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85 Big Ideas that Changed the World
ccnull writes "Forbes just put out its well thought-out list of 85 breakthroughs since 1917 (sneakers) that have revolutionized the way we live. This is interesting on a number of levels -- crazy trivia (the microprocessor and the answering machine invented in the same year!?), a reminder of the past (the modem: 1962), and a frightening realization that not much of interest has come out of the last 10 years (a whopping 4 of the 85 ideas). Easily digestible and worth discussing."
The reason that our more recent ideas aren't on the list is because we don't know which are the good ones yet. Hindsight is needed to appreciate what we've been doing.
The thing is that we don't have the perspective of history to indicate to us what will have long term relevance. I mean they listed Viagra on there. VIAGRA? I'm sorry, but the ability for an old man to get an erection is not one of the greatest innovations of the last 85 years.
One thing I didn't see on the list was nanotechnology, which is going to hugely impact the future. We're only seeing it in limited ways so far, but 10 or 20 years from now it's going to revolutionize a lot of things. Also, one thing I noticed was that, while a number of inventions like fiber optics were created some time ago, it's only recently that the implementations have borne practical fruit.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Why isn't spandex on the list???? The person who invented that should get a few medals. Why, women actually WEAR the skintight stuff. Bless you, Mr. spandex.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Don't forget that the folks at Ma Bell saw little use for the transistor, so they licensed it cheap to Sony and other Japanese companies, who proceeded to get rich selling transistor radios. Anyone making a list in, say, 1955, might well have left the 1947 invention of the transistor off.
Also, some of Forbes' choices are strange: tetraethyl lead? This did not "change the way we live".
Forbes lists their top 85 *business* breakthroughs...which slants things so that sheetrock is listed whereas the theory of relativity is not.
New ideas are born out of necessity. The transistor was invented because vacuum tubes weren't going to cut it at any level with computers. They simply werent fast enough or reliable enough. So the transistor comes along and its one of the best inventions of the 20th century.
However we have been improving on this, and other ideas, for the last half century. Miniturization may not be a new idea or invention, but the continued process of improving an idea is just as important as the first step. Moores Law is starting to run out with computer chips, you can expect the search for quantum computing to become all the more critical when it does.
We haven't had many new ideas lately, maybe just because we are still working on the old ones?
In 20 years we may look back and decide that the free software movement represented a landmark shift in the way people view software, licensing and IP issues.
I'm not trying to imply that "everything has been invented", but I think it's reasonable to argue that the "easy" technological advances have happened.
The things that are left take either much more sophisticated science, or sophisticated materials, and therefore have longer development times.
If you were to graph true innovation (NOT incremental) innovation vs. time I think that the curve is starting to flatten out. We're starting to bump into fundamental physical limitations on a lot of things: IC devices which are subject to quantum effects, the earth's gravity well wrt space travel, high T superconductors.
There's still plenty of room for invention (!), but the time and effort between true invention is becoming greater.
Absolute statements are never true
Drop pants on TV.
Genius.
Umm... I didn't see the female thong on the list.
#86 - The Beowulf cluster. .Net
#87 - The first post robot.
#88 - The last post robot.
#89 - Underpants gnomes (Phase 1, 2, 3, etc).
#90 - Microsoft Tablet PC.
#91 - Microsoft
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
For the record, this is a list of 85 business breakthroughs. People forget, especially in the gadget happy world of Slashdot, that some of the great historical inventions and innovations are theoretical and intellectual and first exist in the realm of ideas and aren't clearly profitable or worth, by objective measures, an investment of money. Forbes wants you to think about breakthrough because they have the potential to make profit, which is good because it spurs innovation. But there are other reasons to try to innovate and revolutionize that are outside of the world of consumer culture.
Fight the national One-strike law for public housing residents
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
That they'd left out one of the most significant advancements in the history of mankind...but they didn't
Viagra is on the list, whew!
..."fast, free" website registration. Like the one Forbes used to run me off before reading the article.
Bet it didn't list microwave popcorn, did it? Now THAT is progress we can all get behind!
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
"Thomas Midgely adds lead to gasoline to stop power-draining knocking."
As if burning fuel wasn't bad enough already add a toxic metal to it to really juice things up. It's already banned in many countries including the USA and UK.
This site has further commentary and also covers his discovery of Freons that later helped damage the ozone layer including how his final invention killed him.
Surely the whole idea of such an article is to choose the inventions with the benefit of hindsight.
[)amien
Sure it did! It "lead" the way for all of those "Unleaded Fuel Only" stickers that almost all of us have on our dashboards. I dunno about you, but I sure sleep better at night knowing that's there.
