The Story of Invention - and of human history itself - begins with the first stone tools made by our ancestors more than two million years ago. The ability to create tools is one of the key differences between apes and the human species. Perhaps the most important discovery was in the Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, East Africa, where, in 1960, the remains of a human like skeleton were found, surrounded by animal bones and simple stone choppers and scrapers. This early human was fittingly called Homo Habilis, meaning "handy Man" in Latin. These first Africans probably used their diet and gave them an advantage over their neighbours, who did not have the stone-tool technology. Homo Habilis thrived, gradually growing over thousands of years in both height and intelligence to become Homo Erectus - "Upright Man". But the process o invention was slow to begin with. It was another five hundred years after the first stone tools were used that early people invented ways of making and using fire to improve their lives.
The Changing World: 600,000BC - AD 1299 |
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| 600,000 BC | Fire |
| 45,000 BC | Paint |
| 30,000 BC | Ceramics |
| 30,000 BC | Bow and Arrow |
| 20,000 BC | Needle |
| 7500 BC | Boat |
| 6000 BC | Brick |
| 5000 BC | Irrigation |
| 4000-3000 BC | Writing |
| 3200 BC | Wheel |
| 3200 BC | Ink |
| 3000 BC | Plumb Line |
| 2350 BC | Lavatory |
| 2180 BC | Tunnel |
| 2000 BC | Chariot |
| 1700 BC | Alphabet |
| 1200 BC | Sling |
| 1200 BC | Bells |
| 800 BC | Saw |
| 690 BC | Aqueduct |
| 620 BC | Coins |
| 550-510 BC | Map |
| 450 BC | Abacus |
| 400 BC | Catapult |
| 236 BC | Archimedes' Screw |
| 85 BC | Mill |
| 105 AD | Paper |
| 124-128 | Dome |
| 650 | Windmill |
| 674 | Napalm |
| 950 | Gunpowder |
| 1280 | Cannon |
In the centre of Europe, in the mid 15th century, a German goldsmith borrowed some money and began to print books. In his printing works, Johannes Gutenburg brought together four important inventions: moveable type, paper, ink, and the press. Individually, none of these was a new idea. Moveable type came from China, as did paper, which had only just started to replace animal skin parchment in the West. The ink was oily paint that artists began using presses to squeeze oil fro olives for centuries. But the combination of these four technologies in printing had far-reaching effects. Before printing, books were mostly handwritten in monasteries. They were often in Latin, so precious that some libraries kept them on chains. The printing press changed all this: a printer produced more pages in an hour than a monk could copy in a week.
The Changing World: 1300-1779 |
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| 1350 | Hand Cannon |
| 1411 | Trigger |
| 1528 | Grenade |
| 1538 | Diving Bell |
| 1560 | Condom |
| 1565 | Pencil |
| 1594 | Logarithms |
| 1624 | Submarine |
| 1704-1709 | Orrery |
| 1718 | Machine Gun |
| 1752 | Lightening Conductor |
Water, Wind, and muscle powered almost all machines until the mid 18th century. But suddenly a new power source emerged that was to change the face of industry for ever: Steam. Able to work tirelessly at jobs that quickly exhausted humans or animals, steam did not depend on the weather or the flow of a stream. As people took advantage of steam to power, new, larger more mechanised factories, green fields were filled with mill chimneys, and sleepy hamlets turned into smoky cities.
The Changing World: 1780-1869 |
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| 1780 | Steel Nib Pen |
| 1796 | Vaccination |
| 1800 | Battery |
| 1803 | Railway Locomotive |
| 1818 | Revolver |
| 1830 | Lawn Mower |
| 1831 | Transformer |
| 1839 | Bicycle |
| 1852 | Airship |
| 1853 | Hypodermic Syringe |
| 1854 | Elevator |
| 1865-1867 | Dynamite |
| 1865 | Detonator |
| 1866 | Torpedo |
In 1870, Electricity was no longer a toy. A century earlier, things had been different: the only value of electiricty then was to amuse party guests. Rubbing silk on amber, they laughed at the spectacular static electric sparks. Electricity had grown up by 1870, but it was not yet a tool. Scientists had created basic electrical machines, such as the dynamo and the electric motor, but these devices were still just laboratory novelties. The most widespread use of electricity was in sending messages. A communications cable spanned the Atlantic - but it crackled with the dots and dashes of morse code, not speech. Even electric lighting was a clumsy novelty. Electric lasmps produced light from an alarming and noisy spark that leaped between two carbon rods. These "arc lamps" lit strees and Railway stations, but were far too bright for the home.
