Sexual intercourse is a pretty fundamental omission.
Edit to say: link is SFW, unless work frowns on poetry.
I didn’t mean to imply they wanted the plans back because they needed that copy. I meant the same as you. They want to get back the copy the rebels have so the rebels no longer have that sensitive information. My point was that information today spreads so quickly, there is no “getting it back”. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Well, I’m with those who think there’s a definitional problem here. Among other things, if one is counting “first glimmer of an idea leading to,” Isaac Newton invented warp drive, we’re just tinkering with pre-production improvements right now.
Shouldn’t steam power be considered just a modification of what had previously been done with windmills? And so on.
However, assuming for a moment the OP is right, and there have been fewer novel breakthroughs in the worlds of mechanical and electronic devices (“inventions”), so what? Maybe there are only so many things that can be invented – maybe they’re mostly already invented – we could be thousands of times smarter and more creative and it wouldn’t help us change physical limits.
We might be moving on to periods of massive breakthrough in biology, understanding of the mind, and information organization / networking. It could be that development of fundamentally new mechanical and electronic devices will prove no more useful to the future than, say, improved horseshoes and saddles would be today.
Which, if true, still wouldn’t mean we’re “less inventive,” less creative, slower, stupider, or anything else negative.
Drawing a picture of a flying machine is not inventing a flying machine.
Gene Roddenberry didn’t invent warp drive or transporters or phasers.
Sorry don’t remember if it’s been mentioned, but the visible-light LED was invented in 1962, as I just found out in this article.
Not earth-shattering, after all cathode-ray tubes and light bulbs existed prior, but pretty important invention.
LCDs are probably even more important. Although the groundwork was laid many years earlier, the first practical displays didn’t arrive until the 1970s.
These are clearly a modern invention, and although they have yet to make a huge impact, they may become one of the most important display technologies in the future.
Cute Bizarro cartoon in the late 1980’s, a teenage kid telling an youngster “I remember before VCRs, you had to watch what was on when it was on TV. And if two good things were on at the same time… Oh, the memory is too painful!”
I agree with several posters, many “inventions” are refinements, which suddenly befome practical when several developments reach a tipping point. Anothe issue is that like the frog in the gradually boiling water, we have missed slowly emerging technologies that have massively transformed the mundane.
For example - electronic fuel injection and electronic ignition; anyone who has fiddled with chokes and especially the electric “automatic” choke, can remember when starting used to be hit-and-miss and “car won’t start” was a common thing, not an indicator of severe failure (or bad starter solenoid). We forget how much much more common flat tires used to be, or the innovative idea that tires don’t need tubes.
Digital cameras, digital video - convergence of digital tech, light detection electronics, and storage capabilities. My first digital camera produced pictures that I described as “painfully sharp”; printed as 4x6 they blew away your typical consumer camera, even though they were only 2.4MP. The auto-focus and auto-exposure were so much better than typical consumer film products. MP3 is a prime example of the same convergence in the audio world.
Laser printer and Xerox are the same technology taken to the printed word. We’ve had mimeograph and wire photos since not long after the telphone was invented, but the tech to make it common, cheap, and ultimately, programmable - that made an exponential difference.
The fact that everyone carries a camera in their pocket now has revolutionized a number of things - for example so many places that said “no cameras” suddenly find they can’t really stop cellphones coming in, and people will NOT check those at the door.
Similarly, “nobody predicted social media”, but even by the time “Bye Bye Birdie” was a hit on Broadway (1960?) the meme of teen girl glued to telephone was pretty common, a precursor of what was to come. We just improved on that exponentially with facebook and twitter.
the advances in biochemistry have snuck up on us too. Many drugs were discovered by hit and miss or trying to mimick basic, already known compounds before 1950. being able to map large chemical compounds, especially biological ones, and predict their 3D structure, and the ability “construct” compounds that made the necessary chemical fit to work with or block the receptors for some biochemicals - growing over the years. the tools to do that - such as X-ray crystallography - are old tools but technology made them suddenly more useful.
Software, too, to some extent existed before 1950 - but since then has ballooned into a massive, massive mountain of accumuated technology and technique.
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The silicone breast implant was invented in 1961.
