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What took us from living in caves to being an advanced, multi-lingual, intelligent species?
It has a lot to do with just a handful of extremely crucial inventions.
Let's take a look at the incredible inventions that played the biggest parts in advancing
the human race.
1.
Fist up is fire.
Okay it's not strictly an invention, more a discovery.
But being the first source of warmth for humans, it's importance cannot go un-noted.
It's estimated that fire was discovered 1.8 million years ago.
And it set the wheels in motion, as it was the basis for energy for years to come.
2.
Speaking of wheels.
It wasn't until 3,500 BC when humans finally invented the wheel.
The wheel proved to be such a crucial component of the advancement of the human race, so why
did it take humans so long to invent it?
I mean by 3500 BC it was already the Bronze Age, humans were casting metal alloys, building
sailboats and even complex musical instruments such as the harp.
So what took them so long.
Well the problem with the wheel, was not getting a cylindrical object to roll on its side,
anyone could do that.
It was attaching that cylinder to a stationary platform, so it could move freely and independently,
without rolling off down the hill.
This is known as the wheel and axle design, to achieve this a lot of factors have to be
gotten right.
Such as, the circumference of the axels has to be perfectly smooth, as does the hole in
the centre of the wheel, otherwise there will be too much friction and the wheels won't
turn.
Even more challenging, the axels had to fit snuggly inside the wheels, but not too snuggly
or they won't rotate freely.
Inventors would also need access to very large slabs of wood from a large tree in order to
carve a large wheel from it.
The wheel was certainly a huge challenge; all these factors and more are why humans
took so long to invent the wheel.
It's not something that would have happened overnight and it likely only happened once,
but once it was discovered, it spread very quickly over the rest of Europe.
The wheel's most likely birthplace was either Eastern Europe or Mesopotamia, but historians
can't agree on a precise location.
The wheel was so vitally important because it gave birth to modern day farming, which
made us less nomadic and freed up people's time so they could focus on discovering new
inventions.
3.
Imagine you're far out at sea, traveling to a far off land, the ocean currents are pulling
your boat in every direction, you no longer know which way is north, south, east or west,
you have nothing but your boat to guide you.
What happens?
You will probably end up going gravely off course, or even more likely just go round
and round in circles for days, until you run out of water and die at sea.
This was what happened to many a sailor in the thousands of years between the invention
of the boat and a navigational device.
The world was full of people getting lost at sea and the whole thing was a bloody mess.
Until the 11th century when Han dynasty China invented the very first maritime compass.
The first compass used a lodestone, which is a naturally magnetised iron ore.
The compass quickly spread throughout the rest of the world via maritime contact.
And so finally people could safely traverse the seas, and travel far away from their homelands
to distant new worlds, opening up new trade routes and starting the Age of Discovery.
4.
Knowledge is power.
It was the desire for knowledge that took us from being hunter gatherers to where we
are now.
Nothing excels the technological advancement of a species more than the sharing of knowledge.
But in the 15th century how would you go about sharing knowledge?
There's no internet or phones.
So people relied on books.
But for many centuries books had to be painstakingly hand written, one by one.
This meant book were very expensive and knowledge was severely limited for the majority of the
population and for a long time this proved to be a major brick wall, standing in the
way of the progress of mankind.
What was really needed was an abundance of books so human knowledge could be shared freely
and quickly.
And that's what the much needed printing press gave to the human race when it was invented
in the 15th century.
Although the first movable type system was created in 11th century Song Dynasty China,
the complexity of the Chinese writing system stopped it from gaining much traction.
It wasn't until the 15th century when Johannes Gutenberg invented the first western movable
type printing press in Germany, that the idea of mass printing really caught on.
Gutenberg cast individual letters and punctuation marks out of various metals, which was a vast
improvement on the Chinese system that used wooden blocks.
Gutenberg's printing press exponentially increased the speed at which copies of books could be
made, which led to a rapid increase in the spread of knowledge across Europe.
5.
In 1859 a Belgian engineer called Étienne Lenoir created one of the most revolutionary
pieces of engineering to date, the internal combustion engine.
This engineering masterpiece replaced the dated steam engine to become the de-facto
standard for powering the world's machinery and transportation systems.
The internal combustion engine works by burning fuel in a combustion chamber, the high pressure
gas which is created then pushes a piston, thereby transforming chemical energy into
useful mechanical energy.
The internal combustion engine gave birth to countless modern technologies but most
notably modern cars and aircraft.
6.
Next up is the telephone.
Although it had many pioneers it was Alexander Graham Bell who was awarded the first patent
for the electric telephone in 1876.
Bell's goal was to make a telephone that was affordable to everyone, before this electric
communication such as the electric telegraph were horrendously expensive and were only
used by the very wealthy.
Bell changed this, and very soon there was a telephone in nearly every home, business
and learning institution.
This enabled instantaneous communication and revolutionised the way we communicate with
the rest of the world.
The telephone catalysed international business and accelerated human learning.
In later years the telephone system would also become the building blocks for the internet.
7.
Next up is the very foundation that powers the entire world we live in today, electricity.
Human's have always been aware of electricity and its power.
Ancient Egyptian texts dating back to 2750 BC talk about people getting shocks from electric
fish such as Catfish and the Electric Ray.
But it wasn't until Thomas Edison created the first practical, long-lasting electric
light bulb in 1879, that electricity transformed from being just a scientific curiosity to
an essential tool for modern life.
Following Edison's invention a whole multitude of other electrical devices quickly followed
in the years to come.
Nothing has altered the face of technology like the discovery and practical applications
of electrical power.
8.
In 1928 a Scottish scientist called Alexander Fleming was experimenting with bacteria in
his laboratory when he discovered something that would change the world.
He noticed that one of his petri dishes filled with bacteria had become contaminated with
mould, and everywhere the mould had spread the bacteria was dead.
What was this mysterious mould that had the ability to stop bacteria dead in its tracks,
it turned out to be a fungus called Penicillium.
Over the next two decades chemists purified the fungus and eventually turned it into the
drug penicillin, the worlds first antibiotic.
Penicillin proved to be the magic bullet for a whole load of previously deadly diseases,
this new miracle cure could fight off infections without doing any harm to most humans.
Fleming's discovery forever changed the way we treat diseases.
9.
British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage invented the first computer in the
year 1832 it contained processors which Babbage called "mills" and a memory which he called
the "store", just like in modern computers.
But unfortunately Babbage was way ahead of his time, it wouldn't be until over 100 years
later in 1971 when the world's first personal computer was manufactured and sold.
It was called the Kenbak-1 and sold for $750.
Ever since then computer technology has accelerated at an unprecedented rate and subsequently
so has human knowledge and our technological accomplishments.
Just like the abacus did thousands of years ago, the personal computer outsourced the
task of complex mathematics and problem solving to machines.
The computer was so influential to human development that it accelerated us into a brand new age,
the information age.
10.
And finally, you can't talk about the personal computer, without, of course talking about
the internet.
No other invention has shaped the way we go about our daily lives, as much as the internet.
We now heavily rely on the internet for shopping, business, relationships, entertainment, creativity
and general human communications.
English computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 whilst
working at CERN, he then wrote the very first HTTP web client and server in 1990.
Berners-Lee also founded the World Wide Web Consortium, which is responsible for maintaining
the international standards for URLs, HTTP, HTML and CSS, or to put it more simply, the
technology that the entire internet runs on.
We still use those same standards and technologies to this day.
So, in a movement that could be considered both scary and exciting at the very same time,
the internet changed human kind like nothing before it, and as the internet and the way
we use it evolves every year, so too, does the human race.
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