So just what is the third Great Invention of all time? So here's a fun little game for a Sunday morning: what was, or is, the third great invention of all time? I have a candidate for it and it's very much to do with what youse guys do all day. But I'm not entirely sure that it is the proper winner of third place: certainly, most economists wouldn't rate it there at all. Of course …
Because we've replaced the way the spoken word was used to pass along information in pre-writing civilizations, we denigrate its accuracy too much. If you look at societies that have oral traditions for keeping their records you'll find they built both redundancy and recall techniques into the spoken records they used to track such things.
No, printing wasn't just a development of what already existed. It did fundamentally change the way society works. It did for the written language exactly what the LLC does for the home based shop.
The problem with an individual memory is that important details will be lost with time of an event. And it is possible for the event to be completely forgotten. Written records means, in theory, we can go back and read narratives written shortly after or even during the event. We know what Julius Caesar or Cicero said and did with decent accuracy because we still have writings by them and their contemporaries.
Not for the really important ones. Again you can't carry your prejudices for the written word into the argument. You have to look at societies with actual oral histories and how accurate those histories are. They match what we do with writing. What writing gives us is the ability to forget it because we've written it down somewhere. With an oral tradition you have to keep repeating and reinforcing it so it becomes part of who you are.
Writing but not for the reasons stated. The Greeks did not invent writing but they took it and did something new with it: they took a book-keeping method and made it into a means of recording language as spoken. Oral literature became literacy, and hence rhetorike —the ability to analyse what was said rather than just respond— and thus philosophy, logic and enlightenment.
Given the formulation Tim has given, I'd have to exclude Writing because as others have pointed out it was necessary to the scientific method and predates it.
You could of course argue it was the Second and the Scientific Method should be moved to 3rd, but that would be a different debate.
+100 for this. Not only the standardised units, but the idea of standard parts (like Whitworth's screw threads) and the resulting interchangeability that led to mass production and, in many ways, the latter part of the industrial revolution and all those affordable gadgets we take for granted (you know pipes and taps for clean water, cookers, etc,).
"you know pipes and taps for clean water, cookers, etc,"
I'll remember that when my half inch spanner doesn't fit a particular 13mm nut, I know an inch is "near enough" 25mm - and three quarters is "near enough" 19mm - but a half is often not "near enough" 15mm.
In the old days many communities used a "thumb" as the basis of their measurements - and in wood hewn with an axe that was probably "near enough".
There was the story of the wartime parts that didn't fit because the USA and Britain had slightly different national reference standard bars for imperial measurement. Never mind measurements in "cups" and "gallons".
I would say the third invention is writing - that is, the recording of information in a way that can be preserved and transmitted without the reliance of the human brain. Everything Tim's mentioned is a subset of writing. Double-entry book-keeping is a methodical method of writing down information. Relational databases is a methodical method of writing down information. Cloud storage is still a method of preserving and transmitting information without relying on the human brain for the storage and transmission.
I think writing/record keeping should be the second invention, without it the scientific method would be impossible. It also allowed larger economies and countries/empires to develop. Keeping records of the change of seasons, amount of harvest, even taxes paid to the rulers allowed societies to become more stable and contributed to general economic development.
In what way?
You pitch your great business idea to Mrs Investor, she agrees and wants to invest in your business.
She buys a 20% stake, and you agree to give her 20% of the post-tax profit. You keep the 80% for yourself.
You then screw up royally and the business goes bust, owing far more than its assets.
Without limited liability:
You go bankrupt, the creditors take everything you have.
She's also jointly and severally liable for your fuck up, and also goes bankrupt.
- If you run away, the creditors go after her instead.
So your screwup not only killed the business, it bankrupted you and everyone who believed in you - perhaps including all your employees if they had shares too.
Is she likely to let you run the business, or is she going to want to micro-manage absolutely everything you do?
With limited liability, the shareholders are only liable for the book value of their shares. If they already gave the business the money then they've already paid.
Thus if you screw up, you don't (necessarily) also go bankrupt. You personally only owe the 80% company share value, and your shareholders have already discharged their obligations.
They are still able - and may even be willing - to help you try again.
The problem is confusing the limited liability concept of shared and limited risk to the owners with the antics of the hired (mis)management team. The owners/shareholders do have a different perspective than the managers but many large companies the owners are not directly or very active in the running of the company. Many companies have trouble once the founders leave.
With limited liability, the shareholders are only liable for the book value of their shares. If they already gave the business the money then they've already paid.
This is generally a token gesture. They put in their £1 per share at the beginning- but how much is that share supposed to be worth now?
