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The great inventions of Mankind

The young will probably expect to see frivolities such as the iPod included in this list. But we are only interested in major human advances.

1. Language? No. Language is innate. No society exists without a good working language. Language has evolved, probably over millions of years, as our intellectual abilities gradually increased. Even insects can communicate, maybe far better than we yet understand.

2. Writing? Yes. Writing was an invention. It’s difficult to envisage an ‘advanced’ society getting far without some kind of writing. But plenty of ‘less advanced’ peoples do very well.

3. The wheel? No question. The mind boggles at the thought of not having wheels. But the wheel is an old-world invention. No new-world civilisation had it. It’s interesting that it seems impossible to pin down who first came up with the idea, or even when or where they might have lived. Like other great Inventions, it appears to have been made by unsung folk well away from any centre of civilisation (Civilisation, good or bad?).

4. The arch? Probably. We don’t cover it elsewhere so we’ll go into it a bit here. This grossly undervalued engineering marvel was also an old-world invention. Again the new world didn’t have it. And again I’ve not been able to pin down when or where it was invented. The Phoenicians and early civilisations apparently had the arch. But they thought it a low-status technology, fit only for drains and culverts. To me this is sad. The Parthenon may be a wonder of ancient architecture. But it is crude and chunky compared with the soaring domes that the Romans achieved – or the glorious cathedrals, mosques and temples that came later The first people to appreciate the full potential of the arch were apparently the Etruscans. We don’t cover them. You will have to look on the Internet. The Romans took the arch to their hearts in a big way. Indeed, they could never have watered their cities without it. Nor could they have built the famous roads that were the arteries of their empire.

How does an arch stay up? It’s easy. If you make the blocks slightly trapezoidal (wider at the top) then no single block can be the first to drop out. You could grease the blocks and the arch would still stay up, though maybe it wouldn’t take as much weight. You can also use bricks and mortar, like this one on a canal near my home. The mortar is not there to glue the bricks together, although it does that to a certain extent. It’s there to fill in the gaps. A good brick arch can take enormous punishment before it actually falls down. Stone arches tend to have a ‘keystone’ or ‘capstone’ at the top. Some web sites attribute magical properties to the keystone. Without it, they say, the arch would collapse. Others describe it as purely an architectural feature – which makes much more sense. This bridge doesn’t bother with them. It’s just bricks and mortar all the way across.

5. Mathematics? This is a poser, because it’s terribly dependent on the notation you use. Can you imagine doing simple long-division using Roman numerals? (I’ve read that it’s possible.) The key to modern mathematics seems to be the adoption of Arabic notation – and, believe it or not, the invention of the ‘zero’. Incidentally I’ve read that both these key tools originally came from India. It may be that once you have these vital building blocks, the development of mathematics becomes inevitable. If so then it’s these two tools that are the great inventions, not the mathematics that stems from them.

6. The harnessing of steam and the railways? They would certainly be on my list. There’s no question that they transformed people’s lives in a big way. However if you follow the link you will detect certain lack of objectivity on the subject.

7. The computer? I would have said so. My working life covers both the before and the after. I still have slide rules and logarithm tables, to remind me what pre-computer life was like. In fact when I started out a ‘computer’ was a girl punching a mechanical adding machine. Incredible things they were too. They could even take square roots, an amazing achievement for a mechanical device. I also have a stack of old computer cards for use as shopping lists.

But after that, the fog descends. I would like to see those two boons, the word processor and the Internet, included. But maybe these will come to be regarded as inevitable developments of the original breakthrough. We may have to wait a hundred years before it becomes clear which if any subsequent developments deserve the accolade of Great invention.