The best invention ever.

[xelasnave]

Well what is it?
What if taken away would be a huge loss to you or humanity.
Clearly the mobil phone...or maybe the v8 engine..maybe money...
Now be sensible like me and present your choice.
Alex

[bojan]

Wheel.

[wavelandscott]

Agriculture, language (written and verbal), numbers

[Hans Tucker]

Anything in the Medical Field. X-ray, MRI etc.

[multiweb]

Cheese and vino.

[xelasnave]

So far you have nailed it.:P
I loved cheese but since my problems just cant manage it.
Alex

[Startrek]

The Newtonian Telescope thanks to Sir Issac Newton
I wouldn’t swap my newts for anything
What an incredible simple effective design by one of the greatest minds in history

The humble wheel is right up there too
Without the wheel, humanity wouldn’t have progressed at all. Everything we do and have done through the ages in one way or another relates to the invention of the wheel.

[The_bluester]

I am with Marc!

[xelasnave]

Well these sort of threads get you thinking so I thank whoever started it.
And after thinking about this something occurred to me that is so simple I nearly did not think of it..but it is probably the most important thing in our history and that without it we may never have achieved anything, not the wheel or even cheese...
It is cooking.
Without cooking it seems our brains would not have developed...
Alex

[Stonius]

The screw. I mean as in hardware fixture, but either definition rings true :-D

[JA]

Well since the other, amongst other things:D, involves potentially creating human life.... Yeah that's a biggie :D:thumbsup:

Best
JA

[Peter Ward]

Vaccination.

[drylander]

Sliced bread. Its always nominated.
Pete

[rrussell1962]

I had a tooth abscess a few years ago. I had a thought while in the Dentists chair. The 3 A's Antiseptics, Anaesthetics and Antibiotics. We would have bumbled through as a species without a lot of things. Without those life would have been a lot more painful, brutish and short.

[xelasnave]

I went to the dentist with a terrible abscesses, she lectured at Uni and asked if she could take photos to show the students, I agreed and asked why...she said its the second largest she had ever seen and the larger one was on a dead man. She said that I very lucky that it had not killed me. Again I am just so very lucky.

Alex

[miker]

The flush toilet.


Michael.

[Nikolas]

I'm with Bojan

the wheel for sure

[Hans Tucker]

Wite Out (Liquid Paper)

[leon]

The Pop Rivet, so effective, and useful

Leon

[xelasnave]

Something I can not now live without..my little telescopic back scratcher...not only to scratch myself but it is so handy to drag something out of reach to enable you to pick it up.
Alex

[FlashDrive]

TV Remote ....:D

[Outcast]

Velcro

[gary]

If the metric of a success of an invention was how many times it had been
made, then the transistor would have few peers.

Encyclopedia Britannica says, "They are by far the most common human artifact on the planet".

And the volumes by which we are making them is growing exponentially every year.

Here is a partial chronology.







So it is not hard to imagine that perhaps every day we produce more
transistors than all the meals consumed by all the people who have lived
on Earth for all of history. Or perhaps more than the number of stitches
made in clothing or otherwise in all of history.

Whether the transistor was "the greatest invention of all time" is a totally
different question, but there is no doubt that more have been made and
sold than any other artifact in all of human history.

[xelasnave]

Gary..what about chopsticks?
Alex

[JA]

Hmmmmmm Alex?

The best answer to that question might be to think of people you know with a computer of any type. Going back to the 1970s their processors were made up of tens of thousands of transistors. Now with further miniaturisation we are in to the many billions of transistors per computer CPU. And then there's phones. Anyway - not many folks have that many chopsticks at home:D

Best
JA

[TrevorW]

Toilet paper :)

[Hans Tucker]

Bidet

[gary]

An estimate of the number of people who ever lived on Earth made by the BBC in 2012 was 107 billion.

Let's round that up to 110 billion people.

Say all those people in the entire history of the Earth each lived to the ripe old age of 100.

So they lived a total of
110e9 people * 100 years * 365 days = 4.02e15 person-days

Let's say they each ate 3 meals a day every day using brand new pairs of chopsticks per meal.

