World's Greatest Inventions

In today's world, technology and invention progress at an astonishing speed. We have instantaneous access to information and images from around the globe. Advances in modern medicine are working to vanquish even the most elusive and deadly of diseases. We can travel great distances in a matter of hours and travel beyond Earth into space. All of this is possible because of humankind's desire and ability to invent. But many of our greatest modern inventions often had humble, ancient origins, key discoveries that led the way for great inventions to follow. But what makes a great invention? Great invention has a kind of elegance and a kind of projection. It doesn't solve one problem, it opens up the opportunity to be applied to a variety of problems, and it opens up new opportunities. One invention that has played a key role in many of society's greatest inventions is also one of history's oldest technological devices, the wheel. Though the exact origins of the wheel as we know it are unknown, it is believed that the combined use of wheel and axle as a device for transport was first seen around 3000 BC in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia. What's really important is the wheel, as used on farmer's carts, allows for the movement of crops from the farmlands into the cities, and the more efficient that you can move crops and foodstuffs in from farmlands into the cities, the bigger the population you can have. But the wheel had even more ancient uses. With the discovery of rotary motion as early as 8000 BC, enterprising inventors of times long past found the wheel to be an important and versatile tool. They began using forms of the wheel to aid in their everyday tasks. Flywheels and pulleys allowed for heavy stones and rock to be lifted, allowing cities to rise up quicker, higher, and more efficiently. Waterwheels became a primary source for generating early forms of power, and rotating gears became the essential device in an endless variety of tools and machinery, helping to spark the industrial revolution. The wheel and rotary motion made the creation of another civilization-changing invention possible, the steam engine. The steam engine propelled the world into a new age of transportation. Popular legend has it that 18th century inventor James Watt discovered the power of steam when he observed the lifting lid of a kettle of boiling water. The truth is that man had been aware of the power of steam for countless centuries, long before Watt ever sat down for his first cup of tea. As early as 100 AD, ancient writings told of a rotating steam turbine wheel created by Hero of Alexandria. The device was described simply as a sphere of Aeolus, but Hero never realized the potential uses of his creation and dismissed it as nothing more than a simple toy to keep a drowsy emperor awake. It would be nearly 2,000 years before a practical steam engine would be invented. The steam engine was originally conceived to pump water out of very deep mines, and it soon became applied to lots of other things, especially for driving all sorts of mills. Most closely associated with the creation of the steam engine is 18th century English engineer and inventor Thomas Newcomen. Newcomen designed and built one of the first practical atmospheric steam engines around 1712. The steam engine consisted of a series of steam-driven piston rods linked by chains that rose and fell in order to lift water out of mines. For over 50 years Newcomen's steam engine set the standard, but a Scottish instrument maker and engineer James Watt set out to improve on Newcomen's creation. Initially the rotative motion wasn't used with atmospheric engines because they weren't very evenly running engines. James Watt, by applying steam to both sides of the piston in a cylinder and with the use of properly designed valves, could impart a regular rocking motion to a beam and by means of a crank then rotate a wheel. This improved steam engine, aided by the wheel, provided a major advance in the way we traveled over water. By the late 1700s the steamship was man's first major development at traveling great distances since the creation of the sail thousands of years before. The French were the steamship's earliest pioneers in the late 1700s, but it was an American Robert Fulton who first achieved commercial success when he gained worldwide attention for driving his steamship the Clermont between New York and Albany in 1807. With the success of steam travel on the waterways, inventors looked at the steam engine as a source of power for land transport. The steam engine led to another revolutionary invention that literally connected communities the world over, the railroad. The powerful steam locomotives created in the early 1800s represented an unprecedented leap over early forms of railroads. The first railroads would not have been steam powered, they would have been animal powered and were used to pull strings of cars on rails, but those early developments of steam power made it more efficient to pull heavier loads further distances. In the 1860s America was literally tied together with the building of the transcontinental railroad from Nebraska to the golden yet isolated land of promise, California. The use of the steam engine helped steel-wheeled railroads become an increasingly powerful force in the growth and development of cities around the world. Railways soon became the world's dominant mode of freight, shipping, and transportation. One of the things that the railroad did was give people mobility that they'd never had before, allowed them to travel long distances. By the late 1800s steam power ruled transport, but inventors began looking for alternative, more efficient means of transportation. The result was one of the most pervasive and important inventions in history, an invention that would soon dominate the transportation industry, the automobile. The early automobiles originally used the steam engine as their main source of power, but they were slow, cumbersome, and fairly uncomfortable for the passengers forced to sit close to the steamy hot boiler. The very first