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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 8:48am | IP Logged | 1
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For decades I have maintained that humanity's greatest invention was the printing press, especially with moveable type. It was basically what made the rest possible, by allowing the broad dissemination of information.But, just recently, via the History Channel, I was persuaded to push that estimate back a few thousand years. Humanity's greatest invention is what you're reading right now: written language. It allowed us to take our various grunts and preserve them. It's been around so long, in so many forms, that we can sometimes forget it is totally artificial, completely "man-made".
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Eric Sofer
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 31 January 2014
Location: United States
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 10:17am | IP Logged | 2
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As a dissenting opinion... I think numbers are our greatest invention.
But it's hard to dismiss written language too. In fact, there are so many "greatest inventions" that had to occur to get us where we are today. Weapons. Food gathering. Defending against animals. Covered residences. Spoken language. Clothing.
There are a lot of critical inventions. Perhaps you'd not object if I said that written language is first among equals, then?
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 10:19am | IP Logged | 3
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As a dissenting opinion... I think numbers are our greatest invention.•• Numbers ARE a written language.
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Jean-Francois Joutel
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 06 November 2008
Location: Canada
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 10:27am | IP Logged | 4
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I'm going to cheat, this wasn't invented by homo sapiens, but allowed us to become homo sapiens.
There was a book by Richard Wrangham which postulated there was one invention that allowed us to become human: cooking. By cooking food, our predecessors were able to diversify our diet and spend less energy digesting food. This net gain of energy allowed our brains to grow and develop further.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 10:35am | IP Logged | 5
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I'd describe cooking more as a discovery than an invention. Kind of like fire.
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Jean-Francois Joutel
Byrne Robotics Member
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Location: Canada
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | 6
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That's an interesting distinction. Would you say inventions come from an abstract thought process, as opposed to discoveries?
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Koroush Ghazi
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 25 October 2009
Location: Australia
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | 7
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It's always difficult to narrow it down to a single thing. They're links in a chain. We wouldn't have written language if writing implements (e.g. stylus + clay tablets) weren't invented for example, so do they trump written language?
I do agree though that in general, the ability to pass on information stored in written form has been the critical factor in raising us above all others on this planet so that we don't essentially start from scratch with each generation like other animals do.
I'm a bit dubious about discovery vs. invention. It's a bit of both. Surely, writing was discovered as much as invented, when early man saw that imprints left in mud became permanent when it solidified, leading to that same mud being used for clay tablets.
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Michael Hogan
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | 8
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JB, I’m with you on the development of written language. As an
extension of this, it’s why I consider the pencil one of the greatest
inventions.
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 8:42pm | IP Logged | 9
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We’ve seen that humans were smearing pigment on cave walls long before we started inscribing symbols in mud. Most of that we’d properly identify as painting, rather than writing, but writing, after all, begins with pictograms, formalized, stylized versions of what we’d been painting. Does this mean painting should rank before writing as an important invention? I would say no. Watching children at play shows us that painting is discovered more than invented.
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Christopher Frost
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 24 October 2016
Location: Canada
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| Posted: 09 December 2019 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | 10
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Back when I was in high school, they showed us a film in our social studies class that made the case for the humble plow being mankinds greatest invention as it led to the development of farming which in turn made humans less nomadic and laid the roots for civilization.
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James Woodcock
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Joined: 21 September 2007
Location: United Kingdom
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| Posted: 10 December 2019 at 2:59am | IP Logged | 11
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Writing is an incredible thing.That you can take images and ascribe a sound to that image (often a fluid sound to that image), to make a more complex sound out of the sum of those images and their sounds - and it works! - which someone else can receive anywhere else in the world, and provided they have decided to use the same system as you, they can understand what you wanted them to understand ....
This then allows you to impart information, learning, meaning to others without you actually having to be there.
It is beyond mind blowing and I agree, I think it is the greatest invention of man.
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