The Changing World: 1870-1939 |
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| 1871 | Wind Tunnel |
| 1872 | Chewing Gum |
| 1875 | Gelignite |
| 1879 | Electric Train |
| 1885 | Motor Car |
| 1886 | Coca-Cola |
| 1888 | Disc Record Player |
| 1900 | Zepplin |
| 1906 | Jukebox |
| 1910 | Sea Plane |
| 1916 | Tank |
| 1920 | "Tommy" Submachine Gun |
| 1921 | Motorway |
| 1928 | Colour Television |
| 1936 | Helicopter |
| 1939 | DDT Insecticide |
Two days before Christmas in 1947, Walter Brattain took a razor blade and sliced across a tiny piece of gold foil. He pressed the cut edges against a chunk of germanium metal and connected wires to the foil. "I found that if I wiggled it just right," he said later, "I had an amplifier." He had created the world's first transistor.
Brattain and his team at Bell Laboratories had been working towards his moment for months. They knew their invention would replace valves - the fragile and unreliable glass bulbs inside the radios and other electronic devices of the time. But what they could not have understood that winter day was how completely their invention would change society. Over the next 40 years, the transistor and its successor, the integrated circuit, swept away technology that had hardly changed since the invention of steam power. It was like a second industrial revolution.
The first industrial revolution changed for ever the way things were made, replacing skilled workers with machines that could do the same jobs more quickly and cheaply. But the transistor did not just change factories or what they manufacturer, it replaced many of them with an industry that created, stored, bought and sold information. Compared with creating and selling real things, such as cakes or cars, trading information is perhaps a strange idea, but it is not a new one. In the mid 19th century, one of the first applications of the electric telegraph was in news distribution. News agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press collected news from their correspondents, then used the electric telegraph to sell the information to newspaper publishers. The transistor speeded up the collection, processing, and distribution of information - long before it replaced expensive gas valves on the circuit boards of computers.
The transistor revolutionised the computer, making it a practical, though still costly, research tool. By 1971 - just 24 years after the transistor's invention - computer technology relied on a tiny chip of silicon the size of a thumbnail. The invention of the integrated circuit would eventually put a computer on every desk.
As computers grew in power, they started to change the way people worked, and even work itself. Computer-controlled robots replaced human workers on the production line, and telephone cables linked computers so more people could work at home, traveling in to their offices only for meetings.
Faster computers have also speeded up electronic communications, blurring the boundaries between the telephone, radio, television, and computer data links. Soon urban households may use a single "data highway" to make telephone calls, pay bills, program a video recorder, or check a train timetable.
Operating a computer in the 1990s is no longer a difficult task that involves setting hundreds of switches or understanding a complex language: Modern computer users can simply highlight and process information on a screen by clicking a "mouse". Today, computers that can "hear" and respond to simple speech are starting to become commonplace. As computers become more and more able o understand us, we will probably find ways of communicating with them just as we communicate with each other. Eventually, we will start to use them to do jobs that we cannot yet imagine.
| 1941 | Aerosol Can |
| 1942 | Nuclear Reactor |
| 1942 | Missile |
| 1942 | Scuba |
| 1944 | Plastic Artificial Eyes |
| 1945 | Atomic Bomb |
| 1946 | Computer |
| 1946 | Microwave Oven |
| 1947 | Transistor |
| 1948 | Long Playing Record |
| 1950 | Credit Card |
| 1953 | Heart-Lung Machine |
| 1954 | Transistor Radio |
| 1954 | Oral Contraceptive |
| 1954 | Atomic Power Station |
| 1956 | Video Tape |
| 1956-1960 | Heart Pacemaker |
| 1957 | Space Satellite |
| 1957 | Fibre-Optic Endoscope |
| 1959 | Integrated Circuit |
| 1959 | Hovercraft |
| 1960 | Laser |
| 1961 | Space Travel |
| 1961 | Electric Toothbrush |
| 1962 | Communications Satellite |
| 1962 | Skateboard |
| 1963 | Cassette Tape Recorder |
| 1964 | Word Processor |
| 1965 | Scanning Electron Microscope |
| 1965 | Hologram |
| 1965 | Automatic Landing |
| 1967 | Satellite Navigation |
| 1970 | Floppy Disk |
| 1971 | Food Processor |
| 1971 | Space Station |
| 1972 | Home Video Game |
| 1972 | CT Scanner |
| 1974 | Wave-Powered Generator |
| 1976 | Supersonic Passenger Service |
| 1978 | Personal Computer |
| 1979 | Personal Stereo |
| 1979 | Catalytic Converter |
| 1980 | Rubik's Cube |
| 1981 | Still Video Camera |
| 1981 | Re-Useable Space Vehicle |
| 1981 | Stealth Fighter |
| 1982 | Artificial Heart |
| 1982 | Wind Farm |
| 1983 | Satellite TV |
| 1983-1991 | Smart Bombs |
| 1984 | Genetic Engineering |
| 1985 | Desktop Publishing |
| 1987 | Gene Gun |
| 1989 | Game Boy |
Satellite Telephones - Video Telephones - Virtual Reality - Voice Recognition - Human Genome Map - Smart Card - Genetic Engineering of Animals and Plants - Micro engineering - Super Conductivity - Zero Emmision Vehicle.