Curious droid presents 7 key inventions that shaped the modern world.
The world is filled with amazing inventions but as Isaac Newton once
stated "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" and
this applies to the 7 key inventions in this video which if any one of these had
not occurred
our modern world would look very different to how we see it today.
Number 1 This first invention on our list is probably the most fundamental of
all the ones here for without this one
all but one of the following inventions would not have been possible.
Electricity had been known about since the Greeks and Benjamin Franklin had
shown the relationship between electricity and lightning but it was
Michael Faraday with his research into electromagnetism and then later the
invention of the electric dynamo in 1831 which really opened up the way for the
practical use of electricity.
Although it would be Nikola Tesla almost 60 years later that showed the use of
alternating current using alternators and not DC current to be the best for
widespread transmission of electricity.
It's hard to believe that only 125 years ago the world had virtually no
electrical supply yet within a few decades
it would spread around the earth. Once we had a reliable way of generating
electricity and of sufficient power
the door was open for the next invention to change the world.
Number 2. Almost as revolutionary as the generation of the electrical power
itself, the light bulb brought light to the world at any time anywhere. Before
its invention people had to rely upon oil lamps and then gas but both of these
methods have considerable drawbacks with not only a low output of light but
also safety as both of these relied upon the buring
of oil or gas but the introduction of the electric lamp changed
this completely.
Most people think that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb but there were
as many as 22 inventors of incandescent lamps that predate Edison's design but
all of these including Edison's version were eclipsed by the one created by
William David Coolidge was working at General Electric in 1910 which
used a coil filament made from tungsten which has the highest melting point of
any chemical element. This is basically the same design that has been
with us up to the present day but it's over a hundred years old now and whilst
it may be simple it is easily broken and has a relatively short life span of only
around a 1000 hours.
However incandescent lamps are also very inefficient and convert less than 5%
of the electricity into light
the other 95% is converted into heat. A modern LED lamp
for example converts 75% into light and 25% into heat and as
such they use much less electricity for the same light output
they also lasts up to 50 times longer and are much more robust. Number 3
The third item on our list is the only non-electrical item but it has had as
much influence on the past 100 years as any of the other inventions here and
that is the internal combustion engine
all that there had been many attempts at creating an alternative to the steam
engine,
the first real engine that we would most closely relate to to what we have today
was created by Nikolaus Otto working with Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach
in 1876. In 1879
Carl Benz independently created a two-stroke engine and then a four stroke
engine but the one engine which revolutionized the world in the 20th
century more than any other was created by Rudolf Diesel in 1893
Initially due to the greater power output most of the early engines were
petrol-powered but with advances in diesel design any inherent ability of
these engines to produce more torque at low engine speeds and use less fuel
meant but it became the engine of choice for agricultural and industrial
applications. From the largest engines ever made in ships, to trains, to trucks,
too tractors, to power stations and almost any large vehicle that moves with
the exception of aircraft the diesel engine is now the main power plant for
almost every non-electrical application that needs a powerful engine
the only area which still uses petrol engines in the majority of vehicles is
the car, motorcycle and small devices like chainsaws and lawn mowers for
example, although in Europe 50% of all car sales are now diesel. Number
4. At around the same time as the development of the electrical generators
the same discoveries about electromagnetism also brought about the
fourth item on our list something which enabled mass communications for the
first time and more recently the liberation from fixed connections in our
Wi-Fi world, that invention was the radio. It was in 1864
that James Clark Maxwell showed mathematically that electromagnetic
waves could propagate through free space then in the late 1880's
experiments by Heinrich Hertz confirmed Maxwell's theory that radio waves did
exist and in 1896 Marconi patented a system of transmitting and receiving
radio signals and in 1898 Nikola Tesla successfully demonstrated a radio
control boat at the electrical exhibition in Madison Square Gardens. The
value of radio was further enhanced in the minds of the public when it was
revealed in the court of inquiry into the Titanic disaster
1912 that many of survivors owed their lives to the use of the radio
equipment on the Titanic which was operated by Marconi's marine
communication company.
Marconi himself had been offered free passage on the Titanic but turned it
down and traveled on the Lusitania just 3 days earlier. As the technology
improved services like the BBC in England and NBC in the states began to
broadcast for first time to mass audiences.
Although radio was thought of as just sound only service in the 1920's
experiments started with transmitting visuals along with the
sound which led to the televisions that we know of today.
