# Greatest invention/discovery in the last 500 years? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 23, 2021, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804 "2021-11-23T13:10:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/41 "2021-11-24T01:49:23Z")
> [@Lancia](#): > > Most influential/significant? My vote is for the transistor. It’s the basic building block of all modern circuits and the foundation of our modern, electronically connected society. 90% of what we do today that utilizes electricity relies in some way on transistors. What seemed to be such a marvelous advance for all of ~~mankind~~ peoplekind, and indeed was for 200+ years, has turned out to be, quite probably, the ultimate doom of us all. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Shraiky/publication/267398000/figure/fig3/AS:513274615926784@1499385612224/Something-somewhere-went-terribly-wrong-image-by-an-unknown-artist-Localoaf-2011.png](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Shraiky/publication/267398000/figure/fig3/AS:513274615926784@1499385612224/Something-somewhere-went-terribly-wrong-image-by-an-unknown-artist-Localoaf-2011.png) ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 2:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/42 "2021-11-24T02:45:35Z")
I hope you relative optimists are all correct. But if a quick invention, that took a while to have impact, qualifies, the hydrogen bomb has potential to leave the transistor in the dust. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/43 "2021-11-24T03:45:28Z")
> [@Si\_Amigo](#): > > The social changes caused by the pill accelerated the woman’s rights movement into hyper drive over the short period of my lifetime. If the pill turns out to be the most impactful invention, I think it will be because it leads to below-replacement fertility, putting humanity on a spiral towards extinction. A less impactful possibility is that it will cause the demise not of the species as a whole, but only of modern people who use such birth control, with humanity in the future consisting of insular religious groups having high birth rates, like the Amish, Hutterites, and Hasidic Jews. ---
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/44 "2021-11-24T16:01:02Z")
There’s a case to be made that the second law of thermodynamics will, in the long view, be the greatest in its time. A million years from now, “in its time” could justifiably be considered “over its first thousand years”. Just a proposal. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/45 "2021-11-24T16:27:46Z")
One of the greatest inventions, without which nothing else would be possible, was the invention of mechanical precision: [Origins of Precision - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58) Specifically, two indispensable innovations: the [Surface plate - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plate), which embodies the discovery that three surfaces ground against each other converge on near-perfect flatness; and the [Screw-cutting lathe - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe), which produces accurate screws for precisely converting rotation and linear motion into each other. Without these our best machines would be closer in appearance to a grade-schooler’s woodworking project, and advanced technology would be impossible. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/46 "2021-11-24T16:31:03Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > If the pill turns out to be the most impactful invention, I think it will be because it leads to below-replacement fertility, putting humanity on a spiral towards extinction. > > A less impactful possibility is that it will cause the demise not of the species as a whole, but only of modern people who use such birth control, with humanity in the future consisting of insular religious groups having high birth rates, like the Amish, Hutterites, and Hasidic Jews. Or women who have a deep-seated biologically based craving for babies. I raised this topic in an old thread [Is birth control ultimately self-defeating?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-birth-control-ultimately-self-defeating/322056) ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/47 "2021-11-24T16:42:22Z")
@PhillyGuy: Or society will decide to support raising children, instead of declaring that most of the considerable work involved needs to be done in the supposed spare time of parents all of whom are also expected to hold paid jobs; and that the considerable expense involved needs to be borne primarily by the same people who are being expected to do the work. In any case, at the moment it’s above-replacement fertility that currently risks putting us on a spiral towards extinction; or at least towards a really nasty eventual crash. I do wonder whether the religious groups that ban birth control will wind up becoming a larger percentage of the population; but they may instead increase their assimilation rates into less restrictive groups. And it should be noted that while Catholicism theoretically bans it, Catholics themselves in practice very often use birth control; this may well also be true of other groups I know less about, though it certainly isn’t true of Amish and Old Order Mennonites in this area. (More liberal Mennonites, however, seem to run to much smaller families.) ---
**Author:** ![Crane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crane/32/3495_2.png) [@Crane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crane)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/48 "2021-11-24T16:52:07Z")
> [@Ike\_Witt](#): > > My thought is to say the ‘Scientific Method’. Pretty much everything else has flowed from that. And that began with the Evangelista Torricelli. Also around that time (1650) the word fact was invented to cover newly discovered information. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/49 "2021-11-24T17:37:50Z")