I find myself noticing the years most of these inventors had died. Their inventions and discoveries are astounding, but I was alive when a lot of them died and I can't even remember any news or information about these people when they died.
Almost if any announcements of such were simply a segue from national news to sports. Easy to forget.
The discovery that tetraethyl lead could prevent knock was huge leap forward; it was a huge boost to the automotive industry, since it allowed manufacturers to build safer/more reliable/more powerful/etc engines.
These days all we hear about are the health risks of tetraethyl lead (it's toxic as hell), but back in the early 1900's it was seen as a tremendous leap forward. Without it, cars, airplanes, etc would be very different today.
Did you see that? 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrates computer
windows and a wooden stylus he calls a mouse. 1968. Can you say
"Microsoft vs Lindows trademark lawsuit"? How about 1968, can you
say that? (I knew the concept was old, but I didn't know it was
that old.)
> To a packed house at a computer conference in San Francisco,
> Stanford Research Institute's Douglas Engelbart made a dramatic
> presentation that included first-time demonstrations of onscreen
> "windows," teleconferencing and a wooden stylus device he called
> a "mouse." Engelbart didn't see much value in the peripheral, and
> neither did Stanford Research, which owned the patent and later
> licensed it to companies like Apple Computer for a $45,000
> one-time fee. Two decades later, Engelbart's in-vention was the
> PC standard.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Anyone else notice how the ethernet slide has a picture of an rj-11?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Electing George W. Bush?
Oh, you meant for the better...
My
Limekiller
No mention of Microsoft.
My Ass hurts.
What they should have put on the list is the !@#!~ scrollbar! Why the hell did they put only one invention per page?!?!?
</rant>
Other than that, not a bad article....
For the slide show on the Forbes web page, you have to hit "next" like 3 or 4 times until it starts showing up. In other words, it does work.
The list's a little silly, but whatever. Steve Forbes's comments, however, are a good dose of absurdist techno-capitalist babble.
Exempli Gratia:
Ray Kroc, for instance, didn't invent the fast-food phenomenon back in the 1950s. But when he saw the facility run by the McDonald brothers, he quickly grasped--as they did not--the awesomely exciting implications of their techniques in a business that was notorious for failure. The idea of creating a chain of thousands of similar restaurants that spanned the globe was, before Kroc's vision, utterly preposterous.
Alternate reading -- Ray Kroc, shrewd businessman, stumbles upon small very profitable business. He proceeds to buy their franchising rights, eventually purchasing the business and taking legal control over the use of their own name, and makes a fortune. McDonald brothers are left in the dust.
Yet all too many academics, politicos, bureaucrats and even businesspeople don't understand that risk-taking is the wellspring of our progress.
Sure, Steve, because we know that none of the great innovations of the twentieth century have involved financial or institutional support from governments, universities, or big business. All garage tinkerers...
But the most potent fiscal incentive is reducing marginal tax rates--i.e., the tax you pay on each additional dollar you earn.
Ah yes, the Steve Forbes innovation. Surprised that wasn't number #86 on the list.
Trial lawyers have progressed too far in diffusing the stark difference between fraud and honest business mistakes.
Yeah, like the Ford Pinto. Just an honest business mistake...
The fundamental concept of limited liability--you can't lose more money than the amount you invested in an entity--is being eroded.
Fun fact -- our founding fathers viewed limited liability corporations with some concern. As a result, such corporations could only be chartered by state legislatures, and had to be renewed every few years. If a corporation didn't seem to be serving the public well, state legislatures would often decharter it.
Corporate directors with M.B.A.s and considerable experience in running businesses have been discovering that in the eyes of the Securities & Exchange Commission they are not qualified to sit on audit committees, because they are not certified public accountants.
Perhaps that could be because spending a few years learning management culture at Harvard doesn't qualify you to thoroughly analyze corporate finances.
Democratic capitalism is moral.
Democratic capitalism? Is that something like military intelligence?
You won't long succeed in business if you don't serve the needs or wants of others.
Yeah, that's why Ken Lay did so poorly...
Red All Over: Rambling Missives from an Aspiring Revolutionary
Maybe our problem is due to a lack of original thought.
Might as well blow some good karma here.
Why would you post a cut and paste from 4 days ago, then why do the moderators follow along as good little sheep and mod it up as interesting and insightful?
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
I can recognise and sympathise with the sentiment, but:
I studied CS, and consider myself to have more of a leaning towards science than art/humanities/whatever, but who decided that only scientists are capable of designing new products or services?
