Inventions Of Humankind, The Greatest (Real)

They Are All Around You

Author: Vladimir L. Shirokogorov 
Date: 1997/08/18
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Here are brief descriptions of the four most significant inventions of humankind.  Definitely people made millions of other inventions, but these four influenced civilisation most of all and finally made humans what they are now.

Fire

Fire was not actually invented by people -- previously fire was a natural disaster caused by lightning or a volcano eruption or overheating, which destroyed the woods with all the inhabitants, including primitive humans. Obviously, fire was first used by people for cooking food, but later it was utilised for numerous purposes.  Now it is widely used for cooking in gas ovens, heating, transportation... frankly, it is easier to name areas where fire is not used.

Problems while using fire:  not letting it get out and not letting it burn everything around it.  These can be solved by the accurate use of fuel and keeping fire in a specially designed place (so called ovens, incinerators, motor cylinders, etc.)

The dark side of this invention is that fire makes it possible to kill each other, not by smashing your enemy's head with a club, but by throwing a metal bullet at some 700 metres per second from any distance up to 5 km, or, destroying more enemies, by throwing a shell with approximately the same speed from any distance up to 80 km, or by just pressing the red button and thus activating ICBM engines [1].

 
Wheel

The idea of wheel is also, most likely, taken from nature.  Though the wheel, as is, can not be found in any animal/tree/mineral, trunks of pine trees or round stones rolling down the hill could have given early man a hint.  The wheel is used for making horizontal transportation easier by way of reducing friction [2].  The most common wheel is a round one. Making square and triangular wheels makes no sense, as far as such wheels do not reduce friction.

Besides the fact that the wheels of trains and cars kill many people and animals every year, they have another disadvantage, which is a direct result of their advantage.  They always tend to roll down, so to stablize your car on a hill you have to use good brakes.

 
Money

Now this is a tricky bit.  Primitive people could do without money.  Today people can not, because they decided so.  This is how it happened.  When people began to produce more goods than was necessary for their own living, they started exchanging the extras for some other goods produced by other people.  In a while it became clear that they needed something to estimate the proportions in which goods should be changed and, at the same time, something which may be exchanged for goods, accumulated, and then changed into goods again.  So, after trying to use some other things for these purposes, people invented golden money [3].

Electricity

Again, electricity is not a pure human invention -- people just learnt how to get useful quantities of it and how to control it properly.  The discovery of electricity led to the inventions of electric lights, the telegraph, radios, computers, the Internet and so on.  Today's post-industrial, informational era would be impossible without these applications of electricity.

[1]	Note that the nuclear weapons themselves are not based on the     invention of fire, but the means of transportation in most cases are     propelled by fire.
[2]	Technically speaking, the wheel replaces the sliding friction with the     rolling friction, which is significantly lower.
[3]	Actually, it is better to read something by Adam Smith or Karl Marx     [4] or Paul Samuelson's "Economics" to understand why money is a     really great invention.  What I described is just the history of this     invention, but it gives no idea of money significance, which is     related to added value and other very smart things.
[4]	Read those works of Marx that are dedicated to the economic issues and     not the social theory.  He was a great economist but a poor prophet,     but regardless of whether you like it or not, all communism is based     on his works.