4.02e15 person-days * 3 meals-day * 2 chopsticks = 24.1e15 chopsticks.

That's 24.1 times ten to the power of 15 or 24.1 quadrillion chopsticks.

Yet even by 2014 we were making hundreds of quintillions of transistors
per year. That's 100 times ten to the power of 18, nearly four orders of
magnitude higher. :)

And of course we don't all live to 100 and we didn't all have three
meals a day in all of history using a brand new pair of chopsticks each time. :)

[Boozlefoot]

The telescope...............otherwise we wouldn't be on here.:shrug:

[xelasnave]

Mmmmmm JA :D I each day the people in China go through a fair few and this has gone in for some considerable time maybe a century or two or even thousands of years. Now I have not verified this but I suspect it hints at the truth...

Residents of the People's Republic of China produce 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks each year, or 130 million pairs each day, according to Los Angeles Times, which reported on the story earlier this week.20 Aug 2010

BUT THEN I FOUND THIS:eyepop:

Global production of transistors has surpassed 20 trillion per second—hundreds of quintillions per year. Transistors are the primary building blocks of modern electronic devices: computers, smartphones, TVs, radios, and other devices.4 Apr 2017

I call for a recount:D


Alex

[xelasnave]

Now just try and get your head around this...

This year, iPhone Pro models get more GPU horsepower than regular iPhones. Apple's A15 processor in the iPhone 13 has 15 billion transistors. Apple on Tuesday revealed its iPhone 13's processor, the A15 Bionic, a chip with 15 billion transistors and new graphics and AI abilities.14 Sept 2021
https://www.cnet.com › ... › Mobile
Apple's A15 Bionic chip powers iPhone 13 with 15 billion transistors

They also must rate as the cheapest "thing" per unit.
OR imagine trying to substitute with the old tube valves...the world would be entirely covered in tube valves if all the transistors turned into tube valves.
Alex

[mura_gadi]

So many inventions rely on all that has gone before them its hard to rank them.

Is controlling fire an invention or a skill? Without simple weapons we would never have had the increased leisure time or the abundance of proteins.

I think writing, the ability to pass on knowledge over distance and time. Its the one that has the greatest chance of changing multiple aspects of society for the better.

That's what makes the internet so sad at times, we have one of the greatest dissemination engines of all times and we use it to post selfies, listen to music and troll each other.

[doug mc]

Readily available toilet paper. Just can't imagine civilisation without it. We are currently living in the year 2021 PTP (post toilet paper).

[LewisM]

Women. I like thinking I am in charge, but reality says otherwise

[Stonius]

Sometimes I wish this site had a 'like' button just so I could click it on posts such as these.

[gary]

When the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, fresh from having invented
the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved to Mountain View in
California, they sold their first batch of 100 transistors to IBM for $150
a pop.

If the aviation industry had gone through the same sort of price reduction
factors as the semiconductor industry, you could buy your own
A380 Airbus today for around 4 cents.

[mura_gadi]

You can get 5+ teraflop phones now, the computing power of the best Super Computers in the world when Bill Clinton walked into office was about 10% of a teraflop. They say, you have more computing power in your hands today than was available to Bill Clinton as PotUS. (Around the late 90's for the 1st teraflop super computer.)

Floating point operations:
FLOPs are simple a math procedure and used as a benchmark for CPU speeds for a long time. Bit like spinning your wheels, smoke looks good, but useless for much else.

[Hans Tucker]

[QUOTE=mura_gadi;1538848]You can get 5+ teraflop phones now, the computing power of the best Super Computers in the world when Bill Clinton walked into office was about 10% of a teraflop. They say, you have more computing power in your hands today than was available to Bill Clinton as PotUS. (Around the late 90's for the 1st teraflop super computer.)

If we ever get back to the Moon I don't want to see any more 1202 or 1201 error messages. Plus keep Buzz away from the RADAR.

[gary]

Hi Steve,

In 2016 I read an engineering article about how surprisingly low the
MTBF was of state-of-the-art supercomputers.

