Roomba? Are they really ubiquitous enough to have made any significant impact?
I’m a person in my 30s and I’m pretty sure my friends and I are the “target market” for such a tool and I only know one family/person out of all my friends who has one.
Yeah…the “boombox” changed the world-for the worse!
Thank God we now have Ipods-instead of blasting noise with boomboxes, the Ipod zombies listen in private…and other people don’t have to suffer
Digital HDTV has changed the world? I mean, it’s nice and all, but I’m not seeing it as in the same category as bras, or duct tape, or the hypodermic syringe.
I might have added 3D printers to that list - though maybe that’s just a potential thing at the moment. The idea does have immense potential to change the world, though.
ETA: I also have some grave doubts about calling a bra a gadget, unless I’ve misunderstood and it’s not referring to clothing - in which case, I doubt its world-changing impact, if I’ve never even heard of it…
The problem with the list is that some of them aren’t gadgets. They are just regular inventions or specialized products. I don’t think of duct tack as gadget for example and neither are DVD players, CD’s, or matches. A list that includes all technology would be much different.
A lot of room to debate what’s a “gadget”- I presume they mean something personally usable on a small scale. And some of the listings seem like near-duplicates: cameras, electronics, digital media, etc.
Derringer? :dubious: I’d have said “revolver” or “handgun”.
Of course those all changed the world. Every invention changed the world. Some of them just didn’t change the world nearly as much as others. Given what they claimed, the list is fine. If they’re trying to claim the 101 biggest changes to the world, though, they’re crazy. Where’s fire, or the wheel, or the spear, bow, or club?
The list should include the telegraph. It’s been superseded now by other technology but it’s impact at the time was bigger than the telephone or the radio or the internet. Those inventions were just improvements of existing communications. The telegraph was the system that first made it possible to have instantaneous communication over long distances.
I think you have to read the article to really understand their reasoning. The Roomba is important as the first mainstream personal robot. The Ginsu Knife for its infomercial marketing style.
Not saying I agree, but it makes a little more sense.
I agree that its impact was at least as great if not greater than the above, but the reason has at least as much to do with cost as it with speed. Optical telegraphs could get a message across all of Europe in less than a day, but required manned outposts every 2 miles or so. Resultingly they were so expensive that after the Napoleonic Wars they were almost (but not quite) completely abandoned.
For many pieces of information it doesn’t matter if you receive it some time in the day or within a few minutes (allowing for waiting for the telegrapher and transcription times) but both are huge improvements over around a week.