By 2013 79% percent of households in the world owned a
television set
but the method of communication using radio ways is not limited to just mass
broadcasting. Today many types of radio communication are part of almost
everybody's way of life with two-way communications, short-range digital
communications such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and even contactless credit
cards,
remote control of everything from drones to satellites, mobile phones
satellite navigation, radar and even cooking food with microwaves
all of these rely upon these basic radio principles discovered just over a
100 years ago.
Number 5. Without our 5th invention
you wouldn't be sitting here watching this video and in fact much of a modern
world would look like he did in the 1930's.
Back then the word computer meant someone who did a manual number
crunching job using a mechanical calculator, usually women working for
accountancy firms, banks or government's. The first computing device but could be
programmed with punch cards was Charles Babbage's analytical engine in 1833 but
it was Alan Turing who published a groundbreaking paper called "On
computable numbers" in 1936 that proposed a device which he called a universal
computing machine, in his paper he proved that such a machine could compute
anything that is computable by executing instructions or program which is stored
in memory.
The world's first stored program computer that contained all the elements
required in a modern electronic computer was the Manchester small-scale
experimental machine built at the University of Manchester England and it
ran its first program on the twenty 1st June 1948, today
the computer is fulfilling Turing's dream of becoming the universal machine
by replacing what were dedicated devices for example the modern TV is a computer
that receives a digital signal and displays the results on its screen the
modern DAB radio or digital radio is again a computer that turns a digital
radio signal into sound and a smartphone is a computer that can send and receive
a digital signal and turn it into a wireless telephone or visual
communications device
not to mention all the things like being a social media tool, playing games, taking
photos, videos, playing music controlling other equipment and anything else it
that can be programmed to make use of its connections to the outside world.
Number 6. While the computer is taken on the job of being the universal
machine it would not be possible to do what he does without our next invention
which allowed early computers to go from the Machine the size of a large room to
something you can wear on your wrist carry in your pocket or even have
implanted under your skin, that invention was the transistor in 1947 by American
physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William shockley at the AT&T Bell
Labs in the United States. The idea of a solid-state replacement for the vacuum
tube had been around since the mid 1920's but the materials
didn't exist until the late 1940's. A transistor is a semiconductor
device that can be used to amplify or switch electrical signals and this is a
fundamental building block of virtually all electronic devices. Until its
invention
electronic equipment had relied upon valves which were fragile, consumed a lot
of power and were relatively large, what made the transistor so useful was they
were much smaller, used much less power and were much more robust but the big
breakthrough came when they were made even smaller and combined with other
components on the same piece of silicon to create integrated circuits. The first
commercially available transistor became available in 1954 with the first
transistor radio going on sale shortly afterwards. In 1964
Frank Wanlass whilst working at general microelectronics demonstrated a
16-bit shift register which used a 120 transistors on a
single chip, today
52 years later CPU's like the Oracle Spark M7 can have over 10 billion
transistors on a single chip and if you add up all the transistors used for the
cpu memory screen and other areas a device like an apple iphone 6s
128G Bytes of RAM will have well over a 130 billion transistors
in it
if our iphone were made out of Valve's instead of transistors and assuming a
one-for-one replacement and they were closely packed side by side it would
cover an area around eighty four square kilometers in size or about 50 square
miles.
Number 7. Whilst the previous inventions on our list of all been
physical devices the last invention is essentially a protocol for users of a
computer or more importantly a network of computers to follow but the results
would have one of the biggest impacts on how we as people communicate, connect
work and play
since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and in fact has ushered in
the information revolution.
Yet without this simple but highly effective system we would not have
Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube or any of the just over 1 billion websites
online now. Our last invention is not the internet but the World Wide Web which
was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee whilst working at CERN the European
particle physics laboratory in Geneva Switzerland. The web allows the user to
jump from one page to another even though it might be located on a server
in a completely different part of the world just by clicking on the links
whether they be text or graphics hardly needing to touch the keyboard at all. In
1980, Tim came up with an idea of a global system based on the concept
of hypertext or the clickable hyperlink as we will know it
that would allow researchers anywhere on a network to share information in
1984, he published a paper which married the idea of the
hypertext with the then
internet which CERN was a major European part of. This created a system of sharing
and distributing information not just within CERN but with anyone else on the
Internet.
He also created the first web browser and editor on the 6th August 1991
the world's first website went online at info.cern.ch , this basic text only
website is hosted on Tim's own next PC and explained what the world wide web was
and gave information as to how other users could make their own websites and
it's still there today for you to visit.
Tim decided that the system would be open and free and this helped the
fledgling world wide web spread around the world and it was the beginning of
the internet as we know it now.
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