Examples of scientific discoveries that have changed human life. Random discoveries that changed the world

Two decades ago, people could not even dream of such a level of technological development as it exists today. Today it takes only half a day to fly half the globe, modern smartphones are 60,000 times lighter and thousands of times more powerful than the first computers, today agricultural productivity and life expectancy are higher than ever in the history of mankind. Let's try to figure out which inventions have become the most important and, in fact, changed the history of mankind.

1. Cyanide

Although cyanide seems rather controversial to include on this list, the chemical has played an important role in human history. While the gaseous form of cyanide has caused the deaths of millions of people, it is this substance that is the main factor in the extraction of gold and silver from ore. Since the world economy has been tied to the gold standard, cyanide is an important factor in the development of international trade.

2. Plane

Today, no one doubts that the invention of the "metal bird" had one of the greatest impacts on human history by radically reducing the time needed to transport goods or people. The invention of the Wright brothers was enthusiastically received by the public.

3. Anesthesia

Until 1846, any surgical procedure was more like some kind of excruciating torture. Although anesthetics have been used for thousands of years, their earliest forms were nothing more than alcohol or mandrake extract. The invention of modern anesthesia in the form of nitrous oxide and ether allowed doctors to safely operate on patients without the slightest resistance from them (after all, patients did not feel anything).

4. Radio

The origins of radio history are highly controversial. Many claim that Guglielmo Marconi was its inventor. Others claim that it was Nikola Tesla. In any case, these two people have done a lot to enable people to successfully transmit information through radio waves.

5. Phone

The telephone has been one of the most important inventions in our modern world. As with all major inventions, who invented it is still a matter of controversy. One thing is clear: the US Patent Office granted the first telephone patent to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. This patent served as the basis for future research and development of electronic sound transmission over long distances.

6. World Wide Web

While everyone thinks it's a very recent invention, the Internet existed in its archaic form in 1969 when the United States military developed the ARPANET. But it was Tim Berners-Lee who created the web of hyperlinks to documents at the University of Illinois and created the first World Wide Web browser in its relatively modern form.

7. Transistor

Today it seems that picking up the phone and calling someone in Mali, the US or India is very easy, but it would not be possible without transistors. Semiconductor transistors, which amplify electrical signals, have made it possible to send information over long distances. The man who pioneered this research, William Shockley, is credited with creating Silicon Valley.

8. Atomic clock

While this invention may not seem as revolutionary as many of the previous paragraphs, the invention of the atomic clock was crucial in the advancement of science. Using microwave signals emitted by varying electron energy levels, atomic clocks and their accuracy have made possible a wide range of modern modern inventions, including GPS, GLONASS, and the Internet.

9. Steam turbine

The steam turbine of Charles Parsons literally changed the development of mankind, giving impetus to the industrialization of countries and making it possible for ships to quickly overcome the ocean. In 1996 alone, 90% of the electricity in the US was generated by steam turbines.

10. Plastic

Despite the ubiquity of plastic in our modern society, it only appeared in the last century. The waterproof and highly pliable material is used in almost every industry, from food packaging to toys and even spacecraft. While most modern plastics are made from petroleum, there are increasing calls to go back to the original version, which was partly organic.

11. Television

Television has had a long and storied history that dates back to the 1920s and continues to this day. This invention has become one of the most popular consumer products around the world - almost 80% of families have a TV.

12. Oil

Most people do not think at all when they fill the tank of their car. Although people have been extracting oil for millennia, the modern oil and gas industry emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. After industrialists saw all the advantages of oil products and the amount of energy generated by burning them, they raced to make wells for the extraction of "liquid gold".

13. Internal combustion engine

Without the discovery of the efficiency of combustion of petroleum products, the modern internal combustion engine would not have been possible. Given that it has begun to be used literally everywhere: from cars to agricultural combines and mining machines, these engines have allowed people to replace back-breaking, painstaking and time-consuming work with machines that can do this work much faster. The internal combustion engine also gave people freedom of movement since it was the one used in automobiles.

14. Reinforced concrete

The boom in the construction of high-rise buildings happened only in the middle of the nineteenth century. By embedding steel reinforcing bars (reinforcing bars) into concrete before it was poured, people were able to build reinforced concrete artificial structures many times larger in weight and size than before.

There would be far fewer people living on planet Earth today if there were no penicillin. Officially discovered by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming in 1928, penicillin was one of the most important inventions/discoveries that made the modern world possible. Antibiotics were among the first drugs that were able to fight staphylococci, syphilis and tuberculosis.

16. Refrigerator

Harnessing heat was perhaps the most important discovery to date, but it took many millennia. Although people have long used ice for cooling, its practicality and availability has been limited. In the nineteenth century, scientists invented artificial refrigeration using chemicals. By the early 1900s, almost every meatpacking plant and major food distributor was using artificial refrigeration to preserve food.