There’s probably interesting distinctions to be made between inventions, discoveries, and sheer happenstance serendipity. Penicillin is of course one of history’s great examples of somebody being brilliant enough to recognize that something amazing has happened. It’s a very different kind of brilliance than the unending machine-like patience the discoverers of the first sulfa-based antibiotics needed. > [@New\_Labor](#): > > Humble but effective - the corrugated cardboard box. Quality first post. Welcome to the Dope. ---
**Author:** ![tavaritz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@tavaritz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tavaritz)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/50 "2021-11-24T19:42:10Z")
Lathe is definately one as it’s step towards miniatyrization which I think defines last 60 years. If you don’t know its finesse is in that one can use cruder screw to make finer screws. I’ve seen several documents on how fire has changed societies but none of them expressed the most amazing thing that discovering fire has done to mankind: It has changed how our intestines work. We have evolved to eat cooked food. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2021, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/51 "2021-11-24T23:09:25Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > In any case, at the moment it’s above-replacement fertility that currently risks putting us on a spiral towards extinction; or at least towards a really nasty eventual crash. Folks have been saying there are too many people since ancient times. Despite the loads of internet evidence, we netizens can find, that fertility rates are in long-term secular decline, and below replacement most places, yours continues to be a popular view. So I see your claim not as refutation of my previous post, but as evidence that secular society is unlikely to make population level a big priority, regardless of the level. (Admittedly, there is an argument that what I just wrote shows confirmation bias. Still, it can be true.) > [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Or society will decide to support raising children, instead of declaring that most of the considerable work involved needs to be done in the supposed spare time of parents all of whom are also expected to hold paid jobs; and that the considerable expense involved needs to be borne primarily by the same people who are being expected to do the work. Most countries, with below-replacement fertility, have pro-natalist tax policies. In France they are strong, and their fertility rate is higher than for neighbors, but still below replacement. The recent increase in U.S. child subsidies is happening at the same time the U.S. fertility rate continues to decline. And any effective pro-natalist government policies will be offset by continuing improvements in birth control technology. > [@thorny\_locust](#): > > I do wonder whether the religious groups that ban birth control will wind up becoming a larger percentage of the population; but they may instead increase their assimilation rates into less restrictive groups. And it should be noted that while Catholicism theoretically bans it, Catholics themselves in practice very often use birth control; this may well also be true of other groups I know less about, though it certainly isn’t true of Amish and Old Order Mennonites in this area. (More liberal Mennonites, however, seem to run to much smaller families.) You said it before I could. The Catholic example shows that preaching against birth control doesn’t work if you have weak control over your group’s members. And [no groups are fully isolated from birth control methods](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14652910/). Hypothesis: SETI is failing because, in advanced industrial civilizations, birth control tech improves more quickly than evolution can counter its effects. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 1:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/52 "2021-11-25T01:05:04Z")
This, and surgical anesthesia. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/53 "2021-11-25T01:11:06Z")
People who live in the groups you named may not use the Pill for birth control, but they often use it for other reasons. I said “people” on purpose because I’ve seen men who took it, usually for prostate cancer. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/54 "2021-11-25T01:14:02Z")
One of my Facebook friends, who lives a couple blocks away but in the same complex, posted a 20-second video of what woke her up this morning. It was a Bobcat with a jackhammer in the front, instead of a shovel, rat-tat-tatting in her parking lot. She said, “But there wasn’t a pothole there!” and I, and several other people, told her that there might be damage underneath, at which time she mentioned that her building was going to have some plumbing updates. Which leads to yet another “new” thing that isn’t - sanitation. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/55 "2021-11-25T01:28:24Z")
> [@tavaritz](#): > > It has changed how our intestines work. We have evolved to eat cooked food. I think that was more than 500 years ago. Historical cite: Asterix comics showing Caesar eating baked chicken and Obelix eating wild boar. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 1:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/56 "2021-11-25T01:33:14Z")