We are all familiar with the notoriously short MTBF numbers of early
vacuum tube computers like ENIAC which would be in order of an hour.

And we are all familiar with PC's at home or work operating reliably
indefinitely. Switched on continually, you may never see a hardware
related crash in months or even years.

But if you want to be at the absolute cutting edge of high performance
supercomputing in the petaFlop and exaFlop range, when it comes to
MTBF figures, few things have changed since the days of vacuum tube
computers.

Cosmic-radiation would be one big cause of failures, with one machine
at Los Alamos, even after putting extra metal shielding on it, only
running for about 6 hours before crashing. Another at Virginia
Tech’s Advanced Computing facility which consisted of 1,100 Apple
Power Mac G5 CPU's but no ECC on the RAM, had a failure rate so high
from cosmic radiation that it was nearly impossible even to boot the
whole system before it would crash.

A Cray XT-5 at Oak Ridge had 360 terabytes of main memory with ECC
and it would log ECC errors at a rate of 350 per minute.

The IBM Blue Gene/L system at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which was
the largest computer in the world between 2004 to 2008, would frequently
crash and the culprit was found to be radioactive lead in the solder.

The Cray XK7 Titan was the top supercomputer system in the world for a
long time and consisted of 18,688 NVIDIA GPUs but even it had a MTBF
during some periods of its life of less than a day.

Anyway, I had only just read this article in 2016 when I happened to
meet someone who was involved in supercomputing at the Sandia
National Laboratories. I said to him I had read that the MTBF could be less
than a day and he replied, "Oh no, much worse than that. Typically in the
order of only 30 minutes".

[xelasnave]

Sorry to take my time getting back to you but I just had to check your sums:P well not really...I realised no matter how huge the number number of chop sticks we wont be any where near the transistor numbers, when replying to JA...I must thank you for drawing attention to the transistor the numbers etc..it is mind bending.
Alex

[mura_gadi]

One of the most interesting CPU/Network designs underway atm is the SKA project.

The network is scaled to 8 petabytes, which if my old networking days means anything, about 40% of capacity. They have two 100 petaflops computers online (Oz/S. Africa) and expect about 600 Petabytes processed data a year. The support for all of that is amazing as well...

The glossy stuff doesn't talk about MTBF but that would be interesting to know as that is a prod buttock network.

[toc]

I would go with the scientific method, although I'm not sure it is considered an invention as such.

[JohnF]

Wife

[astroametuer]

The internet!

[xelasnave]

If only everyone on the planet followed it what a wonderful place it would be...Even a semblance of checking stuff someone told you or checking stuff you see on youtube and perhaps not ignoring the facts available that conclusively show that you are simply wrong. The propensity of folk to believe rubbish over science is alarming...those who still will say evolution is wrong and that it is after all only a theory...and these folk of course have never read up on what the theory actually says but rely on the straw man constructed by folk who prefer to get their science from unknown sources written at a minimum of 2000 years ago...dure way to go...and so they argue against something that they have no idea of what is set out...and ...well I will leave it there and wont waste more time thinking about fools.
Alex

[sn1987a]

Argo Navis :P

[gary]

Thanks Barry. :lol: Where do I mail the cheque?

[toc]

"If your happy and you know it clap your hands" :lol:

[sn1987a]

It was the only thing I know of that addressed both criteria in the question.
"What if taken away would be a huge loss to you or humanity". :D

[xelasnave]

Last night I was reading up on the Sumarians and their various inventions and although I have been studying them for some time found in the stuff that I was reading that they are believed to have invented the wheel and the sail boat...as well as many other things. I think it is criminal that they are neglected it seems in history classes in our schools. I expect that most people would not have a clue about them or the contributions they made that are with today. The tos prevent my explanation as to why this is so however it becomes entirety obvious when you study their "stories" ...one may find that one has heard them before from a later time in history.

AND rather than list their contribution to our world I simply encourage members to take the time to learn some very interesting stuff by googling them.
Alex

[Hans Tucker]

The best invention ... the refrigerator.

