Greatest Invention Ever?

[Lithp]

What do you think is the greatest invention ever and why do you think that? The wheel? Vaccines? Antibiotics? The Computer?

For me the greatest invention ever is the helicopter. I Can't think of anything that has saved so many lives and done so much good. From search and rescue missions to delivering food and supplies to the needy in hard to reach places just to name a very few good deeds this thing does, the helicopter is #1 in my books.

What do you think?

 

[#juan]

Ah yes, before the cavemen invented the helicopter, they had to walk everywhere, or take the bus or something. It was hell.....trying to be funny..... The helicopter was the result of many inventions, including fire, the wheel, internal combustion engines, and so on. I would say the wheel paved the way for many later inventions that we now take for granted... My answer would be the wheel.

 

[CDNBear]

I would have to say fire.

Without fire, the inventer of the wheel would have been in the dark all those late nights, pondering the processes of AutoCad.

lol.

Not to mention, without fire, how could we smoke Wild Game and Fish. Yummmmm.

 

[Sassylassie]

Gentlemen gentlemen, please fire and the helicopter nope it's the Wonder Bra fellas. :laughing7:

 

[CDNBear]

Gentlemen gentlemen, please fire and the helicopter nope it's the Wonder Bra fellas. :laughing7:

AAAAHHH, yes, to lift and separate. How could I be so blind, lmao.

 

[smilingfish]

Well fire is the most basic invention. And I would have to say, the greatest is computer. it started a brand new era.

 

[Kreskin]

The upside down ketchup bottle has to be in the top 20.

 

[Daz_Hockey]

For me, it was Holt and Spitz's one-way shunting device in the late 60's....saved or prolonged the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, like myself, with Hydrocephalus, who would otherwise either die in infancy, spend the rest of their lives hideously deformed and a vegetable........if they were lucky.

Although the device was a direct result of nazi "tests" by people like Megele, I have to say, without it, I would surely be dead, it's what's keeping me alive right now. So I thank those ingenious American fellows.

otherwise, the wheel or fire both seem sensible answers.....oh and the wonerdbra is a dirty, dirty trick that I think should come with a sign saying "contents may appear different once removed.".

 

[Kreskin]

Daz, good to see that it was a lifesaver for you.

 

[I think not]

I know a myriad of inventions had to come before this to make it happen (contemporary), but I have to say the airplane. I can almost remember the first time I saw one as a little boy, and today it has the same effect on me.

Hundreds of tons streaking effortlessly in the air.

It made the world smaller. What took months of travel in the past, became hours.

 

[Daz_Hockey]

I know a myriad of inventions had to come before this to make it happen (contemporary), but I have to say the airplane. I can almost remember the first time I saw one as a little boy, and today it has the same effect on me.

Hundreds of tons streaking effortlessly in the air.

It made the world smaller. What took months of travel in the past, became hours.

Have you seen the Wright flyer in the Smithsonian?...it's actually bigger than you'd think, I think that was probably one of the most under-rated things I saw, not only in washington, but in North America.

 

[I think not]

Have you seen the Wright flyer in the Smithsonian?...it's actually bigger than you'd think, I think that was probably one of the most under-rated things I saw, not only in washington, but in North America.

Yes, I've seen it.

Here it is;

 

[Daz_Hockey]

And you get to see such a earth shatteringly important device like that for free.......oh of course, they would like you to go downstairs and buy a MacDonalds, but Washington is great for stuff like that.

Although I dont understand why the great sea powers didnt realise as soon as that was invented, their Navys were effectivley defunct.

 

[I think not]

I agree with you, Washington DC is great for Musuems, as is New York. By the way, "free" is relative. You don't have to pay for admission, but it helps the museum, so you end up paying anyway.

And everything is a matter of tradition really. Shipping was the primary mode of transportation for thousands of years. Defunct or not, they're dam cool. Did you get a chance to see The USS Constitution by chance on your visit? It's pretty cool boarding an "active" war ship a couple of hundred years old.

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Very interesting question, and as usual I'm incapable of offering a simple answer.

I think fire has to be disqualified from consideration. It's not something humans invented, nature sets fire to things quite regularly with no help from us. What humans did was invent various ways to make it and control it, but it existed without us. An invention I think has to be something that wouldn't exist without us, so if you want to put fire on the list it has to be one of the technologies we use to create and control it, not fire itself. I'd also be inclined to restrict it to a single invention, not a product like a helicopter or a computer that's the result of multiple inventions over many years.