Tim
However, the credit for the Multiplane Camera was given to Walt Disney, not to its true inventor, Ub Iwerks. That guy got ZERO respect from Disney. Walt also took credit for the final design for Mickey Mouse...guess what? Iwerks drew that. According to animation historians, Disney couldn't draw to save his own life. He relied on Iwerks to take his scribbles and scrawls and turn them into something that actually LOOKED GOOD.
"But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever....In the digital world, we don't need back-ups..."
-- Jack Valenti
13) Discourage common courtesy - glorify rudeness and arrogance as being "forceful and dynamic". However, make sure that anybody who dares to critisize somebody for their rudeness is called "intolerant". Manners are the oil that lubricates society - throw as much grit in there as you can.
www.eFax.com are spammers
This Ben Stein essay originally in Forbes or somesuch is such tripe.
This is the same guy who hosts the pointless trivia
show on Comedy Central "Win Ben Stein's Money".
If that's not clearly exactly the sort of crap that he is saying has led to the decline of the US, then he's not reading his own essay.
The show is all about getting some $$$ for answering some pointless questions and winning something for nothing.
His essay clearly highlights a lot of important issues, but his life and lifestyle put him in the "part of the problem" side.
Forbes both characterizes Unix and C (1972) as "the original computer operating system and language," but also has FORTRAN (mid to late 50s) in its list of 85 big ideas--so not only are they wrong (Unix isn't even the first multitasking OS or the first OS written in a high-level language--we'll grant C high-level status in this context), they contradict themselves.
These people had been to movie theaters before...didn't they know how terrible of an idea a cell phone is?
Two things to consider:
1.) As other posters have written: Hindsight is needed to appreciate breakthroughs which "change...lives in a profound way." If there have been any such breakthroughs, recently (no, I'm not suggesting that Segway will qualify), they haven't yet had time to be fairly judged.
2.) I think it's also worth considering that recent years, more than the past, have seen our "technological progress" move more toward improving existing tools rather than inventing new ones. The obvious example is the internet -- now that its infrastructure is present, and it has been adopted into a large percentage of homes and businesses, we're seeing real and profound development occur. Amazon, eBay, Bibliofind -- hell, even pr0n -- aren't "inventions," per se, but they certainly represent new developments which I suspect may be seen as quite impactful.
Also, the past ten or fifteen years have seen a progressive slide in our economy from product-oriented business to service-oriented business. Maybe it is true that we're not pumping out wold-changing inventions (the Foreman grill and the Popeil pasta maker aside) at the same rate we were a century ago; but I think that it has to be acknowledged that we are also offering (and consuming) services which didn't exist in the past. It's worth considering whether the rate of decline in our production of "inventions" is perhaps matched by our rate of growth in providing "services."
Finally, although I think the above is more relevant, there's the obligatory shot at the Clinton generation: One of the notions held by that generation, I think, is the idea of "quick profit" -- and specifically, that it's quicker, cheaper and generally more efficient to improve upon an existing product, rather than produce something entirely new. I think that generation, as compared to the economic drivers of the 1940s, have been more interested in taking charge of what's around them than developing anew. So if we're seeing less inventions and more "version 2.4"...well, I'm not surprised.
crib
Please don't read my journal
Same reason that military jets are faster than planes you can buy.
Why is that sad? Conflict motivates.
How many animals out there improve their existence more by cooperation than by conflict?
Not sad, not happy, just a fact of the human condition.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Better yet, read Atlas Shrugged, Part Two: One hour later!
Wah!
Number one on that list? Not the steam engine or the telegraph, the cotton gin or the McCormick reaper, or even newcomers like electric lights and the telephone. According to the New York Times, the most important invention of the previous century was chemical "frictionless" matches.
I suppose this decision makes a little more sense in a world where most homes and businesses are still heated by coal and lit by kerosene. (And yes, I know it is a bitch to light things with flint and steel.) But I wonder how much of this article will be considered laughable or just plain stupid in 100 years.
--Gondwanaland for Gondwanans!--
Forbes discovery of using a "slide show" to cram 85 ads down a single users throat in a single "story".
Ingreadients of Cellphone Zapper include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.
Do not taunt Cellphone Zapper.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
1954 -- Telstar The first commercial communications satellite is launched
Oh, well! If History is taught in the U.S. as Forbes' "historians" show it, no wonder why Americans are so unaware of the world's reality.
Are you aware of the term "Ad Hominem"? If you are, then you will know that attempting to discredit this argument based on irrelevant facts about Ben Stein doesn't hold much water.