automobile is generally credited to 18th century French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. His vehicle was financed by the French government and was originally designed as a steam-propelled three-wheeled artillery wagon. With a top speed of two miles per hour, the vehicle ran out of control during a demonstration and crashed into a wall. But it is 1880s German inventor and automaker Karl Benz who is generally credited as the father of the automobile. Karl Benz and his contemporary Gottlieb Daimler are important because they're really the first people to not only come up with, in their case, gasoline-powered road vehicles, but they persisted at it and eventually developed vehicles that they sold for market. One man who perhaps more than any other would revolutionize the automobile industry with his gasoline-powered automobiles was Detroit automaker Henry Ford. Ironically, it was an early steam engine that inspired the automotive pioneer. The first self-powered vehicle that Henry Ford ever saw as a boy was one of these steam traction engines. For Ford, one of these light bulb moments, he saw this thing coming down the road as a young boy and it affected him profoundly. By the early 1900s, numerous companies were beginning to make automobiles, but it was Henry Ford who succeeded in bringing the auto to the public. Ford's great contribution was to really see where the future of the market lay, which turned out to be in cheap cars for the masses, and he developed not only a cheap car, but a very good car, his Model T Ford, and developed the assembly line process for producing it cheaply. Ford's assembly line concept had been inspired by a somewhat more gruesome counterpart. stood on end, as if suspended on a common conductor. When Franklin touched the attached metal key, he received quite an electrical shock. With this jolt, Franklin had proven that electricity was manifested in the clouds in the form of lightning. Franklin wrote in his own publication, Poor Richard's Almanac, that his invention of the lightning rod could secure houses from lightning blasts by directing the powerful bolt of electricity into the grounded metal rod instead of the structure itself. As Franklin's lightning rods appeared on homes across America, an outraged clergy remained vehemently opposed to the invention. They believed that lightning expressed the wrath of God and should not be tampered with. As knowledge of electricity grew, inventors saw that this awesome force could be stored for later use. They developed a groundbreaking energy storage device that would ultimately fuel the communications industry, the battery. The battery has really an interesting sort of impact on the development of electricity. On one hand, it provides that basic building block that allows for experimentation in telegraphy, in telephony, and even in early wireless telegraph. But the search for a usable battery was not a new one. There is speculation that a crude form of electrical battery may have appeared in the first century A.D. In 1938, an Austrian scientist working in Baghdad uncovered a small pottery jar with a copper tube and iron rod running down its middle. Testing showed that the battery did emit small electrical charges, but not enough to provide any real source of power. Since it was discovered in what was clearly the house of a magician and medicine man, however, many others dismiss it as nothing more than a simple magic trick used to instill awe, perhaps even fear, in all who saw it. The first authentic battery as we know it does not appear until the early 1800s when Italian inventor Alessandro Volta created the first viable energy storage device. What it consists of is a pile of plates and, in fact, it's sometimes called a Volta's pile because it's literally a pile of metal plates alternating copper and nickel or copper and silver with an acid in between copper and zinc, another pile. And the bigger pile you make, the more current you can get out of your battery. Volta's invention of the battery was truly groundbreaking. For the first time in history, the powerful force of electricity could actually be stored and used as a source of energy. In the middle of the 19th century, minor improvements were made to the battery. Now known as wet cells, they basically consisted of a jar of acid with metal electrodes stuck inside. The acid caused a chemical reaction that produced electrons which flowed through the metal electrodes to provide power to the attached device. Continual improvements were made to the battery. Inventors soon found it to be an indispensable device in their latest life-changing creations. The simple battery became a key element that ultimately fueled major advances in instantaneous communication. Less than 150 years ago, communications were mostly limited to messages delivered in person. As the scientific knowledge grew that electricity could be transferred from one place to another, inventors began to experiment with the possibility that the same principle might apply to communication. The result was a great invention that took the first steps toward bringing the world closer together. Instantaneous communication was now possible for the first time in history with the telegraph. The telegraph is based on the battery and the electromagnet, both of which are inventions of the very early 19th century. All you have to do to make a telegraph is simply string a wire over a distance, have an electromagnet attached to one end and have an on-off switch at the other end, and that allows you to send a message. And then when you apply a code, dots and dashes for example, so that you can represent numbers, letters of the alphabet, that sort of thing, then in fact you can send any message you want over any distance you want that you have the wire strung. Using his coding system of dots and dashes, American inventor Samuel Morse was the first to successfully send a telegraph message in 1844 with a demonstration line set up between Washington D.C. and Baltimore. The message that Morse sent was a simple but powerful one. What hath God wrought? The growth of the electromagnetic telegraph was