The analytical balance must be up there - can’t do chemistry if you can’t weigh things.
Set of scales seems pretty fundamental to society in general - quanitification by weight.
Fire.
depends on how you define important
Hubble Space Telescope gives us lots of scientific data, but how much of it is useful in everyday life in 2015?
I’ve heard it claimed that paper was a more important invention than movable type.
Without paper (which was invented in China centuries before Gutenberg), the impact of movable would have been considerably less. This was in part because woodblock printing (also invented in ancient China) already existed.
So supposedly, woodblock printing combined with paper would have been more effective than movable type without paper.
Additionally, as noted above, paper enabled better written communication and record keeping, which advanced the pursuit of science.
It’s WHISPER-QUIET.
I know, I know, but the Method itself is vastly superior to any instrument.
People come up with ideas. Lots of ideas. All the time. Almost all of those ideas are worthless noise.
Ideas that explain something better than the present theory, and have not yet been disproven in the slightest way, and have multiple peers sharing them are pieces of information extracted from this sea of noise. Over time this has led to the steady ratcheting up of knowledge, and this knowledge has been used to make better tools, and here we are.
An information tool is very much a physical tool. The circuits in the computers implementing the tool are arranged, at least temporarily, into the patterns required by this tool. These patterns are physical structures made of silicon and wire or biological proteins. Some day we will build massive FPGA or ASIC chips that physically and artificially realize the scientific method (and all the supporting structures needed inside a synthetic sentient mind), and it will be a physical tool you can touch and maybe even pick up just like a hammer.
The Most Important Scientific Tool Ever Invented Is…Language.
These big energy hungry brains would never have survived evolution if they hadn’t had this strange side effect of language. While beavers and chimps and corvids have been observed to teach their young complex skills that don’t seem to be instinctual, human language has allowed for “what-if” and for exploring concepts when the tools are not at hand.
A chimp may be able to show her baby how to strip a twig and fish for termites, but a human can say, “So, what if you took a twig…?” when there’s no twig there.
I’m going to go with the ruler or the clock*. You can’t do science without taking measurements, so in order to start, you have to have some sort of measuring tool. Without that, nothing else would have been possible.
*and I mean to use those terms in the broadest sense. That is “clock” just means “something that measures time”.
I’d broaden it further to glass in general. Not just useful for lenses, it’s also brilliant for making chemistry equipment from.
With ‘most useful invention’ type questions though, the earlier the discovery, the more likely it will have dramatically shaped human history. Nothing we invent today can be said to be more important than say, the taming of fire. People in the future will always be able to say ‘well that would never have existed if fire hadn’t been tamed first’.
Log tables. See Stranger’s post above. But log tables was going to be my answer before I read any of the other posts. More recently, I would go with the transistor.
I think the same answer to an older question works:
What was Edison’s greatest invention?
NOT the incandescent light bulb or phonograph or anything like that.
It’s an invention that invents inventions!
Fork. Nothing would ever get completed without it.
My late husband, who was a research scientist, always said it was the sliderule. That counts as a tool, rather than a concept, I believe.
Hindu-Arabic numerals. Lead to Mathematics as we know it and eventually … Science.
Was the Hubble Space Telescope a thing that was “invented”? It’s a telescope. The telescope was invented a very, very long time ago. That’s what was “invented.” Saying the Hubbell was “invented” is kind of like saying Panasonic “invented” my television.
When I read the OP, this is also what I came up with.
There was just a fantastic blog post about this. The major elements that he emphasized was that* clear* glass lead to eyeglasses (as mentioned above), the telescope, laboratory glassware, and scientific instruments (thermometers, etc).
I think the argument for the Hubble is that it’s THE SINGLE most important tool in human history. Microscopes (plural) may have assisted with more discoveries, but an individual microscope’s accomplishments pale to discovering:
-The size of the universe
-The age of the universe
-The acceleration of the universe’s expansion
-Extrasolar planets in other solar systems
and on and on.
Saying that the Hubble isn’t the most important single tool is pointless contrarianism (an exercise this board loves, so go get 'em!).
Saying, “If you disagree with me, you’re wrong,” is not a persuasive argument.
Stranger
My reasoning why your argument is clearly and gapingly wrong :
a. The Hubble data doesn’t provide any information that will let you build other tools needed to improve and extend the lives of humans living on earth. The data suggests certain stats about the universe, but doesn’t tell us anything you would need to build a better engine, make people live longer, or build a better form of defense, to name a few things.
b. The Hubble data isn’t self amplifying, either. The Scientific Method is self improving(the idea I said is the best one), artificial intelligence is self improving, digital computers are essentially self improving, and so on. What I mean is, the output from these tools lets you build much better versions of the same tools and helps in lots of other fields. We’ll never even be able to tear down Hubble, and the basic science of optics has not been advanced at all by building it.
c. The Hubble is sort of an endpoint of a vast number of advances made using simpler, more useful tools. We couldn’t have advanced to build a Hubble if someone drew a hubble on a napkin in the 1700s, but the scientific method, writing, etc, let us advance to that point.