I'm not trying to pick on this single post, because there hasn't been a single valid rebuttal on this thread, actually. It doesn't matter that I copied and pasted the post and it doesn't matter that Ben Stein hosts a game show. The points are still strong, and nobody seems to want to actually deal with the issues head on. That's exactly what prevents innovation -- lack of desire or ability to solve problems.
Tetraethyl Lead was a TERRIBLE idea - the only reason it was chosen over grain alcohol was that tetraethyl lead could be patented and marketed, whereas grain alcohol could not.
Perhaps it was a great business innovation, but a lousy scientific innovation.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Something that starts off with this line can be considered "Insightful"??
zrodney is attacking the article because it is written by someone who he says is apparently "evil" because he has a game show. That reeks of a Troll to me. I guess not to everyone else.
Lets ignore the fact that his gameshow (like some others) actually rely on the knowledge and intelligence of the contestants to win money and prizes... not just the "luck of the spin of the wheel". Lets also ignore the fact that Ben Stein is a highly intelligent man who has written speeches for U.S. Presidents and presidential candidates. Lets mod this guy up because he talks about the author of the article "being part of the problem with society"... which really has nothing to do with the article at all.
Karma: NaN
For instance:
2) Encourage the making of laws and rules by trial lawyers and sympathetic judges, especially through class actions.
As opposed to letting it be made by a morally bankrupt, corrupt congress which is primarilly elected based on their ability to:
1) Kow-tow to the incredibly popular president, regardless of what he's actually doing
and
2) Raise cash from huge corporations?
I'd much rather have intelligent judges legislate from the bench (even if I disagree with them) than letting CEOs legislate from the board room.
Besides, this is ONE of the ways that things can enter law, and if it's really WRONG congress can always overturn it.
I always love these "10 point" lists. They are ALWAYS oversimplifications of an incredibly complex problem (which can itself be simplified to "People are stupid")
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
1917-1938
1939-1947
1947-1955
1956-1958
1959-1971
1972-1987
1987-2000
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Like I said, I studied CS, but I'm having trouble deciphering that logic. My assumption seemed reasonable, given what was, I assume, the ironic nature of the arguments. i.e. the author was describing things he didn't think should be done/happen.
In any case, people rarely employ boolean logic when speaking - the classic example being "Get me all the customer orders from London and Manchester".
Tim
(nods and shakes head, dejectedly)
It's getting frighteningly close to that book...
I'm starting to think that America as a nation won't last the century.
There is not a single original thought in your post. Instead of flaming me for copying and pasting, how about you respond to some of the points that you disagree with?
Innovations that Revolutionized Slashdot
from the not-I-said-jonkatz dept.
That's all I can think of, anyone care to add more?
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
So that's where they keep the internet. And all this time I thought it was on my machine.
Hmm. Interesting. No wonder it's listed.
Sent from your iPad.
The way I read it was that trial lawyers and judges were preventing scientists, AND other people that understand the issues from solving the problems. There are a lot of people that have a lot to gain from problems not being resolved once and for all. Those people employee attorneys and sometimes judges to throw legal roadblocks in the way of those (scientists and everybody else) who may be able to put an end to the problems.
One thing that's interesting about this statement is that Stein himself is a lawyer.
The sentence in question isLet's call scientists group S and trial lawyers and judges group L. (Scientists and Lawyers for mnemonics.) Let's call the responsiblity for new products and services R. That sentence could be rewritten, from a logic viewpoint, as:The assumption is that S has R currently. Not necessarily all of R, but at least some R.
Since S does not necessarily have all of R, your sentence:was what I was objecting to. It can be resaid as: which is not a valid conclusion, logically.
Was that clear as mud?
this is better than the link given.
The other myth is that there were no good alternatives. In fact alcohol worked as well then as now. (It just wasn't patentable.)
They managed to suppress the evidence for just how toxic was the lead they were scattering around for many decades. The suppression was deliberate and criminally fraudulent.
Leaded gasoline was a disaster and a crime on a scale similar to the asbestos deception of the same era, but one that has still not been prosecuted, largely for political reasons. It is almost a miracle that leaded gas got banned at all. The ban certainly wouldn't happen in today's political climate, even though lead was killing a World Trade Center's worth of Americans every week. Killing Americans is a corporate privilege.
Critizing rude behavior need not be rude itself - if a person insists upon using their cell phone in a movie, saying quietly to them "Please go outside - I am trying to watch the movie" is not rude.