17. Pasteurization

Half a century before the discovery of penicillin, a new process discovered by Louis Pasteur, pasteurization, or heating food (originally beer, wine, and dairy products) to a temperature high enough to kill most spoilage bacteria, helped save many lives. Unlike sterilization, which kills all bacteria, pasteurization only reduces the number of potential pathogens to a level that makes most foods edible without fear of contamination, while still preserving the taste of the food.

18. Solar battery

Just as the oil industry sparked a boom in the industry as a whole, the invention of the solar battery allowed people to use a renewable form of energy in a much more efficient way. The first practical solar battery was developed in 1954 by Bell Telephone scientists, but today the popularity and efficiency of solar panels has increased dramatically.

19. Microprocessor

Today, people would have to forget about their laptop and smartphone if the microprocessor had not been invented. One of the most widely known supercomputers, ENIAC, was built in 1946 and weighed 27,215 tons. Intel engineer Ted Hoff created the first microprocessor in 1971, putting all the functions of a supercomputer into one tiny chip, making portable computers possible.

20. Laser

The stimulated light emission amplifier or laser was invented in 1960 by Theodor Meyman. Modern lasers are used in a variety of inventions, including laser cutters, barcode scanners, and surgical equipment.

21. Nitrogen fixation

Although it may seem overly pompous, nitrogen fixation, or fixation of molecular atmospheric nitrogen, is "responsible" for the explosion of the human population. By converting atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, the production of highly effective fertilizers was made possible, which increased agricultural production.

22. Conveyor

Today it is difficult to overestimate the importance of assembly lines. Before their invention, all products were made by hand. The assembly line or assembly line allowed for the development of large-scale production of the same parts, greatly reducing the time it took to create a new product.

23. Oral contraceptives

Although the pill and the pill has been one of the main methods of medicine that has been around for thousands of years, the invention of the oral contraceptive has been one of the most significant innovations. It was this invention that became the impetus for the sexual revolution.

24. Mobile phone / smartphone

Now, many of you are probably reading this article from your smartphone. Thanks to Motorola, back in 1973, they released the first wireless pocket mobile phone, which weighed as much as 2 kg and took as much as 10 hours to recharge. To make matters worse, at that time one could only chat quietly for 30 minutes.

25. Electricity

Most modern inventions would simply be impossible without electricity. Pioneers such as William Gilbert and Benjamin Franklin laid the initial foundation upon which inventors such as Volt and Faraday launched the second industrial revolution.

Popov, Mendeleev, Mozhaisky, Lobachevsky, Korolev, Nartov - we have known all these names since childhood. The contribution of our compatriots to the development of world science and technology is truly great. Today we decided to tell you about some of the revolutionary discoveries and inventions of Russian scientists that have changed the world for the better!

The scientific and applied discipline, which became the theoretical basis for operative surgery, was introduced by the Russian surgeon, naturalist and teacher Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov.

In the 1840s, being the head of the Department of Surgery at the Medical and Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg, Pirogov studied the methods of surgery used in those years. Thanks to his research, he radically changed a number of surgical methods and even developed several completely new ones. One of the surgical techniques still bears the name of Pirogov - "Pirogov's Operation".

In search of the most effective method for training surgeons, Pirogov began to use anatomical studies on frozen corpses. It was thanks to these studies that a new medical discipline was born - topographic anatomy. A few years later, Pirogov published the world's first anatomical atlas.

Periodic Law and Periodic Table of Chemical Elements

In March 1869, at a meeting of the Russian Chemical Society, the report of the Russian scientist-encyclopedist Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev was published: "The relationship of properties with the atomic weight of elements." This report gave birth to the periodic table of chemical elements, which each of us remembers from school.

The revolutionary nature of Mendeleev's discovery lay in the fact that the place of an element in the periodic system determined the comparison of the totality of its properties with the properties of other elements. Mendeleev's periodic law gave scientists an understanding of the pattern, which allows not only to determine the place of chemical elements in the system, but also to predict the existence of new elements and even give them characteristics.

The discovery of the periodic law prompted researchers to study the structure of the atom.

Monument to D. Mendeleev in Bratislava. Photo: Guillaume Speurt

Russian biologist Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov devoted years of his life to research in the epidemiology of cholera, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

In 1882, Mechnikov was one of the first in the world to discover the property of some blood cells (in particular, leukocytes) to dissolve foreign objects. Based on this discovery, the scientist developed the comparative pathology of inflammation and, subsequently, the phagocytic theory of immunity, which brought him world recognition and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908.

In addition, Mechnikov is one of the founders of evolutionary embryology.

Image: Wellcome Images

The founder of aerodynamics as a science is considered to be the Russian mechanic Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky.

In 1904, Zhukovsky discovered a law that allows one to determine the lift force of an aircraft wing, and then deduced the vortex theory of a propeller. His report "On attached vortices" became a kind of impetus for the development of methods for determining the lift force of an airplane wing.

Later, Zhukovsky headed the aerodynamic laboratory at the Moscow Higher Technical School and founded the Aeronautical Circle, whose members later became such prominent aircraft designers and figures of Russian aviation as V.P. Vetchinkin, B.S. Stechkin, A.A. Arkhangelsky, G. M. Musinyants, B.N. Yuryev and others.

