Important Inventions

The best inventions

Many people have created lists of what they
think are the best inventions humans have made.  I am going to contribute my ideas, and will try to cover the past 100,000 years or so. 
Actually after thinking about this for a while, I decided that the list could easily grow to be larger than I have time or energy to cover, so I will limit my list to one subject, which I think may well be the most important
series of inventions mankind has made – Communication methods.    

Without effective communication, most of the other types of inventions would be either impossible or would be essentially useless as telling others would be very inefficient or ineffective. 
And it is essential to future inventions to be able to pass on to future generations what has been invented since most inventions are built upon past discoveries.   

I am trying to make my list as basic as possible, or in other words, try to limit my list to what seem to be basic, fundamental,
or unique inventions.  I am also using Wikipedia as my main reference source; contrary to what most schools say, I think the information there is very good.  

Speech

All
Homo sapiens groups have a language.   The variety is enormous.  True speech is probably
limited to Homo sapiens as well.  Experts differ, but the consensus seems to be that Neanderthals probably had rudimentary speech. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_behavior.  But without the ability to communicate complex ideas, directions, methods, etc. a species will not be able to advance by passing on knowledge learned.  There are between 5000 and 7000 different languages in the world, the number depending on how a different language is defined.  And it is estimated that true speech was developed between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language. 

Writing

The next big step in communications was
the ability to communicate over time.  That is into the future.   Writing has been
developed by many different cultures in different places, and it is essential to be able to write down things, ideas, directions, history, records etc. to allow a culture to advance.  There are no advanced cultures that did not have writing in their tool kit.  Around 4000 BC, the complexity of trade and administration in Mesopotamia outgrew human
memory, and writing became a more dependable method of recording and presenting transactions in a permanent form.   In both Ancient
Egypt and Mesoamerica writing may have evolved through calendric and a political necessity for recording historical and environmental events.  By definition, the modern practice
of history begins with written records; evidence of human culture without writing is the realm of prehistory.

Roman
roads

Next, I see communication over distance as a significant advancement.   The Romans
developed and built easily traveled road systems wherever they went after conquest and assimilation of the local population.   The
road system enabled rapid transportation by horseback or chariot and therefore was a conduit for rabid communication throughout the empire.  Obviously the road system allowed
the Romans to deploy troops as needed to control the empire as well as to communicate throughout it.

Until the invention of the telegraph (see below) 1700 years after the Roman road system was being built there was no other reliable or quicker means of complex communication over distance than road systems and they were, and still are one of our main
means of facilitating communication. 

The printing press

Mass communication became possible with the invention of the printing press.  The world’s first known
movable type printing technology was invented and developed in China by the Han Chinese printer Bi Sheng between the years 1041 and 1048. When this technology spread to Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty in 1234, they made the world’s first metal movable-type system for printing.  However, this system did not
use movable / replaceable type.  

Woodcut printing in China preceded European technology by about two hundred
years. Printing was not a priority for the masses because, unlike in Europe, there was no market in China. With the advancement of moveable type, the Chinese stuck with woodcut printing as it better suited their type of paper. 

Johannes Gutenberg‘s work on the printing press began in approximately 1436 when he partnered with Andreas Dritzehn—a man who had previously instructed in gem-cutting—and Andreas Heilmann, owner of a paper mill.  Having previously worked as a professional goldsmith, Gutenberg made skillful use of the knowledge of metals he had learned as a craftsman. He was the first to make type from an alloy
of lead, tin, and antimony, which was critical for producing durable type that produced high-quality printed books and proved to be much better suited for printing than all other known materials.   This invention was the basis for the vast and rapid spread of books for the masses. 

So ideas, knowledge, information, entertainment, revolution, power all were spread by the availability of inexpensive books and other printed media. 

Telegraph / Telephone

Instant communication over distance is my next
suggestion as a key improvement in our ability to communicate.  Note that I am choosing to not count smoke signaling, semaphore systems, mirror reflections, fire beacons etc.
as they are not reliable, are weather dependent, and/or are not available for use quickly. 

In the 19th century,
the harnessing of electricity brought about the means to transmit signals via electrical
telegraph.  An
electrical telegraph was independently developed and patented in the United States in 1837 by Samuel
Morse.  Morse and his assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse code signaling alphabet.  With this invention,
people were able to have almost instant two way communication over vast distances.  

The telephone
was an outgrowth of the telegraph.  First patented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell and further developed by many others, the telephone was the first device in history that enabled people
to talk directly with each other across large distances. 

Wireless

The ability to transmit and receive messages over long distances without the need for a direct connection such as the wire required for the telegraph is my next suggestion as an important invention. 

This invention by Guglielmo Marconi, demonstrated and patent applied for in London in 1896, began the revolution we now all enjoy as radio, TV transmission, cellular phones, WiFi and many
other communication methods.  His invention was based on previous work in wireless radio waves byJames Clerk Maxwell,  Faraday, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz[, Nikola Tesla and
others, but it was Marconi who recognized the practical use of the transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves.

The Transistor

Since I was involved in the semiconductor industry, which is based on the invention of the transistor, I must
include this invention in my list.  The transistor, and integrated circuits composed of transistors are at the base of essentially all methods of communication that we now
use in our work and personal lives. 

The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices,
and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Following its development in 1947 by American physicists John
Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things. The transistor is on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and the inventors were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics
for their achievement.  The invention of the transistor, and more specifically the very small low power MOS field effect transistor allowed the integrated circuit (IC) to
be invented and with that the proliferation of the electronic devices we have and use in our everyday life.  The complexity of the IC’s being made and sold now is mindboggling.  IC’s that have as many transistors on them as there are people on the earth are being designed and will soon be on the market. 

Cell phone, WiFi, Blue tooth, the computer, etc.

These inventions are some of the devices and methods we use to communicate, receive information, are entertained.   New devices, faster data exchange, more capability
are being brought to the market daily.  All such devices merit mention in the list of important inventions that improve our ability to communicate.  All of these inventions rest on the shoulders of previous generations of similar devices.  As such I will not try to
list the inventors, with the exception of this excerpt from Wikipedia about the cell phone:  The first hand-held cell phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Dr. Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing around 4.4 pounds
(2 kg).  From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew from zero to over 7 billion, penetrating 100% of the global population.

Internet

What would life be like without the Internet?   No e-mail, no Google, no Facebook.  OMG!  We use the internet to communicate all the time.   

The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States government in the 1960s to build robust, fault-tolerant communication via computer networks.  While this work, together with work in the United Kingdom and France, led to important precursor networks, they were not the Internet. There is no consensus on the exact date when the modern Internet came into being, but sometime
in the early to mid-1980s is considered reasonable.  From that point, the network experienced decades of sustained exponential growth as generations of institutional, personal,
and mobile computers were connected to it.   Al Gore did not invent it.   

The first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET and eventually the Internet were interconnected between Leonard Kleinrock‘s Network Measurement Center at the UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and Douglas Engelbart’s NLS system at SRI International (SRI) in Menlo
Park, California, on 29 October 1969. The third site on the ARPANET was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics center at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the fourth
was the University of Utah Graphics Department.  Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.
The Internet was fully commercialized in the U.S. by 1995.

What is next?

What will be the next invention to change the way we can communicate?  Mind reading? 
I hope not.   Musicians are hoping for instant communication over large distances so they
can play music together even if they are separated by thousands of miles.  The latent delay in the internet is too great to allow that to be possible.  I can see improvements in on line collaboration making going to work even less necessary than it is now, but that will hardly be revolutionary.  But it will free up the roads.   

Does
anyone have any ideas?