Now, screaming
DID THIS MOVIE START WITH BIG RED LIPS ON SCREEN? THIS ISN'T ROCKY HORROR - SHUT THE FUCK UP!
would be rude.
Fun.
But rude.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Why prozac and not aspirin or tylenol? Safe, low cost pain killers have had a huge impact on people's lives, and spawned the entire pharmaceuticals juggernaut.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
And necessary. Trust me, the first does not work.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
For a very good history of point 2, I recommend reading Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom, by Peter W. Huber. Extremely informative book.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
"You apparently haven't been to a Wal-Mart recently. Many women who are wearing spandex shouldn't."
There is actually a law "illegal use of spandex."
It's on the books, but seldom enforced.
and btw; what is that color of spandex, you know the one, it's sort of green and has milk stains on it?
Ick.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
the microprocessor and the answering machine invented in the same year!?
Yup. They were beastly electro-mechanical things about the size of a VCR.
Believe it or not, lots of technology existed before uP/uC's existed.
Take the automatic phone switch, for example... It was invented when a funeral home realized that the competitor's wife was working the switchboards and referring all businesses to him. It was basically a big rack of relays and switches.
In a list of top business ideas, I'm a little suprised they missed the Black-Scholes Formula. While few outside of the financial have heard of it, this Nobel prize-winning development revolutionised the world of finance. It was (and is) a way of finding the fair price for options contracts, a problem that experts had been trying to solve for most of the century. It was revolutionary because it was the first one that actually worked and as such utterly changed the balance of risks involved with these financial transactions. The model was eventually extended to cover other instruments. Professors Black and Scholes later changed the world in another, less appealing way. They were behind the spectacular failure that was Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), proving, if anything, that their models were not entirely flawless.
Damn, that girl has some nice legs.
(Yes, I know it's bad, but...)
Saying this list represents the 85 biggest ideas of the 20th century is an astonishingly stupid thing to say. There have been many hugely influential and important ideas that weren't inventions, including many in the sciences. It's funny how geeks often seem to think the universe revolves around them...
How about presenting all the items in the list on one page of plain-vanilla HTML with a simple abstract for each item and a link if we want details? Otherwise, this thing is broadband only.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Bullshit. More people are more literate today than at any time in the past.
It's a matter of education and etiquette. People learned to scoop their doggie poo; they will learn how to use cell phones.
What about Public Key Crpto? Without public key crypto, E-business would be a very risky venture not to mention hundreds of other technologies that rely of public key.
Maybe it's time to increase the font on the web browser...
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
Was that clear as mud? :-)
Yeah :-)
I see what you mean - my reaction was just that I thought I saw the prejudice of the author coming through in the language/phrasing (i.e. the opinion that also appears fairly commonly on slashdot, viz, scientists/geeks are smart, everyone else is pretty dumb and/or morally questionable).
However, as someone else has pointed out, Stein is a lawyer, so maybe it's more an indication of my own prejudices ;-)
Tim
Similarly, I've heard, but I can't find a reference now (I think it may have been on a history of science list or something), that many physics labs had working microwave ovens as early as 1935, and while cooking wasn't what it was supposed to be used for, it was... :-)
The LASER was indeed not realized before the 1950-ties, but you can find many folks who worked on early LASERs that will tell you that Einstein really did most of the work a lot earlier. It was his ideas.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Stein's success in various fields tends to make him somewhat of an authority on the subject of what it takes to be successful -- the fruit of innovation.
Are you expecting a single, reasonably concise rebuttal for all of the hundreds of disparate potshots he takes in his 1,000-word diatribe? It would take too long to enumerate every instance in which I disagree with Mr. Stein.
I'm not an unreasonable man, but you didn't even attempt one point.
In general, the points toe a very predictable conservative line, and do not offer any new insight that I can see.
Not new, but still correct.
I should mention that it's really amusing to see all these down-moderations, yet not one person has managed to list a single valid rebuttal to any of the points. "I disagree, but I don't know why!"
I vote the punched-chad ballot (or the Supreme Court interpretation of such) as the invention which will have the greatest effect on the world as we know it.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
It's fun to observe the small circles that we run around in because of beauracracy(sp?). Cell phones could have been implemented in 1947, but
The FCC stymied the idea by limiting the number of radio-spectrum frequencies for mobile telephone service; it didn't reconsider its position until 1968.
Anyone see parallels with wireless technology?
Thank you FCC for protecting me!!!
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
Maybe you need to vote for more fashion cops, if the ones you have are not able to enforce the law effectively.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The real reason you have to wait a few years before listing it, is that you need to let peoples memories fade a bit before you can claim it was an American invention.