truly dramatic. In only 20 years after Morse had laid his first line between Washington and Baltimore in the mid 1840s, we had people putting in undersea Atlantic cable to transmit messages between the continents. The battery-powered telegraph gave rise to a whole host of electrical inventions. If the telegraph sent the message that a communications renaissance was on the horizon, then it was one of history's greatest and most influential inventions that actually put it into words, the telephone. The telephendogram valve called it in fact a speaking telegraph initially because that's what it was. It was a telegraph line in which you had put a microphone and a speaker in a sense at each end so that in fact it would send the spoken voice rather than dots and dashes. Alexander Graham Bell had discovered that electrical currents could exactly duplicate sound waves transmitting multiple sounds by vibrating in the air in a series of frequencies. Bell was a teacher for the deaf and he had spent a great deal of time researching sound waves and the principles of acoustics. Working with his assistant Thomas Watson, Bell realized that you could not only send several different sound tones over the wire, but that you could actually send one complex sound wave, namely the human voice. He realizes it in March of 1876 and he sends the first human message, human voice message over telegraph wire when he says to Watson, come here, I want you. And he simply wanted to show Watson that the transmitter was actually working and Watson heard it on the receiver and they were very excited. Ironically, the telephone did not catch on right away. In fact, the leading telecommunications giant at the time, Western Union, refused Bell's offer to sell them the telephone patent for $100,000. Little by little, however, the public began to gravitate to the phone. telegraph industry, and the invention of the phonograph. He was already known as the Wizard of Menlo Park. Edison had boasted that he would have his light bulb completed in only a few months. Edison, if nothing else, was full of confidence. It took him more like a year and three months, but he did indeed produce it. And again, carbon turned out to be the critical substance and he found that if he had a thin piece of carbon, some trick in getting that thin piece of carbon, and again put the electric current now through the carbon instead of between the carbon poles, through the carbon, you heat that carbon up and it glows. And it glows bright, but not too bright. I firmly believe that the machine age will favorably affect the lives of the workers. It is impossible, however, to forecast what electricity and invention will make of the world a hundred years hence. Thomas Edison was right. There was no way he could have predicted the impact that electricity or his own invention of the light bulb would have on history. The invention of the electric light bulb in 1879 profoundly changed society. The visionary inventor also saw beyond the light bulb and within a year Edison had laid the groundwork for a complete electric light and power distribution system. I can't think of anything that changes the way in which we live domestically, at work, or in the community more than the light bulb. Lighting at work allowed for shift work, overnight work, increased the efficiency of laborers. It also made transportation entirely different. The light bulb also changes entertainment. It changes the way in which we advertise materials. It literally changes work, play, and home life dramatically. With his creation of the light bulb, Edison had also, in effect, created the electronics industry. He had placed his carbon filament electric light inside of a vacuum-sealed airtight bulb. Over the next couple of decades, an Italian inventor named Marconi took Edison's concept of an electrical property charged in an airtight bulb and developed it into another great invention that would help usher in mass communications, the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube turns out to be an efficient way of both detecting and producing radio waves. One of history's most influential and enjoyable inventions would, for the first time ever, bring a world of information and entertainment into the home, radio. When the new concept of radio was introduced early in the 20th century, it created a revolution. A key element of radio was first an understanding that there were radio waves. This is James Clark Maxwell in the 1860s, and he describes the elements of non-optical radiation and that this should be available. Heinrich Hertz in the 1880s produces radio waves. And then it's a bunch of people in the 1890s, Marconi, of course, Nikola Tesla, and others who were experimenting in various ways to make this a practical device where you can send a radio wave from here and receive it over here efficiently. Guglielmo Marconi did exhaustive tests to demonstrate that radio waves would in fact travel through the air. Once a signal such as Morse code or voice transmissions were added, it was discovered that this wireless signal frequency could be transmitted to a receiver. In the year 1898, Marconi sent his first radio message across the English Channel, a distance of nearly 20 miles. The implications of this wireless telegraph were enormous. Ships in the middle of the ocean could now send distress signals at the first sign of trouble, a feat previously impossible with the wired telegraph. By the 1920s, the signal sent had progressed from a series of clicks to voice transmissions, causing radio to become a cultural phenomenon. With radio, sound could travel over great distances. But now scientists began to wonder if they might be able to send visual images as well. The result? A miraculous invention that would bring a world of images into our homes, an invention that would literally allow us to view history in the making, television. Television is one of those inventions that again has had a profound impact. The addition of visuals to sound really changes the way we, not only the way we look at things, but the way we think about things. Television technology continues to advance at