majority of the population had no means of personal transport other than their feet, and anything further away than the nearest market might as well have been in China, cause neither a farmer nor a worker with a family can just take more than a day off.
This meant that almost no one ever travelled further than 30km from their home.
With the bicycle, the world that most of humanity got to experience became 20x bigger.
People met other people further away, experienced new ideas, could travel outside of the immediate influence of their landlord or master, could marry someone who isn't a cousin...

No other invention ever before opened up the world of the average person quite like this one.

The bicycle created demand to build a dense network of smooth roads even in the countryside, brought workers to factories, and gave women more freedom. It was one of the main factors that pushed the industrial revolution.

Language. The ability to communicate advanced concepts is what has enabled us invent/discover a lot of things, including the computer.

Photography! I'm not even into it, but when I look at an old picture it always amazes me we're able to freeze moments in time.

Printing Press

I have a list of things that transcend invention and are actually some of humans greatest achievements:

• The bicycle
• The piano
• The internet
• Saturn V

It's hard to choose, but I would say the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production. It's a miracle of chemistry that almost single-handedly vaporized the population doomers. As much as half of the nitrogen in your body comes from Haber-process-derived synthetic fertilizer!

Soap

Cordage/string. Way more useful than fire and arguably predates it.

At first I thought you were talking about dating lmao

Hmm I definitely agree that computers, and especially smartphones, are pretty damn amazing inventions.

But I agree with another poster when it comes to the greatest invention. When we invented the printing press, it allowed our species to develop much quicker because we were able to share information/education much better.