Greatest Inventions of the past 2,000 years

Hmmm. The link doesn't work for me, but I nominate plumbing (which the Chinese had first, naturally).

For those who can't access the link
John Brockman, editor. The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years. Phoenix. 2000
Contents

• Brian C. Goodwin.
The Printing Press
• Rodney A. Brooks.
The Electric Motor
• Tom Standage.
Telecommunications Technology
• Colin Tudge.
The Plow
• Arnold Trehub.
Otto von Guericke's Static Electricity Machine
• Alun Anderson.
The Caravel
• Samuel H. Barondes.
Organized Science
• John R. Searle.
The Green Revolution
• Marc D. Hauser.
The Electric Light and Aspirin
• John D. Barrow.
The Indo-Arab Counting System
• Leon Lederman.
The Printing Press and the Thermos Bottle
• Richard Potts.
Flying Machines
• Paolo Pignatelli.
The University
• Douglas Rushkoff.
The Eraser
• Viviana Guzman.
Television
• Garniss Curtis.
Gutenberg's Press with Movable Type
• Susan Blackmore.
The Contraceptive Pill
• Patrick Bateson.
The Harnessing of Electricity
• Carl Zimmer.
Waterworks
• Robert Shapiro.
Genetic Sequencing
• Howard Gardner.
Classical Music
• Roger C. Schank.
The Internet
• Randolph M. Nesse.
Printing
• Ron Cooper.
Distillation
• David Buss.
Television in its Effects on Mating Patterns
• Dan Sperber.
The Computer and the Atomic Bomb
• Maria Lepowsky.
The Pill, the Gun, and Hydraulic Engineering
• Robert R. Provine.
Universal Schooling
• Duncan Steel.
The Thirty-Three Year English Protestant Calendar
(see also talk at Seacon'03)
• Peter Tallack.
The Stirrup and the Horse Collar
• John C. Baez.
Social Structures that Enable Inventions
• Terrence J. Sejnowski.
The Digital Bit
• Nicholas Humphrey.
Reading Glasses
• Clifford A. Pickover.
Papermaking
• Freeman J. Dyson.
Hay
• Daniel C. Dennett.
The Battery
• Lawrence M. Krauss.
The Programmable Computer
• Gino Segre.
Lenses
• George Dyson.
The Universal Turing Machine
• Karl Sabbagh.
Chairs and Stairs
• Gordon Gould.
Double-Entry Accounting
• Bob Rafelson.
The Gatling Gun
• Stephen Budiansky.
The Domestication of the Horse
• David Haig.
The Computer
• William H. Calvin.
Computers as Modelers of Climate
• V. S. Ramachandran.
The Indo-Arabic Number System
• Peter Cochrane.
The Thermionic Valve
• Hendrik Hertzberg.
Printing
• Charles Simonyi.
Public Key Cryptosystems
• John Rennie.
Volta's Electric Battery
• Stuart R. Hameroff.
Anasthesia
• James J. O'Donnell.
Late-Twentieth-Century Health Care
• Steven Johnson.
The City
• Jeremy Cherfas.
The Basket
• Keith Devlin.
The Hindu-Arabic Number System
• Eberhard Zangger.
Nothing Worth Mentioning
• Henry Warwick.
Nothing
• Murray Gell-Mann.
Disbelief in the Supernatural
• Steven P. R. Rose.
Democracy and Social Justice
• Joseph E. LeDoux.
Various, Including the Idea that All People are Created Equal
• Don Goldsmith.
The Realization of Our Place in the Cosmos
• Steven Pinker.
The Alphabet and the Lens
• Paul W. Ewald.
Evolution by Selection
• Brian Greene.
The Telescope
• Joseph F. Traub.
The Scientific Method
• Stanislas Dehaene.
The Concept of Education
• John C. Dvorak.
Computer Networks
• Geoffrey F. Miller.
Marketing
• Luyen Chou.
Philosophical Skepticism
• Piet Hut.
The Construction of Autonomous Tools
• Thomas de Zengotita.
Geometry
• Marney Morris.
The Atomic Bomb
• David E. Shaw.
The Scientific Method
• David Berreby.
The Information Economy
• John McCarthy.
The Idea of Continued Scientific and Technological Progress
• David G. Meyers.
The Control Group
• Jay Ogilvy.
Secularism
• Milford H. Wolpoff.
Science
• Reuben Hersh.
The Interrogative Sentence; Space Travel
• Christopher Westbury.
Probability Theory
• W. Daniel Hillis.
The Clock
• Mary Catherine Bateson.
Economic Man---Most Boring Invention
• Julian B. Barbour.
The Bell and the Symphony Orchetra
• Marvin L. Minsky.
The Identification of Smell
• Christopher G. Langton.
The Telescope and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection
• Clay Shirky.
Godel's Incompleteness Theorem
• Colin Blakemore.
The Contraceptive Pill
• Oliver Morton.
Genetic Engineering
• John Henry Holland.
Board Games
• Jaron Lanier.
The Human Ego
• Esther Dyson.
Self-Government
• John Maddox.
The Calculus
• Bart Kosko.
The Calculus
• Verena Huber-Dyson.
The Infinitesimal Calculus
• John Horgan.
Free Will
• Tor Norretranders.
The Mirror
• Sherry Turkle.
The Idea of the Unconscious
• Richard Dawkins.
The Spectroscope
• Philip W. Anderson.
Quantum Theory
• Michael Nesmith.
The Copernican Theory
• Stewart Brand.
Christianity and Islam
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Various, Including the Flag
• Lee Smolin.
Mathematical Representation
• George Lakoff.
The Idea of an Idea
• Andy Clark.
The Digital Ecosystem
• George Johnson.
Mathematical Representation
• Howard Rheingold.
The Evolution of Technology