"They put in their £1 per share at the beginning- but how much is that share supposed to be worth now?"
Then they have lost that amount by not selling out in time. And if they purchased shares based on the value of projected earnings then they have lost the value of that income stream.
No it isn't.
Shareholding is fundamentally a way that a business raises initial capital.
- Even Dragons' Den gets this right.
The shares are sold to get some money to start the business up. Later on more shares might be sold to raise more capital - several banks did major share issues in the wake of the recent financial crisis, in order to get cash to meet their new leverage obligations.
That dilutes the original shares so shareholders generally don't like it.
After the share issue, the business has more cash, and some obligations to those share holders - eg. to pay dividends.
All the other ways of getting capital (or goods to sell) involve debt - borrow from a bank, borrow from customers (ask them to pay up front), borrow from suppliers (buy on credit), borrow from the public (issue bonds).
Language. Hence, humans.
Tool making (e,g, the bag and spear for starters). Hence able to go anywhere on land and sea. Many more humans.
Animal domestication and breeding. Hence domination of other animals.
Agriculture. Hence domination of plants. Many more humans.
Literacy. Hence ability to organize on large scale.
Industrial revolution (which we are in the center point of right now). Many more humans.
Arranging them in importance is like arranging in importance all the turns you make in a road trip.
But, then, hey, there's always the battery. Implying use of the electro-spectrum.
You missed out organisation into villages and towns. Without that everyone was fully occupied with subsistence and child rearing. Once you had a sufficiently large community you could start to have specialists who traded their skills for your produce. Metalworker and teachers are two obvious occupations.
Is of course the 3rd - if not second - most important invention of all times, that clearly distinguishes modern western civilisation from all others.
No bacon - No global navel gazing financial oligarchy twiddling with its algorithmic trading toys.
No bacon - No X-factor
No bacon - No NSA....
Thank you oh mighty bacon !
[For grumpy, bleary eyed, hung-over, sunday morning readers the above is not meant as an actual statement of fact, everybody really knows that western civilisation was built by Dr Who!]
I had to downvote sliced bread. Judging by the sliced bread I have sampled so far, in order to be readily sliceable something is added that makes it barely edible compared to real bread*)
*) I here assume we are talking white bread and derivatives. Rye bread is a different matter.
Well at least you explained. Though I'm slightly surprised you took as a serious comment on the greatness of sliced bread (I agree it's not necessarily amazing), rather than a reference to the phrase "the greatest thing since sliced bread", which is reasonably common whether you agree with it or not.
You're probably the only person around here to ever downvote a reference to making bacon sandwiches.
I'm going to have to go with the crowd here - surely writing supersedes the scientific method, and is certainly a precursor to both double-entry bookkeeping and the limited liability corporation.
If then we agree that the first two are agriculture and writing, the third would have to be something as world-changing as those two.
I think I'd still have to agree with what my high school history teachers taught - mass production (the assembly line), which sparked the industrial revolution. You could argue the internal combustion engine, but then you'd have to admit that fossil fuels were a precursor to that. You could also argue electricity generation, but again, without mass production, these inventions would not have made such a huge impact on history.
So there it is:
1. Agriculture (& animal husbandry)
2. Writing
3. Mass production
The relational database, the personal computer, semiconductors, or perhaps the internet would then be 4th. Just depends on which of those you think is more important.
Ok mass production maybe wouldn't have been possible without the limited liability corporation. But which of the two, if you had to choose one, had the greater impact? I think mass production, but you may disagree.
Yes: first agriculture, then writing.
However, science trumps mass production. Look at history: the Enlightenment and associated discovery of the scientific method was well established before the Industrial Revolution took off.
BUT, science would have been nearly impossible without numeracy and the associated branches of mathematics. Algebra and geometry were understood by the ancient Greeks, but numeracy requires the concepts or number and positional notation. The latter is very important: adding XVII to LXIV is bad enough, but very few Romans could have multiplied them and it would have taken a genius to do long division. In fact, even arithmetic never really took off until the Indians invented the concept of Zero and hence decimal positional notation. So, IMO, the first few Great Inventions were
1) Agriculture, 2) Writing, 3) Integers, 4) Positional number system, 5) Mathematics, 6) Science, 7) Engineering
Book keeping and commerce was able to be understood by many people once the positional number system made simple arithmetic easy. Science laid the foundations of engineering, which in turn supported building large ships and global commerce. These, along with accountancy, helped to set up overseas empires and then the Industrial Revolution. All this was up and running long before computers were invented, and they preceeded the relational database (and IDMS!) by 30 years.
But I think it is social media.