Looking through the list, the inventions fall into 4 categories.
1. American inventions, where their origin is made clear. They're quite careful to always list where the inventions came from, along the lines of "(asian/eastern european name) of the University of (somewhere in America)"
2.Foreign inventions, where no mention of their inventors nationality is made. Fleming, the inventor of penicillin is one example.
3. Foreign inventions that are credited to Americans who came along later. Television and computers are two examples.
4. Foreign inventions that are credited to their actual inventors, and nationality acknowledged. I counted 3.
What is it with Americans?
Why do you feed the need to claim the credit for everything?
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
> I should mention that it's really amusing to see all these down-moderations, yet not one person has managed to list a single valid rebuttal to any of the points. "I disagree, but I don't know why!"
The reason you don't see a rebuttal to these points is that they're correct as they stand. The mistake you make (and Mr. Stein, for whom I have a great deal of respect, by the way) is (in his case) implying that these bad ideas have all been implemented by the U.S. culture and (in your case) believing him. In point 11, I agree that this socialized medical system would be a bad thing, but I disagree with his implication that this is the way things work now. In point 9, the immigration policy he describes is indeed horrible, but I remain unconvinced that it's accurate. I could go on, but you get my point. This doesn't fit "valid rebuttal to any of the points" strictly, but it does represent disagreement with his position.
Virg
I nearly shit myself when I was watching an old Perry Mason episode and I saw him using a car phone! This is like the late 50's, so I didn't realise they had that tech back then. In the same episode, Him and Paul make a big deal out of some guys "Hi-Fi" stereo setup...like the car phone wasn't a big deal. And what about the wind-up phone in MASH that was always in the Blake/Potter's office. That was cool.
1933 Frequency Modulation
Forget Howard Stern. The real force behind modern radio is Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890-1954). By 1913 he figured out how to amplify radio signals with a feedback loop. During WWI he improved reception and made tuning in signals easier with the superheterodyne circuit, a component that transforms high-frequency waves into intermediate-frequency waves. His biggest hit in communications came with his radical notion that radio signals should transmit data by variations not in amplitude but in frequency. By this scheme he eliminated much of the static that plagued traditional AM broadcasts. The broadcast industry, heavily invested in AM, tried to stop him, but FM eventually won the day. It's also the electronic format for tv and space communication.
Nice to know somethings never change. RIAA take note.
Literacy is not creativity. It's memorization, mostly.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Still, I don't see how they could have missed the Segway
With Intellectual Property, I wonder how many "Good Ideas" will be lost in the future. You can't even propose something without being sued to hell, or your too restricted to create new buisnesses because everything is patented.
::throws prototype in trash::"
"Billy: Hey! I have made a prototype for a Nanotech replicator!"
"Sally: Err... Sony patented everything Nanotec"
"Billy: Yea, I forgot.
Car phones in those days weren't anything like the cell phones of today. They were clunky things that weren't directly tied-in to the phone system. Well, maybe they were dialing out, using phone patch technology similar to what hams use, but to call somebody's car phone you placed a call to the "mobile operator" and had them make the connection.
Kinda like when making a long distance call outside the country in those days you had to ask for the "overseas operator" and have them place the call.
-- Alastair
Many people don't realize the wool has been pulled over their eyes in other areas as well. Why doesn't anyone ever talk about this???
They got a small royalty on every burger sold. That small royalty really started to add up over the years :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
interactive TV and videophones are pretty much here anyway, now (oh, you don't have a cell-phone with a camera yet?)
And space-based solar power is actually one of the two major long-term energy options we have (the other being fusion) so it definitely shouldn't be discounted! I just wish NASA and the Department of Energy were spending a little bit more on research into it ($25 million over 30 years doesn't amount to very much...)
Energy: time to change the picture.
Not to mention that Fleming shared the Nobel Prize for the "creation of penicillin" with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, who actually figured out how to isolate and produce it in quantity. Fleming's contribution was noticing the effect that mould had on bacteria, but he didn't take things any further.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Actually, adjusted for inflation the price of gas has not changed much since 1950. I'm not sure how much it was before that, but my impression is that it was the cost of the vehicle then more than now that was the major stumbling block, hence the success of Ford. The heavy taxes that account for about a third of the price of gas also had not yet been invented.
I can see how boosting mileage would be a competitive advantage but am not so convinced the industry would have died without it. Then there's all the adverse health effects to factor in -- those cost money, too, even if they are externalized and subtle.
I do think leaded gas was an odd pick.