> [@PhillyGuy](#): > > Most countries, with below-replacement fertility, have pro-natalist tax policies. In France they are strong, and their fertility rate is higher than for neighbors, but still below replacement. The recent increase in U.S. child subsidies is happening at the same time the U.S. fertility rate continues to decline. And any effective pro-natalist government policies will be offset by continuing improvements in birth control technology. You seem to be assuming that even people who are fully confident they’ll have both the time and the money available to take care of children, and will suffer no negative social consequences or penalty in their later other careers for having them, would still on average have fewer of them than necessary for replacement. I don’t think we have any evidence for this. U.S. child care subsidies come nowhere remotely near covering the full costs of raising children, let alone covering the time involved, let alone providing respect for the life choice of taking time out of the paid work force to have and/or care for them. I don’t know about France’s; but while they may well be better than the U.S.'s, I’ll be surprised if they provide all of that either. > [@PhillyGuy](#): > > Hypothesis: SETI is failing because, in advanced industrial civilizations, birth control tech improves more quickly than evolution can counter its effects. Alternate hypothesis: SETI is failing because societies that think they can expand continuously forever don’t last. ---
**Author:** ![filmstar-en](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/50afbb/32.png) [@filmstar-en](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmstar-en)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 1:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/57 "2021-11-25T01:41:48Z")
Man made fertilizer for agriculture. The chemists Haber and Bosch invented a process of large scale production of ammonia to make fertilizer at the beginning of the 20th century. It was also good at making explosive and responsible for some very big bangs. So both good and bad. The affect cheap fertilizer had on food production cannot be overstated. > With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level[,] the crop harvest in the year 2000 would have required nearly four times more land[,] and the cultivated area would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15% of the total land area that is required today.[ ---
**Author:** ![Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmer_j.fudd/32/1211_2.png) [@Elmer\_J.Fudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Elmer_J.Fudd)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/58 "2021-11-25T01:49:11Z")
I’ve read that WWII was largely responsible for that; almost all the explosives factories built during the war switched over to fertilizer in 1945. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 2:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/59 "2021-11-25T02:34:59Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > You seem to be assuming that even people who are fully confident they’ll have both the time and the money available to take care of children, and will suffer no negative social consequences or penalty in their later other careers for having them, would still on average have fewer of them than necessary for replacement. Evidence is that even when the government is a rich one, and perceives great military need for a high population, it will not make sufficient money available to bring up fertility to replacement. [This example, I know a bit about, shows they will not.](https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4180941) It’s not that education (or obstetical care co-pays) are expensive in Taiwan. They are cheap, and child subsidies are high. Lots of parents there think after-school private classes are a necessity (even though local university admissions standards are low), and would like their children’s to study in foreign universities. That’s not cheap, and illustrates that whether you can afford a lot of children depends not on absolute costs, but on values. Environmentalists often think there are too many people. They have no interest in spending their taxes to fight a birth dearth. And, unlike some of the high birth rate groups, they vote. I vote, and despite being highly pro-natalist, it would take some convincing to make me think that the government should be giving the Hutterites and Satmars the enormous subsidies you propose, especially when I think the number of children women have is more a matter of quality birth control availability (which I support), and values, than dollars. So I still think the pill, and other birth control technology, is likely to prove the greatest, or at least most impactful, invention of the last 500 years. ---
**Author:** ![PhillyGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed655f/32.png) [@PhillyGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PhillyGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 25, 2021, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804/60 "2021-11-25T02:52:09Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Or women who have a deep-seated biologically based craving for babies. I raised this topic in an old thread [Is birth control ultimately self-defeating?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-birth-control-ultimately-self-defeating/322056) Humans evolved to have, among animals, a very low reproductive rate. Modern obstetrics makes it more practical today for women to have a large number of children. But human parents evolved, long ago, to be ambivalent about having children, considering minuses as much as pluses. Over a long time, [Duggar-scale triumphs of modern obstetrical care](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_Kids_and_Counting) would, I think, cause our species to evolve in a baby-craving direction. But do we have that long? I think evolution will take a heck of a lot longer than likely future birth control advances, such as the long-awaited, likely coming, pill for men. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/greatest-invention-discovery-in-the-last-500-years/954804.md?page=4)