invention can be a hard thing to define. is having a concept an invention? i agree that detailed concepts by scientists or engineers may be called invention by many.
though you have futurists (mental masturbators) and science fiction authors.
The container ship. Invented in the 1950s, but didn’t take off for more than a decade. Allows us to have fresh fruit all year round and goods manufactured anywhere in the world for effectively zero shipping costs. It’s as ubiquitous and as important as the computer chip but almost unrecognized.
A concept is not an invention. Predictions made in the 19th century just before 1900 contain hundreds of concepts we would recognize today, but almost never in the actual form we know today or having the effects that they expected. Actual inventions and concepts run on almost parallel tracks.
… but a functional transistor dates to 1947 (first patent to 1925) The most important post-1950 discovery I can think of is the helical structure of DNA by Watson, Crick and Franklin in 1953. Sixty years later, we are just starting to see the impact of that discovery.
Topical example for me. Just yesterday I was reading a book published in 1972 and it starts with tracking a drug ship through a port and contains this:
Then later goes into some explanatory detail of how the process worked. Sparked in me the “oh yeah, I guess that was something relatively recent that seems to have always existed now.”
Advances in convex optimization, Markov chain Monte Carlo and distributed computing have radically changed the way we do science, both in terms of the way we look at old problems and the types of problems we can even consider solvable. These things are truly revolutionary, but they’re just not quite as visible as some of the other technologies that have come out earlier.
Yes, but that is why I said the silicon transistor. Inventing a transistor was a cool thing. Inventing a practical transistor that could be mass produced in practical ways was the important invention. Yes, it is evolutionary, but I would argue that inventing the practicality is, often, more important than the fundamental concept behind it.
Arguments about when it is appropriate to say something was invented aside, I don’t think DNA is an invention unless we’ll count gravity and North America in the discussion.
Saran Wrap!
The ability to amplify, sequence, and manipulate genetic information is transformative technology that wasn’t around in the 50’s. Scientists first managed to sequence DNA in the 70’s, and PCR wasn’t invented until the early 80’s. This has allowed us to study and play with life in ways that were unthinkable in the 1950’s.
Nope. Wikipedia:
In 1949, Dow introduced Saran Wrap
Gutenberg’s main contribution was inventing a way to cast loose types.
Mark Levinson’s history of the container industry, The Box, isn’t for everyone, but I found it to be surprisingly fascinating, if often dry.
For new things that have the potential to change the world but haven’t broken through yet, my top choice is 3-D printing.
I agree. This is the kind of thing I had in mind. This seems to be the first tangible step towards the Star Trek replicators.
Intermittent wipers.
Social networking, from BBSs and the SDMB to World of Warcraft and Facebook.
Watch Star Trek episodes from as late as the 1990s. You’ll notice in their free time the characters all just read books, paint pictures and play board games. Even in the 90s, the idea of connecting with your friends using networked computers was unknown to normal people, although it was happening already.
In addition, I’d say video games and internet memes are legitimately new since the 50s, too.
Software in general, really. In 1950 people were still manually toggling switches on computer panels to input programs. The idea of portable software you could send to your friend either on a disk, tape or computer file was pretty revolutionary, especially if they had a different kind of computer than you. C and Unix (1970) were big stepping stones on that path.
Care to make the case for these being “major inventions”?
Home video. Regardless of whether the format is laserdiscs, videotapes, or dvds (or even Super8 film). The idea of buying your own personal copy of a movie to watch in your own home whenever you wanted didn’t exist in 1950.
Photocopiers. IIRC, they came into being in the late 50s. But think of it, if you wanted a copy of something–newspaper article, a photo, notes from a meeting, a schedule, birth certificate, a handwritten letter from your great-great-whatever-- it was a complex process.
Now, sure there are digital alternatives but for a brief shining moment, we could do away with carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and photostats.
Silly string is used by the military to detect trip wires on booby traps so it deals with life and death situations. I would consider that major. The rubik’s cube, although a game is a very intense mathematical problem that fostered a lot of interest in mathematics. Play-doh inspired a lot of young builders. If you want to define your own rules as to what is major then have at it.
The polio vaccine