History's Most Underrated Inventions

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History's Most Underrated Inventions

by Tamim Ansary

Great inventions.

 

Typically that means big-ticket items. One thinks of dazzling

intellectual breakthroughs: the telescope, the steam engine, the

airplane, the wheel.... Those were all tremendous, of course.

 

But often it's some mundane little nothing of a device that changes

history. It might be no more than a slight improvement on some

earlier invention. If it intersects with a historic moment, it can

become a pivot. Then, like the lever that lifts the elephant, it

produces consequences far out of proportion to the ingenuity of the

thing itself.

 

I've drawn up a list of nine such items. There might be better

examples, but any such list illustrates, I think, the way our lives

are interwoven (almost creepily) with the things we make.

 

1. The chariot. The wheel was great. The cart followed from the

wheel and it was great, too. But the chariot? That's just a two-

wheeled cart. How hard was it to think of four minus two? And how

consequential could that have been? The fact is, the chariot had an

immense effect on history. Here's how: In ancient times, the world

of farms, towns, cities, workshops, and governments--the "civilized

world"--was a belt of territory stretching from the Indus River to

Asia Minor. These folks had the cart, which is useful mainly for

going straight (it can't turn quickly). North of the civilized belt

lived a nomadic people, now remembered as the Indo-Europeans. They

invented the chariot, which was really just a basket slung between

two big wheels; it was light enough for a horse to pull, and it

could pivot as no four-wheeled vehicle could. The horse-drawn

chariot gave the Indo-Europeans a crucial military advantage over

the sedentary farmers. It spurred their expansion into India,

Persia, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Italy, where they overwhelmed and

replaced the original inhabitants. That's why English, French,

Italian, Greek, Persian, Hindi, and so many other tongues all belong

to the same group, the Indo-European family of languages. From

America to India, most of us are descended from those nomads.

2. Concrete. Some might say concrete wasn't an invention because it

already existed in nature. That's like saying the airplane wasn't an

invention because birds could already fly. The Romans figured out

how to make artificial concrete by mixing lime, sand, and bits of

broken rock with a certain pink volcanic ash. Then they reinforced

it with bronze rods. This invention had a precious property: It set

and hardened when wet--even underwater. Reinforced concrete could

span distances as bricks and stones never could. Using concrete,

Romans could build seawalls to protect coastal towns. They could

bridge just about any waterway. Rome's conquest of the world and its

ability to hold its conquests together rested largely on its ability

to build walls, bridges, roads, aqueducts, and monumental buildings.

Concrete was the key to all that. The rule of law is often called

Rome's greatest contribution to civilization, and maybe so--but

concrete has to come in a close second. Check out a historical

timeline of concrete and info for kids about concrete.

Want More Tamim?

Read other columns by Tamim Ansary.3. Horse collar. In medieval

Europe, the collar that attached an animal to a plow had flat straps

that pulled across the animal's chest. Because of the way a horse is

built, these straps pressed against the horse's jugular vein and

rendered it incapable of pulling a plow. Farmers, therefore, used

slow-moving oxen. Then someone invented a collar with softer straps

that distributed the weight a bit differently. This tiny innovation

allowed the same familiar collar to be used on horses. Horses work

roughly 50 percent faster than oxen. Using horses (and a slightly

improved plow), peasant farmers could suddenly produce a surplus. A

surplus gave them goods to trade at crossroads markets on weekends.

Markets soon turned into towns. Towns meant some folks could give up

farming and just make goods for sale. A proliferation of such goods

meant some people could live purely by buying and selling. You see

where this is leading--the horse collar played a pivotal role in

ending the feudal system and launching the rise of Europe.

4. Longbow. When people think of major military inventions, they

usually think of the gun, which did enable the European conquest and

colonization of Africa and the Americas. But if you want to talk

about a weapon that triggered the greatest historic change in the

least amount of time, the longbow gets my vote. The longbow changed

history on three specific days in 1346, 1356, and 1415. On those

days, English and French armies clashed at Crécy, Poitiers, and

Agincourt. Why was the longbow so important? Because it enabled

leather-clad English commoners to defeat ironclad French knights.

Throughout medieval times, a European army consisted fundamentally

of armored noblemen on armored horses. These living tanks personally

won or lost battles, and that's what made nobles noble. At Crécy,

Poitiers, and Agincourt, the French army had roughly three times as

many knights as the English, but the English army had archers armed

with a new kind of bow. It differed from the old kind of bow only in

length. But that extra length gave it just enough power to shoot

some hundred feet further and pierce armor. Just like that, the

armored knight was finished as a significant element in war. From

this time forward, power began shifting from the armored class to

the moneyed class--which soon came to include merchants,

manufacturers, and bankers. Read more about the longbow.