an astonishing rate. But television of today owes a debt of gratitude to scientists of long ago. In the 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci presented his findings on the persistence of vision, which stated that the human eye continues to see an image for a fraction of a second after it has disappeared. This concept is applied to our modern television system, which sends 30 complete pictures every second. Color television owes a debt of gratitude to Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1666 discovered the color spectrum, proving that a rainbow of colors are formed when white light is shown through a glass prism. In the early 1860s, Giovanni Caselli created what many consider to be the first television broadcast. In an experiment with early imaging, the Italian-born priest wrapped tinfoil around rotating cylinders and sent shadowy transmissions of handwritten messages and line drawings over a telegraph wire. The modern television as we know it was not the product of a single mind, but numerous inventors from around the world who all had a hand in its creation. Principal inventors often cited for electronic television are Vladimir Zvorkin, who was working first at Westinghouse and then RCA in the 1920s and 30s, and Philo Farnsworth, who was pretty much a lone inventor at the beginning and then got involved with Philco and others. And the critical thing here is to take electricity and somehow to detect an image at one end and store this electrically in some form, in this case it's within a vacuum tube, and then take that information and convey it electrically to the other end where again some electrical device spews out electrons and as it turns out these electrons hit a world by storm. For the first time ever people were able to actually witness key historic events as they unfolded. By 1936 there were only about 2,000 television sets in use around the world. By 1955, less than 20 years later, television really broke through with more than 30 million television sets in homes. As a communication medium, of course, it's become profound. You get to see people land on the moon, which is amazing enough, but it's also had, I think, a fairly significant downside. The television is there, you turn it on, you watch it almost regardless of what's on. And so I think, in fact, we're still working out the long-term implications of what television means to us. Next, a tiny device cuts years of inventions down to size and opens the door for the modern computer age. By the late 1940s, radio had captured the imagination of the world and television was a new medium just about to explode onto the scene. Of course, these great inventions relied on electricity and bulky, expensive, and unreliable vacuum tubes for their power. Then, in 1948, an invention the size of an average finger was announced with very little fanfare, but it would leave an indelible mark on history and society, the transistor. The transistor was invented by three men at Bell Labs, John Bardeen, Walter Bertain, and William Shockley. And Bell Laboratories, again, this is part of the AT&T telephone company, they used a lot of information circuits in their own machinery in the phone system, so that's the motive for doing this. The three men introduced the transistor at a press conference at the Bell Labs headquarters in New York City, but no one paid much attention. Eventually, however, the creators of the transistor were awarded the Nobel Prize, as this great invention became recognized as a device that would trigger one of the most sweeping technological revolutions in history. The basic principle of the transistor amplifying electrical signals is simple, but its impact was huge. By releasing a large surge of electrons through the transistor, the weak electrical signal was transformed into a much stronger copy of itself. Transistors increased those electrical signals in a fraction of the space, which in turn scaled everything down to size. Transistors were much less expensive and far more reliable than bulky vacuum tubes. With improvements being made almost immediately, the device played a key role in a great invention that has had a global impact on virtually every aspect of our lives. The computer. The next significant thing that happened after the transistor was the integrated circuit, the chip. The single thing on your computer that really runs the whole thing, the CPU chip, contains tens of millions of transistors on a single chip. So you can see the economies of scale. We went from 18,000 vacuum tubes to run a big computer down to several thousand transistors to run the first real business computer down to our desktop, which has tens of millions of little transistors, microscopic transistors on a single chip. An extraordinary achievement when you consider that less than 50 years ago, a computer was a massive bank of machines that took up an entire room, held far less memory, and was infinitely slower than today. Tables for weapons launched during World War II. Previously, with the men often battled, the complex weapons took a core of a hundred female mathematicians more than a month to figure a single firing table. The ENIAC, I think, really put these massive machines into the public consciousness. People called it a giant brain, and there was this kind of first dawning outside the scientific community of what a computer could really be. Aided by the creation of the simple transistor, what the computer turned out to be was an indispensable device that has forever changed the way we live and work. Everybody's using them, and I think that's a very significant thing that's happening in our culture today. In fact, in schools we've got children teaching adults. I can't think of another time in history where something like that has been true. Whether editing a simple business letter or influencing the vast global economy, there is perhaps no other invention that has impacted the world as deeply as the computer. Next, 17th century astronomer Galileo is astounded by a device that even to this day continues to save millions of lives. During an average workday, the human eye must refocus