All good ideas. I was going to suggest the printing press, but got beaten to it.
I’ll throw out another important, but I don’t thing the most important invention. - Accurate, transportable clocks. The makes exploration/travel much easier. It allows travelers to calculated their longitude.
Along these lines I’ll add textiles. They may have first have appeared in making nets for hunting and fishing. Certainly the earliest textiles were not tightly woven cloth, possibly to make small cargo nets to carry items, but I think the scale may have increased with knotting before the development of weaving.
IMHO these kind of hunting devices were the precursors of agriculture, instead of hunting animals individually, instead of seeking the largest animals as a means of hunting efficiency, the mass gathering of smaller fare would have been a step toward domesticating animals and farming. Hunting by beating the ground using all members of a community would improve greatly by driving the game into nets instead of relying on individual captures via hands, pointy stick, rock, or blunt stick.
Another vote for the printing press.
Almost every doc I’ve seen has had in in the top 3, if not #1.
It ushered us into the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and the Information Age we live in today.
Agriculture made civilization possible, and all the other inventions necessary.
You don’t have any of that unless you invent string first, though, do you?
You could use vines and strips of leather, but yes, the development of long fiber production is a basic part of textiles. I was pointing out more about how weirs and nets may have helped pave the path toward agriculture, and agriculture is pretty important considering how humans may never have survived in large populations without it, and technology would be largely limited by what you could carry with you. And as I mentioned, textiles increased the carrying capacity of people.
Plastic.
Language.
Anything else mentioned on this list is 100% rendered moot if we couldn’t communicate with each other to make it happen. Yes, even math.
clocks had already been invented but the most important part of clock inventions was to make one that kept accurate time on the Seas. This was necessary for accurate navigation, not for getting to work.
Too much is lost with the oral tradition … written language is when we were able to store wisdom and knowledge accurately for future generations …
Would “carrying things” count as invention? … the chimp that fashions a useful tool would have to leave it behind when the troop moved to a new location and make a new one there … it would be a huge savings in resources if the chimp could just simply carry the tool with him … also when the chimps come upon a leopard’s kill, they have to sit and eat as fast as possible before the leopard returns … much more efficient to pick the carcass up and carry it to a place of safety and share with the whole troop …
The voltaic pile … what good are generators or transitors without current electricity? …
The top dozen inventions in order of importance:
Language
Government
Written language
Tools
Fire
Agriculture
Domestication of animals
Art
Mathematics
Wheels
Alphabet
Money
Don’t know if it is the most important, but right now the one I definitely appreciate the most (since it is broken) is the air conditioner. I can’t think of a single other appliance in the house that I would be as desperate to fix as that right now.
Nitpick: Is spoken language an “invention”? Or did evolution turn it into a human instinct?
I would like to suggest that this discussion is better suited for Great Debates than IMHO, most of these answers are well thought out and serious. (Even the Venetian Blind joke was very clever, if not perfectly accurate or on point.) I certainly hope this discussion stays on a serious and informative level; several of us have included flippant, but still somewhat serious answers like: TV remote, free pornography, and my own- air conditioning, but even those suggestions contain underlying truths about a hierarchy of needs and the significance of creature comfort in a developing society. Your own answer quoted above is quite thoughtful and significant. I hope we all consider this discussion worthy of serious thought and debate and do not resort to uninformed opinion. (Of course I do not visit that form much and may not understand **IMHO **the way other dopers do—I simply tend to not take opinions very seriously unless they are well informed and thought out.)
Your post does bring up an important topic in this discussion. At what point does something become its own invention? I mention above (again cribbed from the scientist Daniel Levitin) the idea that all electronic communication is an extension of the first written words and symbols for numbers. I had assumed that written language was a simple extension of spoken language—but your post made me reconsider that point; now it doesn’t so much. Is the printing press the same as the movable type press? How about the tele-type, the FAX machine, attachments to e-mail, and for that matter e-mail itself? (And I know I must have missed several important steps of technology in that example of a string in one field.) To me, these are all examples of using that day’s technologies to more effectively do the same thing the previous thing was doing. Is it possible that these new technologies changed written communication in a different way? That investigative reporting was a result of movable type printing, and before that written words were too expensive and difficult to accomplish to use for anything other than recording the most serious of thoughts and governmental (and I suppose religious) decrees?
It also seems some effort (by people smarter than me I hope) can be placed on the level of society each invention served. From nomadic existence to weekly marketplaces, to permanent marketplaces to towns and villages, to grand ancient cities of a million people—to urban areas containing 20 million in population (I am not sure if any one city has 20 million residents- but many areas have that many spread over adjacent cities). As a last word on this part of the discussion— I would like to believe we will never go backward from here, but reading about Rome falling from the center of the known universe to a population of twenty or thirty thousand more or less refugees surrounded by cats (and seeing as how polarized our government has become) and reading a thousand versions of dystopian futures—it makes me wonder what inventions and technologies would be sustainable in an unthinkable (but possible) future? In my neighborhood at least, if the secret to the universe was on an eight track cassette-- it would be unobtainable.
I know I have gone on too long already, but now that we have modern ships that can navigate through the thickest fog, stay underwater for days (possibly weeks) at a time, and not need to refuel for decades at a time . . . . is it possible ancient sailing ships were a more significant invention because it allowed those whole civilizations created by sharing the wisdom of the whole tribe (written word) develop independently of each other – to interact and trade spices and cultures? At the age of forty, I found sailing a twenty or thirty foot ship far more technologically advanced than speeding around on a wave runner or ski boat (which I had done extensively in the previous two decades). Technologically advanced is the wrong term, but I don’t know what else to call it. The thing was, on the sailboat, I was able to see, understand, and control ALL of the forces I was using. In a speedboat, I was reliant on fuel I could not distill (or even get the raw material), to run a motor I could not build (in my garage with the tools I have- I understand the theory behind internal combustion), in a shell of plastic I could not create/build/etc.
To belabor the point, who is a better farmer; the CEO of Archer-Daniels, or some guy with a few acres he plows and harvests himself with a single tractor or even a two horse team? Is a simple plowshare the greatest invention of all time? (And is a multi-million dollar combine just an extension of that curved piece of metal?)
Venetion Blinds are quiet clever, to allow light into a room while stopping radiant heat from the sun is literally light years ahead of a simple fabric blockage that is there or not there. To use simple strings and slats of wood to separate the two elements of sunlight (light and heat) is a very practical and useful technology that is very, very accessible. An elegant solution as mathematicians like to say.
And I found the joke quite funny as I didn’t see it coming.
I would indeed quibble with this, but not just because it might not be an invention (that would also throw into question many other worthwhile technologies in this thread such as my agriculture), but because of the “human history” qualifier. We probably had language before we were human.
Another vote for agriculture. Food surpluses allow for specialization which allow for all othet human pursuits and inventions. For a more modern invention I’d go with sanitation and vaccination.
I dunno, ever watch the YouTube channel primitive technology? That guy never talks.
Having recently consumed Sapiens: a brief history of humankind, I’d like to nominate :
Refrigeration. I was reading a Hornblower novel where they describe a typical shipboard meal back in the early 1800’s. Yuck.