Some of the Best Inventions. Some of the greatest inventions have been pretty simple and yet when applied to machinery and such have truly advanced the human race. One of the things I am talking about is the lever. You have to wonder when this was first discovered. Did a cave man need to move a rock which was far too heavy to do by himself? Perhaps he wanted to block a cave entrance to keep out wild animals while he and his family slept. He could have watched the rock for days and even months before having a brain storm and using a large tree limb to move the object. When he did it and when other cavemen came around did they think he was a genius and hold a party for him? Was this the beginning of large rocks being moved everywhere? I guess the wheel will go down as the GREATEST invention ever. Imagine if we didn’t have it. Most of our machines would not exist since so many depend on wheels to run. How would you drive your car if it had no wheels and no engine because that also uses wheels? There would be no transmission because, yes you guessed it, it also uses a form of wheels. This reminds me of the commercial where there are triangular wheels on an ancient wagon and they can’t figure out why it doesn’t move. There have been some areas where wheels have been replaced such as hover craft which can skim across water and land on a cushion of air. The dial wheel on our old telephones has been replaced on our cell phone with a touch pad. The wheel to advance film on our cameras has been deleted since there is no film to advance. Even the wheel on our televisions which was used to change the channels is gone. There may come a time when wheels will become obsolete. One of the most important inventions was more of a thought than a device. It was the invention of the zero. The Romans were one of the most advanced races of their time, but they had no zero which made doing mathematical operations much harder and yet look at what they accomplished. Anyway, their system for counting money was complex. In the middle ages the Roman system was still used by some but they had added the word nulla which meant none. This simplified things a lot. The Romans had adopted a lot of things from the Greeks and held them in high esteem even though they conquered them and put many into slavery. One of the greatest status symbols for a Roman was having a Greek slave. The Greeks knew about zero but never used it. Aristotle dismissed it because you could not divide by it. I just have to list fire. There are many different ideas on how fire was harnessed. One of my favorites is cavemen saw a lightning bolt ignite a fire and quickly put some of this into a container and then kept a fire going because if it ever went out, they didn’t know how to start it again, so being keeper of the fire would have been a great responsibility. We don’t know if any of that is true, but it makes a great story. The discovery of fire was just so important. It allowed us to cook our food, harden weapons and even use fire itself as a weapon and a way to keep wild animals away from camps and caves. If they did have a keeper of the flame one has to wonder how he was selected. Did they pick the person they thought was the most reliable, or the most popular because this person might have held great sway with the tribe? People used to succumb to bacterial disease in large numbers, then in 1928 a doctor named Fleming in Scotland invented penicillin which some say completely transformed medicine. It ushered in the era of antibiotics. Today our antibiotics are beginning to fail us and we are looking at many other ways to achieve the same result without antibiotics. One invention which I wish we never would have invented, but is one of the greatest is nuclear fission. When it was invented in a crash program in the United States which involved tens of thousands of people no one knew if it would even work. We used it to create an atom bomb and while scientists kept their fingers crossed, we fired it off and it did work. The Japanese in World War Two had hidden many thousands of planes and swore to defend their island and we had calculated we could suffer a million casualties and deaths if we invaded so we dropped an atom bomb on Japan. They didn’t surrender and we only had one more atom bomb left and dropped it. The Japanese didn’t know it was our last one, so in the face of tremendous devastation finally gave up. One of the dreams of mankind for many centuries was being able to fly through the sky. Many ideas were put forth and in 1842 the plans for a flying steam carriage were patented. Ten years later a steam engine was attached to a dirigible and it was flown over Paris. Many attempts were made at steam powered flight. People are still arguing about if controlled flight was attained in 1890 by Clement Ader flying his steam powered plane. There was several others who attempted steam powered flight, but as we know the ones who finally got credit for powered flight were the Wright Brothers with their combustion engine powered plane. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention mass produced books. Today maybe I should say digital books, but the method of production of books is not as important as the books themselves. This allowed us to read the ideas of others and this has changed the world. One of the reasons the Nazis burned all the books was they didn’t want their people reading about foreign ideas or what they were really doing. Moveable type played a big part in massive book production. The Chinese were the first to mass produce books and then the Gutenberg Printing Press with movable metal type changed things in the western world. My list of the greatest inventions will never be agreed on by everyone because many people have their own ideas on the subject, but I bet at least some inventions will be agreed upon. If one was to make a list of the hundred best inventions, I bet most of them would appear on other’s lists.
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