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John Brockman, editor. The Next Fifty Years: science in the first half of the twenty-first century. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 2002
Contents

• Lee Smolin.
The Future of the Nature of the Universe
• Martin J. Rees.
Cosmological Challenges: Are We Alone, and Where?
• Ian Stewart.
The Mathematics of 2050
• Brian C. Goodwin.
In the Shadow of Culture
• Marc D. Hauser.
Swappable Minds
• Alison Gopnik.
What Children will Teach Scientists
• Paul Bloom.
Towards a Theory of Moral Development
• Geoffrey F. Miller.
The Science of Subtlety
• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
The Future of Happiness
• Robert M. Sapolsky.
Will We Still be Sad Fifty Years from Now?
• Steven Strogatz.
Fermi's "Little Discovery" and the Future of Chaos and Complexity Theory
• Stuart A. Kauffman.
What is Life?
• Richard Dawkins.
Son of Moore's Law
• Paul C. W. Davies.
Was there a Second Genesis?
• John Henry Holland.
What is to Come and How to Predict It
• Rodney A. Brooks.
The Merger of Flesh and Machines
• Peter W. Atkins.
The Future of Matter
• Roger C. Schank.
Are We Going to Get Smarter?
• Jaron Lanier.
The Complexity Ceiling
• David Gelernter.
Tapping into the Beam
• Joseph E. LeDoux.
Mind, Brain, and Self
• Judith Rich Harris.
What Makes Us the Way We Are: the View from 2050
• Samuel H. Barondes.
Drugs, DNA, and the Analyst's Couch
• Nancy Etcoff.
Brain Scans, Wearables, and Brief Encounters
• Paul W. Ewald.
Mastering Disease

All those people, and only Carl Zimmer got it right! (hee hee)

Though the plow is a good choice, I think. And industrial fertilizers, though the impact of that one on the planet as a whole is, um, pretty negative less than a century later. A very big impact, though.

Some of these don't fit into the time frame. Baskets, cities and geometry all predate AD '03.

Oh, yeah. The plow probably predates the period, too.

Saran Wrap. Its clear, you can wrap anything in it, and you can see whats in the bowl in the frig. Thats the testimony of the 2030 year old man

it's also a far more effective contraceptive than the paper bag.

Great inventions are not things but ideas that radically alter the way we perceive the world, ie paradigm shifts. I'd have to go with Geoffrey F Miller who nominated marketing. The idea that people can be convinced to purchase things for reason of status and status competition rather then for need is the basis of our mass consumption economy and mass consumption is a necessary precursor to a mass production industry and a functionally based science that services that industry. That is what as made our contemporary world, is the foundation of our power, and our problems.

"Will We Still be Sad Fifty Years from Now?", asked one of the authors.

Most of us will be very lucky (or very unlucky, depending on health) to be alive.

BTW, the mirror is also over 2,000 years old

Communication allowed information to be transferred from one mind to another.

Language improved the efficiency of the transfer.

Writing freed language from the ambiguities and alterations of storytelling.

Printing widened the distribution of writing and accelerated the accumulation of information.

Distribution and accumulation of information enabled each generation to build on the previous.

Technology resulted from this multi-generational building, and in turn, it supports distribution and accumulation, perpetuating a cycle which is accelerating.

This foundation of knowledge which we have built, and the feedback cycle which it fuels, are our greatest creation and our greatest legacy.

Best Regards,

This is great....Who invented the date?

2 important inventions:
needle
forceps

Ask any surgeon!

most inventions were made by the Scotch

a lot of the things are over 2000 years old. ie...
"• Stanislas Dehaene.
The Concept of Education"

moveable type
integral calculus
the zipper
the pill
the telescope.
malt whiskey

The numerical zero (0).

Ketchup.

You girls know that the real answer is Tampax.

Beer