All revolutionary development has its downside (in this case FB/Twatter/Tindr etc.) but the upside is the dissemination of information outside of the silos it has historically existed in.
Social media allows anybody to ask questions on any subject and in any field, a tiny subset of these questions will be good hard ones.
Good questions are always in demand, they are the driver of definative answer supply, without which progress stalls.
Which means, in fact, that the first great invention may have been the domestication of dogs, around 17000-35000 years ago and long predating agriculture.
Dogs extended the hunting capability of human beings, but also they consumed food waste. The canine digestive system is extremely aggressive and dog turds are much less hazardous to health than either waste food or people turds. Sanitation per se was invented very late - really a 19th century invention - but long before that, it has been argued, dogs made it possible to site permanent villages, whereas without them the waste eventually built up till everybody died or decided to move. Permanent settlements make civilisation possible.
I was going to put "Flushing Toilets" as the example of the more general heading of sanitation, or to go even wider, the concept of 'organised disposal of waste stuff to some place elsewhere'.
Flushing toilets might seem trivial but this implies the support industries related to actual drainage to elsewhere, the existence of enough of a water supply to use to chuck sht down the drain, an entire porcelain production line, some engineering to do the fancy cistern mechanics, and someone who knows how to make a comfortable seat out of a few sticks and a bit of moss.
Specifically, the idea that you can have any law you like, but you have to write it down in a self-consistent formulation and then it applies to everyone, not just the plebs.
Without it, it's only a matter of time before your society is screwed over by some sociopathic imbecile. Long-term investment in economic undertakings are impossible unless you are already one of the social elite (and therefore able to defend yourself in the short term). Economic development and innovation therefore proceeds at N(elite) / N(population) of its potential rate.
We'd all still be chipping stone if it hadn't been for those great chemists melting and smelting metals some 7k years ago. You think your new phone is cool? Imagine how cool the newest bronze knife was back in the day - and it actually kept its value for a few millenia.
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Agriculture
Writing
Scientific method
Information Technology.
Agriculture enabled us to settle and to produce a surplus of food.
Writing, as well as enabling the p[reservation of knowledge also allowed the development of business in the modern form, as who can remember every last detail of a business' transactions with its many clients?
Scientific method enabled us to make better sense of the world about us and develop more effective technologies, including truly effective medical treatments and engineering that wasn't just guesswork or rule of thumb.
Information technology allows us to communicate, exchange data and ideas, and process data more effectively, right from heliographs and semaphore through to todays bleeding-edge computer technology. Modern computing, of course, enables us to find information from amid seas of data that an individual human mind would be overwhelmed by.
I was tempted to include free software in there somewhere, but really that's a form of sharing data and information. Once science in its modern form really got going, with its notion of the free exchange of ideas, collaborative working on tough intellectual problems etc, the notion of free software can be seen as a logical extension of that. Which isn't taking anything away from RMS in standing up and actually saying that against a background of capitalism trying to lock up and set a direct monetary value to everything in sight. Sometimes it takes a brave individual to protest the stupidity of received wisdom to open the eyes of the rest of us to how we're being prevented from progressing by established interests.
My suggestion would be:
Flint knapping
Control of fire
Domestication of animals
You can't have agriculture without tools to dig the ground and you can't have tools without a first generation of cutting tools. You also need fire to cook grains if you want intensive food sources, and domesticated animals to pull the plough and provide protein.
Once you have tools, fire and something to do the heavy lifting you have the possibility of leisure for some, and the rest follows.
Another way to look at my list is that the first two are necessary for materials forming and hence engineering, and the last one is the start of the process of using external energy sources.
I'd say you're barking up the right tree, but stone tool making doesn't require access to flints in particular. Cookery should be on the list of greatest inventions: never mind eating grains, it makes food digestion more efficient overall which means we get more use out of the food we eat than otherwise, can get by with smaller guts and can grow bigger brains. It's incredibly useful, a fundamental requirement for our intellectual development. One might fantasise that cooking gets overlooked as a spectacularly useful technological development because cooking's generally considered a woman's job, but surely sexist attitudes like that are long extinct?
And what about clothing?
So: my list of greatest inventions would be, in what I suppose to be chronological order:
Tool making (whatever the material - wood or stone or bone or whatever)
Fire making (not just fire use, which I'm not sure counts as an invention)
Cookery
Clothing
- and then move on to civil engineering, i.e., making house-type shelters and so on.
The rest of it follows on from those foundations. Humanity spread over a large chunk of the globe long before agriculture and the scientific method turned up: they're clearly not fundamental to our success as a species. Admittedly, if we're going to last, agriculture and the scientific method are necessary.