over 20,000 times to read the letters on a computer screen. Modern marvels will return in a moment. Perhaps the greatest advances in modern medicine can be attributed not to surgical techniques or the discovery of new drugs, but another great invention, the microscope. It was not until the invention of the microscope that scientists were able to detect and defeat deadly bacteria. While the practice of health care in one form or another is as old as civilization itself, early scientists were truly working in the dark until they began applying the principles of optics and lenses to their research. In 1609, an optician's apprentice discovered that if spectacle lenses were placed in certain positions, objects seen through them appeared to be much closer. Famed inventor and scientist Galileo vastly improved the invention prompted by this discovery, the telescope. By creating a device that could magnify objects 30 times their normal size, Galileo used the telescope to make numerous important discoveries about our solar system. He soon gazed inward instead of outward with another recently invented optical device that he said made flies look as big as a lamb. That device was the microscope. As man's understanding of optics continued to progress, microscopes became increasingly powerful. Aided by the microscope, scientists would uncover life-saving discoveries that would impact health care more deeply than at any time in history. They would wage a war with disease armed with a powerful new weapon, vaccines. It is only because of the microscope that scientists were ultimately able to save millions of lives with the creation of vaccines. I mean a big step forward as far as other vaccines was the microscope and the ability to identify bacteria that were causing diseases, for example diphtheria. People were able to see specific organisms and then they were able to take them and put them into animals and reproduce diseases and show the same organisms. So the microscope played a major role in the subsequent development of many vaccines. The earliest recorded attempts to vaccinate against disease dates back to India in 700 AD. Buddhist monks routinely ingested snake venom in the belief that if they were bitten, their bodies would have to build up immunity to the poison. No one knows for certain if that radical attempt at early vaccination was effective, but they did have the right idea. But it was not until the end of the 19th century with the help of the microscope that the link between germs, bacteria and disease was discovered. Scientists began to create appropriate vaccines. Vaccines are designed to introduce a bit of the disease into the body without actually passing on the disease itself. The body then produces an antibody that creates immunity to the disease in question. Edward Jenner created the first successful immunization in England in 1796 and while he was certainly using an early form of the microscope, his discovery was the result of a keen observation. Smallpox was an epidemic disease that had plagued the world for more than 2,000 years. With a mortality rate of over 40 percent, scientists were frantically searching for a vaccine to eradicate the deadly disease. Jenner had observed that if milkmaids on farms got an infection from an illness in cows called cowpox, they somehow seemed to be immune to smallpox. What Jenner did was take the material from the lesion of a milkmaid and inoculated that into the arm of a boy, James Phipps, and that this boy was subsequently exposed on purpose to smallpox and he was protected. In time, the once deadly disease smallpox was eradicated completely. And then, in the late 1800s, French scientist Louis Pasteur made more great strides in vaccine research. Pasteur is known to history, I think, primarily because of the nature of the development of his rabies vaccine and that used the attenuated matter to produce a way of treating rabies, which up until that time no one had been able to treat. The next big advancement in medicine was antibiotics. In the early part of the 20th century, one of the most important antibiotics in history came close to being shelved forever. In 1928, penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming, who noticed with the help of microscopes that mold growing on a jelly sample in his lab completely destroyed bacteria that he had been cultivating. Ironically, Fleming lost interest in the penicillin discovery, and it was 10 years before another group of scientists uncovered his notes and, realizing its potential, created a form of pure penicillin. With penicillin, great strides were being made in the war on bacteria, but scientists now needed a way to battle viruses. Viruses, unlike bacteria, are a substance much too small to be seen by even the strongest conventional microscopes. Scientists once again harnessed the power of electricity and created the electron microscope, a device that finally allowed the magnification of viruses. America pumped billions of dollars of research money into the development and creation of new vaccines. Jonas Salk's research led to the creation of a vaccine that virtually eradicated the crippling and deadly disease polio, and a host of other vaccines were created to battle diseases ranging from measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis, and many others. These vaccines help us live longer than at any other time in history. History's key inventions have affected and influenced every aspect of our lives. How we live, work, play, and travel. And while these great inventions certainly stand on their own, they are in many ways inextricably connected. I think what we're seeing in the last 20 or 30 years, the latter part of this decade, is the amount of technologies that are kind of coming together and being utilized together, integrated if you will, is so dramatic that we are seeing advancements unparalleled in any part of history. The human race has witnessed an incredible wave of important inventions. As long as man continues to think, he will continue to invent. And the result will be more great inventions that will undoubtedly change the course of history.