Frankly I doubt it's possible to make a compelling case for any single invention that everybody would agree is the greatest invention ever, unless you can convincingly argue that homo sapiens wouldn't have survived without it, or at a minimum that the lives of a majority of humans would have been nasty, coarse, brutish, and short, without it. Alternatively, we could argue that the greatest invention ever is the one that's made the greatest difference in the lives of the largest number of people, and I think that one's dead easy: it's the method of analysis and testing of ideas we call science. My grandparents' generation, for instance, was the first generation in human history that could routinely count on most of its children surviving to adulthood and most of its females surviving into old age instead of being taken out early by the stress of multiple childbirths, childbed fever, plain old wearing out, stuff like that. Birth control, infectious disease control, waste management, clean water... It all comes from the scientific understanding of the world around us.

Other candidates for the greatest invention ever:

cooking: it greatly increases the list of what's edible, and is an important factor in disease control

the basic caveman-type toolkit: knives, bows, arrows, spears, clubs, all the things that enabled our ancestors to bring down bigger game and protect themselves from predators.

language: it's a bit problematic whether this is a human invention or an inevitable consequence of evolution, but we are a social species and our sociability and progress are much enhanced by our being able to talk to each other and pass our knowledge along to the next generation, in great detail.

writing: this is the repository of the most successful human cultures, the way we preserve and pass on the thoughts of the best minds among us.

Any others you can think of? I've had a long and busy day, and I'm getting tired and running out of ideas. Maybe we could try for a top ten list instead of a single invention?

 

[Daz_Hockey]

Nope, I didn't, I boarded several US vessels in portsmouth a couple of weeks before I left last time at naval regatta, but that looks like one of the ships that used to irritate the hell out of the Royal navy.

Back to my point though, I cant be the only one who thinks the wonderbra is an illusionary device created by statan can I?

 

[#juan]

Gentlemen gentlemen, please fire and the helicopter nope it's the Wonder Bra fellas. :laughing7:

It wasn't the Wonder bra exactly. It was the wonderful thumb and indexfinger catch on the back.:read2:

 

[Curiosity]

Dexter

I had never considered the shunt as one of the best inventions but when I consider that it has given you the ability to survive and share time with us - reading all your terrific responses and thought - I'm inclined to vote for that one on a list of many great inventions....

My vote

It is similar to "fire" in that it is not manmade but has affected humankind greatly....the thumb.

 

[TomG]

I watch the occasional old movie, and I think women in the era of lift and separate sort of looked like they were wearing horizontal dunce caps. The effect seemed to have spawned a generation of naughty adolescent cartoonists who thought that a breast looks like what’s under a ‘50’s sweater. I don’t think I’d rank lift and separate as wonderful, but that’s just my perspective.

I read a historian in the ‘60’s that made a case for inventions that changed the course of western history (I suppose ‘changed course’ is as easy to give meaning to as ‘greatest). The historian’s top two were the horse collar and the stirrup. The horse collar since horses could be used in agriculture as well as warfare. Horses are faster than oxen and their use produced greater food production while using less human labour. The freed up labour could be utilized for other purposes--which then as now usually meant conquering your neighbours. Labour that became surplus to food production could specialize in becoming professional soldiers or bureaucrats. Better fed, trained and administered armies became very good at conquering their neighbours. Tax collection became very efficient.

The stirrup was important also for reasons of warfare. It enabled soldiers to fight from horseback while using heavy weapons. The Roman Cavalry were more like mobile infantry. They rode to where they were going and then dismounted. Chariots weren’t that great.

So, we owe our wonderful present life style and nation states to the hose collar and the stirrup. I think maybe the historian had a one tracked mind but maybe Internet will undo some of the damage that resulted from the horse collar and stirrup falling into irresponsible hands.

 

[#juan]

I would have to say fire.

Without fire, the inventer of the wheel would have been in the dark all those late nights, pondering the processes of AutoCad.

lol.

Not to mention, without fire, how could we smoke Wild Game and Fish. Yummmmm.

True, and the cell phones didn't work worth a damn in the caves..