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Da Vinci was to science and art (then called Natural Philosophy), what Mozart, Bach or The Beatles were to music.
We’re talking about a guy who lived 100 years (mid-1400s) before Copernicus and Galileo. 200 years before Newton.
Anyhow, modern engineers have already constructed several of his engineering designs, and yes, some failed, and some were, in fact, successful. But he can’t be blamed for not having the resources, wherewithal or even the precursory technology needed in order to build his designs to test under trial and error.
He was a virtuoso in science and art (when the two were seen as two sides of the same thing), and his work is seen as being visionary, brilliant, unprecedented, inventive, academic and sincere.
He was so ahead of his time—and unpublished—there’s no telling how much influence his artistic and academic study of nature, and his career as an engineer and an artist has affected the course of science, art, design, engineering and history, let alone what inventions, beyond those we do know, can be truly attributed to him.
One of the most important minds in human history; he opened it all up for us.
some will say that was an outstanding invention. others will say it was a flop.
Just for the record, I don’t really have a position here. My curiosity was piqued by a couple of things I read suggesting this, so I thought I’d explore it further. Which we are doing here. So far, I like the variety of input and viewpoints. I’m just going to let it roll and see what we end up with.
I also considered your point about reaching the limit of possible inventions. Kind of reminds of the apocryphal story about closing the patent office because everything had been invented–except you’re seriously considering something like that. I’m far from an omniscient being, but I consider this notion if not ridiculous, at least far-fetched. At every point in man’s history, we’ve been pretty sure we knew “most everything” there was to know. Including now. We haven’t been right yet.
Friction Stir Welding
Self-Piercing Rivets
Carbon nanotubes
and the ShamWow
My good god man :eek:, the ShamWow was just a knockoff of Zorbeez. Doesn’t belong in a serious discussion of new earth shaking inventions after 1950 like we have going on here.
And don’t forget we are comparing the past half century to all recorded history up to and including the 1950’s.
Just to repeat a great example above: the Pill. Truly one of the most significant inventions in human history, for good and/or ill.
Also: not just the internet, but internet porn. Like the Pill, the true sociological impact of instantly accessible life-like smut of infinite variety will take decades to sort out.
(Note: I’m not even kidding… thousands of years of pornography carved in stone, inscribed in paper or even photographed on the page that all had to be viewed from afar or quietly snuck away has given way to 24/7 private accessibility. It’s like the monkey in a cage experiment: we’re all monkeys, and for the first time in humany history we got the clicker to give out cocaine any time we want it-- that’s a minor but powerful change).
Fine, but he didn’t invent the helicopter. Having an idea and drawing a picture of it doesn’t mean you invented it.
If one day someone builds an antigravity generator would you insist that HG Wells really invented antigravity because he wrote a book about it 100 years ago? Did the unnamed Greek storyteller who invented the story of Icarus invent the airplane?
To count as “an invention” you have to have a working prototype. That prototype could be insanely expensive, much different than the modern version, built once and then forgotten for 100 years, or totally impractical. But it has to actually exist. So Einstein, despite his work on the photoelectic effect did not invent the laser. Isaac Newton, despite his work on orbital mechanics, did not invent space travel. And so on.
One thing that comes up over and over again in this sort of discussion is how often things get invented or discovered, and then are ignored. And then decades later someone re-invents or rediscovers the same thing, does a little research, and discover that the idea has been around for a long time. The classic story is Gregor Mendel, whose groundbreaking work on genetics was completely ignored until rediscovered in the 1900s.
So was Gregor Mendel an indispensible genius? No of course he was not indispensible, and the proof is that his work was totally ignored. Oftentimes an invention or discovery requires a vast supporting infrastructure to be understood. You can build a steam engine, but it can’t be a practical invention without industrial steel production. You can’t have industrial steel production without steam engines to work the mines to produce the coal that powers the mills that create the the steel which makes the steam engines. Which is why early steam engines were curiosities.
Erm, is porn really that big a deal to the average human over the age of, say, 21? I mean, I know it’s there if I want it, but I can’t recall the last time I bothered to look for any.
Long ago, I saw an episode on tv about a new type of welding. They had a video, but didn’t mention the name. I think this is it!