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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.
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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.
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.
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.
..."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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!--
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.
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.
A major motivation was to improve gas mileage. By allowing for higher compression, more efficient engines gas mileage was improved by something like 30%.
Today gas is so cheap and our standard of living so high that most people aren't terribly concerned about the amount of money they spend on gasoline.
This wasn't true in the early days of the automobile and the significant boost in mileage and the corresponding lowering of the cost of operating a car was considered important.
.
It's a matter of education and etiquette. People learned to scoop their doggie poo; they will learn how to use cell phones.
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)
Regarding the "knock" argument, ethyl alcohol was widely known in the 20s to be a safe alternative to tetraethyl alcohol, though it cost a bit more. There's also a myth that leaded gasoline was easier on valves but in fact the opposite is true and only through the introduction of chemical "scavengers" into the fuel which swept the lead out the back of the tailpipe were they able to eliminate this problem.
t m#cars
Folks this is nothing more than a classic cost/benefit analysis made by the automobile and petroleum companies back in the 1920s. They chose profits at the expense of public healthand the environment. They got away with it for nearly 50 years until the early 70s when the scientific evidence against leaded gasoline was too overwhelming to ignore.
From http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/Lead-History.h
While they were busy glossing over its perilous shortcomings for the public health, tetraethyl lead's boosters almost forgot that their "gift of God" posed some serious problems for cars. Instead of benefitting, engines were getting destroyed by lead deposits. GM researchers had noted this early in TEL's life, but Charles Kettering was anxious to get the new product to market. Problems, he argued, could be worked out with real-life experience to guide them. But necessary changes were slow in coming.
In May 1926, three years after leaded fuel went on sale, GM's Alfred Sloan wrote Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, to express concern that valve corrosion with Ethyl gas was so bad after 2,000-3,000 miles that it rendered cars "inoperative." Rather late in the day, one would have thought, he urged further development of the product. Referring to Ethyl's decision to re-enter the market, he wrote, "Now that we are back in again and are considering pushing the sale [of Ethyl] to the utmost, I think we ought to be concerned with this question."
So the additive that Standard, GM, Du Pont and the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation defended so vigorously before the Surgeon General and the nation wasn't even any good yet--it junked people's second-largest investment, after their homes. Incredibly, in spite of the near-magical claims being made for TEL, GM's own car divisions were at this very time bitterly resisting engine modifications to take advantage of it. In fact, GM's Buick, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac divisions would not recommend it to their customers until 1927, when they circulated bulletins to their dealers calling on them to withdraw any objections to leaded fuel. This was six years after TEL's invention and a full year and a half after a fractious national debate on TEL at the high-profile Public Health Service conference in Washington. Tellingly, support for TEL was forever lacking in the Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, the automotive engineering community's leading organ.
The damaging effects to which Sloan referred necessitated the introduction of chemical "scavengers," which would cause the residue of the spent ethyl fluid to leave the engine along with the car's exhaust gases, thus preventing lead buildup. After a little trial-and-error experimentation proved the destructiveness of chlorine, ethylene dibromide (EDB), a byproduct of bromine invented by Dow Chemical in the twenties, was selected as the scavenger of choice.
Proving the old maxim that you only make things worse when you tell a lie, Ethyl's adoption of EDB and its widespread use have created several waves of secondary environmental disaster. In more recent times, EDB combustion has been linked to halogenated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in exhaust, believed to be cancer risks. Also, when EDB is burned in the engine, it creates methyl bromide, which as a component of automobile exhaust the World Meteorological Organization has termed one of "three potentially major sources of atmospheric methyl bromide," which harms the ozone layer.
With the eventual demise of the US market for leaded fuel written on the wall, Ethyl had to find a new market for its lead scavenger EDB, and in 1972 it did--as a pesticide. Twelve years later, EDB would be banned by the EPA in this application following a 1974 finding that it was a powerful cancer-causing agent in animals; a 1977 finding of "strong evidence" that it caused cancer in humans; and a 1981 determination that it was "a potent mutagen"--a carcinogen with especially damaging consequences for human reproductive systems, powerful enough that it should be removed immediately from the food chain. This was bad news, as the United States was by now putting 20 million pounds of EDB into its soils annually, and it had begun to show up in cake mixes and cereal. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would also act to restrict EDB exposure, and the EPA would cite its reduction in the atmosphere as an additional benefit of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
Today the mechanical benefits of unleaded gasoline are obvious. Ever wonder why your new car goes longer than your old one between spark-plug changes? Or why exhaust systems last longer? Or why oil changes don't need to be as frequent? Try unleaded fuel. In a report delivered to the Society of Automotive Engineers, lead-free fuel was shown to significantly reduce engine rusting, piston-ring wear and sludge and varnish deposits, as well as to reduce camshaft wear. In 1985 an EPA report concluded that reduced lead levels reduced piston-ring and cylinder-bore wear, preventing engine failure and improving fuel economy. Estimated maintenance savings exceeded the maintenance costs associated with recession of exhaust valves, which is caused by the use of unleaded gasoline.
Gary Smith, an English Ford engineer working in the area of fuel economy and quality/vehicle/environmental engineering, told The Nation: "The higher the lead content, the more it messes the engine oil up, and we wanted to get longer intervals between engine oil changes, so that's a negative for lead as well.... [The scavengers used in leaded gasoline] or combustion of anything with chlorine or bromine will make hydrochloric and hydrobromic acid, so the actual muffler systems get corroded. They end up on--and affect--the spark plugs. Because we're trying to keep warranty costs down and [lower] costs for customers, we found ourselves going away from lead."
The jet engine is listed, along with its provenance as a British invention.
Babbage's computer is more that 85 years old, and therefore outside the scope of the article.
I'd be interested to know who, if not Philo Farnsworth, submitted a concept paper on the subject of television to his high school teacher (assuming they had high schools in the homeland of whoever the true inventor was). Did Farnsworth plagiarize previous work? Did he come by his idea independently of the true inventor? Did the revolutionary implementation build on Farnsworth's work or the other guy's? If the world-changing television was developed based on Farnsworth's work, in ignorance or disregard of the other guy, then I see no problem with crediting Farnsworth with the world-change.
Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian inventor living in Paris, flew a heavier-than-air craft (the 14-Bis) years before the Wright Flyer left the ground. Shortly afterwards, he successfully flew the Demoiselle, another HTA craft.
Sadly, lack of proper marketing, combined with Santos-Dumont's lifelong obsession with dirigibles (the 14-Bis and the Demoiselle were side projects), left him as a footnote in history, and the Wright brothers are not only credited with the first HTA flight (wrongly), but also credited with revolutionizing travel (rightly, I think--but that's a matter of opinion).
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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.