History's Most Underrated Inventions

Part II: History's most underrated inventions 5 through 9

 

5. Eyeglasses. Reading glasses were invented in Italy about 1350,

and eyeglasses that corrected both nearsightedness and

farsightedness around 1450. Isn't that just about when the

Renaissance began? All right, I can't say definitively that the

invention of eyeglasses caused the Renaissance, but I do know one

thing. I have an affliction that is considered trivial today: I'm

myopic. If I were living before eyeglasses, I would be considered

blind. My job would be to sit by a road with a begging cup. Roughly

25 percent of the people in North America are nearsighted like me. I

wonder how many potential writers, artists, scientists, inventors,

philosophers, and the like never developed their talents because

they lived before the invention of eyeglasses? How many seminal

intellectual feats since the invention of eyeglasses were achieved

by people who wore glasses? Read more about the history of

eyeglasses.

6. Rotary printing press. Johannes Gutenberg invented the flatbed

printing press in 1450. His invention remained basically unchanged

until 1827. That year the steam-powered rotary printing press was

invented, which printed from a single continuous roll of paper. The

best flatbed press could print about 125 pages an hour; the new

device could do about 18,000. At the time, no one needed that many

copies of anything that fast, but invention is the mother of

necessity. In 1833, a New Yorker named Benjamin Day decided to print

a newspaper so cheap that at least 10,000 people a day could afford

it: He would profit on volume. But what could he possibly put in a

newspaper that 10,000 people a day would want to read? That's when

Day's newspaper, the Daily Sun (and soon a host of imitators),

invented ... news. Before this time, news was whatever gossip

drifted past a person's ear. Mass newspapers, however, had to find

events to report every day or they'd go broke. Spotting events of

the greatest interest to the greatest number emerged as a skill.

This was the first step toward mass culture, mass media, mass

opinion, mass movements, and the mass in general.

7. Barbed wire. In 1870, the American Midwest teemed with wild

cattle, which cowboys collected and herded to railroad stations to

sell for meat and hides. The land was open range, belonging to no

one: Any herder could graze his cattle on any pasture. Branding kept

herds private. Farmers tried to settle here, but they couldn't fence

out the cattle, wood being scarce and walls of sod being laborious

to build. Then in 1874, barbed wire was invented. Joseph Glidden

took out the basic patent, and by 1880 he was selling over 80

million pounds of barbed wire every year. "Devil's wire" was cheap

and easy to string and it quickly divided the open range into

private plots. Farmers could then move in. By 1900 the entire

Midwest was on its way to becoming the nation's granary. Cowboys and

the Old West had moved from the prairies into those deep crannies of

the American psyche where myths are stored. Read an essay on barbed

wire.

All About Inventions!

• Searchable database of inventions, inventors, and the impact of

inventions.

• A list of inventions arranged from A to Z.

8. Carborundum. Perhaps you've heard of carborundum. It's an

industrial abrasive consisting of silicon carbide. Okay, probably

you haven't heard of carborundum. Invented in 1893 by Edward

Goodrich, this invention made possible the mass production of

precision-ground, interchangeable metal parts. You need carborundum

to make machines used in factories to make other complex machines.

Most of us will never find a use for carborundum in our daily lives,

but we wouldn't have cars, cameras, or CAT-scan machines without it.

That is why the United States Patent Office called carborundum one

of 22 American inventions most responsible for the industrial age of

the 20th century.

9. Bakelite. All right, I'm cheating a little here. Few have heard

of Bakelite, because Bakelite is no longer made. What we're really

talking about here is something bigger. Bakelite, invented in 1907,

was the world's first plastic. By the 1920s it was everywhere. The

invention of one plastic inspired the search for others. World War

II gave intense impetus to this research. After the cataclysm,

Bakelite gave way to Lucite, fiberglass, nylon, and many others.

It's all plastic, though, and plastic has two salient features: It

can take any shape and it never decomposes. It has therefore shaped,

literally, the way our (designed) world looks, and it has magnified

the waste disposal problem to a scale the ancients never imagined.

Traditionally a list like this has ten items, and I could go on.

Consider the adhesive postage stamp. (It led to the concept of

prepaid mail delivery.) Consider the electromagnet. (It led to the

telegraph.) Consider the can.

 

As you get closer to the present, however, it gets harder to

identify which inventions had the hugest impact on history--because

less and less history lies downstream from the invention. If I had

to add one device from the last 20 years to my list, for example, I

might pick the cell phone. There's no telling what the consequences

will be of a device that enables people to remain in touch while on

the move. The operative phrase is "no telling." That's the thing

about historically pivotal inventions: We can't really know what

they are--only what they were.

 

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