When I used to work on GA aircraft, I spent a lot of time picking pieces of lead out of the spark plugs (they cost $10 apiece, and so were worth saving).
Interestingly these many of the engines, which in design dated from about WWII, ran perfectly well on "low-lead" gas with a fraction the original lead. I don't know if anyone put much thought into minimizing the lead.
I have heard anything about MTBE? It was patented and earning whatever oil company a fortune. Sadly, it is also incredibly toxic and can leach into groundwater from leaking tanks -- like a gallon could destroy an aquifer. I'm not yet convinced it is as bad as described, but what I heard was very disturbing.
From the article:
Electronic Digital Computer
After "an evening of scotch and 100mph car rides"
This might explain alot in the computer industry...
-ted
This mixture of recycled paper and the cheap mineral gypsum is cheap, to boot: Industry insiders say this is the only business where you can sandwich dirt between two layers of garbage and get money for it. Apparently industry insiders don't watch much television.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
" How did the cellphone revoluntionize the world? Did it double crop outputs or cure a disease or what?"
It allowed much more instant and available connectivity.
It allows us to report crimes as we see them from inside our car.
It allows us to call for help when deserted out in the middle of HickVille, USA.
And the real reason it made it on the forbes list: Now all of the suits have access to that cool snake game while in boring meetings.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I had a feeling that the article would claim that everything was invented by the US (or exclude things invented outside the US), and where they had to include something huge, they'd fudge over the details about where it was invented.
I couldn't get the article to load properly (kept crashing Chimera) so I didn't get to see them all.
I would have thought one of the top ones would have been the TV ariel - invented in Japan, or the jet engine, invented in Britain, or radar, invented in Britain, or the computer - invented in Britain by Charles Babbage.
The US will be claiming it invented the wheel soon.
Well, a US company will probably patent it then sue everyone that wants to use "a circular device that aids travel".
Literacy may not be creativity, but it's not memorization, either. At least, not the way I would normally use the word.
An example of memorized knowledge would be the multiplication tables.
The way we internalize and retrieve language information is a very different thing.
Analogies are tricky things, but perhaps it's like the difference between retrieving information from a database and having the information included in the software itself. Then again, perhaps not.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Driving through the midwest in 1965 (Ohio, I think), there were occasional gas stations with the brand name "Boron". I was informed that the "Boron" chain was so-named because they used a boron compound as an anti-knock agent. Apparently this was not a great commercial success. I have no idea if toxicity was a problem, but my father said the company he worked for (Commercial Solvents Corp.) helped "Boron" with some difficulties they had keeping their compound dissolved in the gasoline.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
A century ago? The steam engine was invented in 1763 (or 1698, if you want to be a bit flexible on the word 'engine'), and the cotton gin was patented in 1794.
Agree that article is way too much american centric to be serious.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
Especially as the computer game was invented way before pong (Space War was created in 1962).
Exactly my point! :)
Which was really that inventions of the past 85 years (Forbes' time frame) are kind of hard to label revolutionary.
Imagine how long the list of inventions superior to the cellphone would be. IMHO the pager blows it out of the water -- does anyone remember what a sensation those were? and think of the lives that were saved by ruining the dinners of innumerable doctors -- the cellphone was merely a later step.
To be fair, I should have picked items from Forbes's 85-year period. I bet there are quite a few superior to the cellphone in the at period -- think of the life-changing advances in medical technology alone -- yet the number that can be called revolutionary is an historical sense is small.
For fun, here is a fun catalog of inventions large and small. Count how many beat "cellphone."
BTW, the cotton gin was kind of a disasterous revolution if you happened to have been an African-American slave. It saved cotton plantations from financial ruin. Nor did Eli make much off of it; the patent was one of the most widely-disregarded in American history, with the states themselves handing out gins. (I can already hear someone making bizarre "fair use" arguments and complaining about the RIAA monopoly on gin technology.)
I noticed that too. It's a typo. If you click on the "more information" link on the slide, they show the correct year of 1962.
But they're ignoring strokes of genius like one-click shopping swinging sideways!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
At a sidebar, there is a poll that caught my attention. Below is an excerpt.
Which of these technologies is most likely to reinvent the future:I wish I had a button that would say "Nooooo!"
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
I live and love IT, but really, it seemed near half the list was some or other minor step in the march of IT towards world domination, with some side bets on medicine, motor cars and financial instruments.
From memory, food got three mentions (frozen, micorwaved and fast/franchised) and construction two (tract housing and Gyprock).