[xelasnave]

I think the Sumarians invented the first cold storage...but I am not sure on that...that will keep me occupied checking ...
Alex

[RB]

It was the Eskimos Alex.

RB

:thumbsup:

[Hans Tucker]

Was that to keep their Beer cold?

[mura_gadi]

I'll add domesticated animals, front and foremost the dog.

Live just wouldn't be the same without ya dog.



Ps. Alex if you're taking the "Coolgardie safe/cooler", you'd have to go back a long way. As for ice transport that would be a distance and transport tech. issue, people close to ice would have been utilising it prior to a lot of other basic inventions... Roman had ice shops, is one I found...

Other:
"...between 1000-2000 BCE—people discovered that they could make their food last longer by storing it at cold temperatures. The ancient Mesopotamians developed the most common form of storage called “ice pits” that evolved into “Yakhchāl” in Persia. These large dome-shaped clay structures had a hole on the top and a vaulted ceiling over the ice pit. Water from the ice would evaporate and cling to the walls of the dome to cool the air inside."

*The Artic Small tool tribes of Siberia may have been freezing fish and hacking them out 6000 years ago. I'd guess the tribes around the foot hills of Mount Kilimanjaro would have been storing food even prior to that.

[Stonius]

Speaking from a purely selfish perspective I would have to nominate the dishwasher. Every time I stack that thing I say a little thanks to Josephine Cochran for the fact that I don't have to do them.


And, er, Penicillin was pretty good too. Sometimes I even use the dishwasher to clean the penicillin off dishes I find hidden in the back of the fridge.



Markus

[xelasnave]

The only thing I have against the Sumarians was they invented beer and thus opened the doors for drunkeness for humans ..just think of the lives taken by booze it is terrible....

Alex

[xelasnave]

Yes you have a decent grasp of subject but it was the Sumarians who invent ice:)
Alex

[Hans Tucker]

Possibly this is the best invention ever .. and no the Sumerians didn't invent this a Hungarian did.

[xelasnave]

I think the inventor got the idea after looking at Ziggurats.

Edit much later.

What gave it away is the black between the "bricks" which is reminiscent of the bitumen used as mortar between the bricks in the Ziggurat.
Alex

[By.Jove]

The best invention ever - running fresh water and a sewage system.

Without it humanity would be stuck somewhere before the bronze age.

[Tropo-Bob]

Language; most inventions since have needed this prerequisite.


But in my lifetime:- The Internet.

[xelasnave]

Writing comes to mind as without writing where would we be?
Who invented writing? Does anyone know? Probably not as this civilization is ignored it seems.

But it was the Sumerians.

Why are they ignored in education?

Alex

[Stonius]

A lot of education on history revolves around the unspoken assumption that it is the history of 'us' - where *we come from that is interesting. Unless you're doing comparative anthropology, early Chinese, Middle Eastern, African etc cultures are largely ignored. What we call the 'dark ages' really only applies to western europe.

Markus

[mura_gadi]

Back in the day looting a library was the same as a bank for some...

Look at all the stuff we call Roman, they stole it from the Greeks...

I'd say you lost ownership of the knowledge much the same way you lost ownership of the gold. Once they had it, it was called "theirs"...

[xelasnave]

It all started with the Sumarians:lol::lol::lol:

One thing I picked up on reading history is something of significance that was on the table if a peace was being negotiated was who got to have the churches, or so I believe, why? Well I expect they were cash cows back then unlike these days...10 % of your income plus other special collections...and how convenient and managable .once a week every week plus special holy days...
The Sumarians had Adam and the garden, the flood plus lots of other stuff found in later religious texts...I sometimes feel they are not put up for education as current religions would not be found to be original.

AND History...thats what I am talking about and not religion...you cant utter a word in history without touching on religion..it is central to our development really... And who invented history.. we learn so much from seeing how civilization after civilization rises and disappears ... When will it happen to us?
Alex

[mura_gadi]

They say the best thing about winning a war, is you get to write the history...


As for history I think the late Terry Pratchett summed it very well...

“History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time

[xelasnave]

I like it:)

Alex