Wasn’t sure where to put this thread…but since inventions are the product of human creativity, I decided here. If it needs to be moved so be it. I also hope it hasn’t been asked before. In addition, I considered a poll, but was more interested in detailed answers.
Anyway the questions stands…is it the wheel? Mass Production? Gun Powder? The airplane or automobile? How about the telephone…or the computer? Or the microchip? Discoveries of things such as fire and electricity don’t count.
Given my screen name, my first inclination is to say the golf club, but I don’t think that would fly.
Do antibiotics and anesthesia count as discoveries?
If so, then I’d go with nuclear energy, and nuclear weapons in particular. Not “important” in the good sense, necessarily, but it doesn’t have to be good to be important.
Without a hint of a doubt, by far the best thing to have ever been invented in the history of humankind, and in fact in time and space all throughout the entire universe and every species to have ever live is unquestionably hyperbole.
I remember some genus or influential thinker saying the pencil about twenty years ago (which I dismissed at the time). Without doubt the ability to extend memory through literacy and the use of numbers—which freed the mind to consider more abstract thoughts (which were also subsequently recorded) is the most significant technology to affect human development.
Many inventions already mentioned in this thread are extensions of basic literacy: computers, printing press, maybe transistors depending on how they were used. Sound recordings, photographs and moving pictures are storage devices that make memories more available — and actually make some memories possible without experiencing them first hand (a video of your daughter’s wedding or your grandson’s graduation make the experience a visual reality to bedridden relative). In addition written music and recorded music also extend the memory and shared experience of humankind. (Note: I am not sure if a case can be made that universal broadcasts of global events like the Olympics or war coverage can be counted as an extension of simple reading n writing- but at least to some degree they are the same concept on a grand scale and instantaneously realized. Everything else mentioned here IS an extension of using written symbols to extend memory.)
Full disclosure, this is not my original thought. This entire idea was taken from Daniel Levitin’s book THE ORGANIZED MIND, or extrapolated from same.
While I typed my response above that became post number 10, the number of posts doubled; a testament to the social networks and all electronic communication, computation, and immediacy. But I have two further answers which I believe trump all high tech answers to this question.
The first is pretty high tech itself. Living in the American southwest, I am well aware that air conditioning is the BEST if not most important development mankind has ever conceived.
But in reality, the technologies we take for granted are easily the greatest and best advances of history. Irrigation, dams, food production through money crops, vaccines, and so many other basic things that many a hundred and a hundred and fifty years ago had a grasp of are so far removed from everyday life they are dismissed. If the entire Straightdope community lived on a seaport coast, and all manufacturing, and electronic information services were destroyed by a comet strike or nuclear winter. . . . . could any of us build a boat to sail to another continent? If we could, would any of us know how to use only the power of wind to pilot us to safety across a sea? Could we feed ourselves while we grew crops for next year? Could we build buildings substantial enough to keep ourselves safe through a winter? I mean without a lumberyard or home improvement store. Would we be able to defend ourselves from other groups determined to take what we have and kill us all? Could we possibly build a simple mill powered by a waterwheel (assuming running water)?
My point is that before any advanced technology is of any use these very basic needs MUST be met. Would we even be capable of removing our own waste products so they do not contaminate the supply of food and water? With only what we find, can we provide any level of medical care for ourselves? Make clothing from scratch? Anyone know how to run a spinning loom assuming one of us could build it? In an agrarian society sans electricity, what use is a transistor, computer, or printing press?
Paper (but I’ll go along with books and the printing press).
The ability for tinkerers and scientists to swap ideas and run peer reviews on each other gave us the scientific method and all of the other inventions. And minus those inventions, you may have never had the population density to allow a large number of tinkerers and scientists to all inhabit the same city at the same time and do so even more efficiently than through swapping manuscripts.
It also brought us humanism, democracy, meritocracy, etc.
It occurs to me possibly a code of justice, and the formal statement of human rights might be the best “invention of all time”. Perhaps the documentation of a civil government based on fairness and justice for all people. Granted that is easier when your society is small and perhaps all related to each other, but when applied to all humankind quite a noble significant achievement.
There are some “invisible” things we take for granted - every day - that make our lives so much better.
At the top of the list I would have to put vaccines. Your life would be very, very different without vaccines.
Another is our modern sewage system. You don’t see it, because it is mostly underground. Visit a country that doesn’t have a sewage system, however, and you will no longer take it for granted.