What about glass skinned skyscrapers? If you used the approach they used to IT, I'm sure there could be several more discrete innovations which have made our modern CBDs possible.
But beyond that, and even more essentially American (at least before the rise of China in the last decade) is the interconnected web of manufacturing industry where things like JIT and TQM, of even, in its day, the humble fax, have made a huge difference.
I dunno what I can do but chuckle when a publication like Forbes starts to see the whole world as an IT application. WIRED I can imagine.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
You forgot the latest one, the DUPE(tm) technology, now patent pending in US and other countries.
Shit.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
"It allows us to call for help when deserted out in the middle of HickVille, USA"
Sorry this is wrong. Though in places like the midwest were only a few towers is needed this idea works. In most rural places it doesn't. I live in Pennsylvania, one of the most populated states in the country but in one of the hick parts. Cell phones don't work. And simple arn't very likely to work any time soon, as in the decade. Mountainous regions kill implementation of cell phones unless there is a lot of people to make it worth while. So if something happens to you there your still screwed.
Also snake is a good game, but once you beat it it's not so fun. that is to make a snake that fills every pixel of the screen. Takes a long time to do but not hard. Best way to run a game is to beat it. Maybe when i get a new phone it will be fun again
Why do you feed the need to claim the credit for everything?
I think you're just being paranoid.
For the vast majority of the inventions, no nationality is mentioned at all.
I see plenty of inventions that mention "Royal [University|airforce] of such and such", or "Invented by Sir So-and-so". Sure, there are plenty of references to companies like "Raytheon invented the microwave" or something, but I rarely see nationality mentioned.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Would lead fuel actually damage your engine these days, or is the sticker just a propaganda device against the evil harmful lead?
I've heard both...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I don't know about you guys, but this is one of the funniest pictures I've ever seen!
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
You forgot the technique of discussing the viability of creating Beowolf Clusters of just about damn near everything.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
I believe that Baird invented a mechanical mechanical "television" (as well as Color TV, later on), but Farnsworth came up with the idea of using a Cathode Ray tubes instead of mechanical parts.
The years are mixed up, however. Some articles say that Baird created his TV in 1925, and Farnsworth did his part in 1923, 2 years before Baird.
Either way, it goes to show that alot of these "I invented it first" arguments are utter rubbish.
We wouldn't have modern TV or monitors without either of these folks.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
And the atomic bomb has contributed to peaceful productive commerce and business how? All of fission has led to very little in real business value. Due to fear nuclear power has been a complete loss, and nuclear weapons are a waste product that require funding taxed from thousands of productive businesses to be built.
Yes, I'm aware many modern gadgets rely on principles inherent in modern, not classical, physics : everything from the laser to the smoke detector. And in the future it may become more viable to get our power from nuclear (reprocessing) fission due to the many limits and drawbacks with oil.
Besides the obvious issue of lead poisoning, there were a few other factors in the phaseout of tetraethyl lead.
The development of much more precise fuel delivery systems with port (and now direct) fuel injection, better engine breathing (turbocharging, supercharging and 16 or 20 valve per cylinder cylinder heads) and the development of computerized engine controls made it possible to have extremely precise control of the combustion process, which made it possible to have powerful engines with no worries about engine knocking. A great example of this is the evolution of the four-cylinder engine on the Honda Accord; the 1986 Accord LX sported a 2.2-liter 12-valve per cylinder I-4 engine made about 98 bhp, while the 2003 Accord LX sports a 2.4-liter 16-valve per cylinder I-4 engine that makes 160 bhp, with a tiny fraction of the harmful emissions output and no change in fuel mileage! =)
Did anybody see the article referenced on the side about how
innovators die poor?
1. Have a great idea
2. ???
3. Die broke
BTW, I am glad that they included relational databases in their innovation list. I would have had a hissy fit if they did not. Is Codd still alive, BTW?
Table-ized A.I.
The first to cross the Atlantic were John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, two british chaps.
Go figure for the rest of similar "thruths". :-)
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
The sort of literacy the grandparent post cited (the type given in literacy statitistics) was not the "well read, able to understand complex nuances" sort of literacy. It's the "Can you read or can't you" sort of boolean literacy. And that's nothing more than memorizing.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Interactive Television
One word for you: Tivo.
What? In what way is a Tivo "interactive Television"?
The correct answer here would be "Internet". That would also be the correct answer to the Video Phone question as well. The only thing those camera phones bring to the eqution is mobility, and even that is questionable since there have been laptops with built-in cameras for a few years now.
Tivo is interactive television the same way that cuddling is a contact sport.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.