Photo: NASA

We owe the modern method of measuring blood pressure to the Russian doctor, employee of the Imperial Military Medical Academy Nikolai Sergeevich Korotkov.

Saving the lives of wounded officers during the Russo-Japanese War, Korotkov for the first time in world medical practice applied the sound method of measuring pressure. Previously, it was customary to measure pressure using a device based on a mercury manometer. Korotkov noticed that, listening to the vessels with a phonendoscope, one can register sounds that alternate depending on the compression and weakening of the cuff of the apparatus on the patient's limb. This discovery allowed doctors to take readings with a revolutionary sound method.

By the way, the specific sounds that the doctor listens to and registers when measuring pressure are called "Korotkov's tones."

Photo: jasleen_kaur

The discovery of "stem cells" and methods of using them for medical purposes was a truly revolutionary breakthrough in medicine. The rejuvenating and healing effect that these cells have on the body can be safely called miraculous.

Today, the phrase "stem cell" is familiar to many, but few people know that this term was proposed for widespread use by the Russian histologist Alexander Aleksandrovich Maksimov back in 1909. Maksimov not only introduced the term, but also gave a description of hematopoietic stem cells and proved their existence.

Thanks to this discovery, Maksimov became a pioneer in the field of cell biology, setting a certain development vector for this science for many years, up to the present day. Maksimov's works are considered world scientific classics.

Professor of the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology Boris Lvovich Rosing is rightfully considered one of the inventors of television.

The fact is that back in 1907, Rosing received a patent for the “Method of electrical transmission of images over distances” invented by him. The scientist proved the possibility of converting an electrical signal into points of a visible image using a cathode ray tube.

Rosing did not limit himself to the theoretical part. A few years later, at a meeting of the Russian Technical Society, for the first time in the world, he demonstrated the transmission, reception and reproduction of images of static geometric shapes on a CRT screen.

Photo: Stephen Coles

Georgy Gamow's research is often referred to as the beginning of Big Bang cosmology. His model of the "hot universe" considers the beginning of the evolution of the universe with a phase of dense hot plasma, consisting of protons, electrons and photons. In this hot dense substance, nuclear reactions took place, favoring the synthesis of light chemical elements.

In his theory, Gamow predicted the existence of a cosmic background of radiation, which, according to his calculations, should have existed together with hot matter at the dawn of the universe.

Image: J. Emerson

Talented Russian scientists are directly involved in the development and creation of a prototype of another revolutionary technology - an optical quantum generator, or laser.

The first prototype of a modern laser called a maser was created in the 1950s by Soviet scientists Nikolai Gennadievich Basov and Alexander Mikhailovich Prokhorov. Approximately in the same years, the American physicist Charles Towns was also developing such a technology.

It is noteworthy that in 1964 all three developers - Basov, Prokhorov and Townes - received the Nobel Prize "For fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which made it possible to create generators and amplifiers based on the principle of a maser and a laser."

Photo: Nikos Koutoulas

In conclusion, I would like to remind readers of one more Russian invention, slightly less significant from the point of view of world science, but certainly important and loved by millions of people.

In 1985, the Soviet programmer Alexei Leonidovich Pajitnov invented the most famous and popular computer game in the world - Tetris.

For the first time "Tetris" appeared on the microcomputer "Electronics-60". At that time, Alexey Pajitnov studied the issues of artificial intelligence and speech recognition. In his research, he used puzzles, in particular, the so-called "pentamino" - a puzzle in which figures consisting of five squares connected by sides must be placed in one rectangle.

Pajitnov automated the process of assembling the puzzle and transferred it to a computer, slightly modernizing it, taking into account the computing power of the existing equipment. So there was "tetramino" - the older brother of "Tetris". Then the main idea of ​​the game was born: falling figures form rows-rectangles, which subsequently disappear from the screen. Very soon the game became popular not only in Moscow, but all over the world.

Photo: Aldo Gonzalez

The history of mankind is closely connected with constant progress, the development of technology, new discoveries and inventions. Some technologies are outdated and history, others, such as the wheel or the sail, are still in use today. Countless discoveries were lost in the whirlpool of time, others, not appreciated by contemporaries, were waiting for recognition and implementation for tens and hundreds of years.

Editorial Samogo.Net conducted her own research, designed to answer the question of what inventions are considered by our contemporaries to be the most significant.

Processing and analysis of the results of Internet surveys showed that there is simply no consensus on this matter. Nevertheless, we managed to form a general unique rating of the greatest inventions and discoveries in the history of mankind. As it turned out, despite the fact that science has long gone forward, the basic discoveries in the minds of our contemporaries remain the most significant.

First place indisputably ranked Fire

People early discovered the beneficial properties of fire - its ability to illuminate and warm, to change plant and animal food for the better.

The "wild fire" that flared up during forest fires or volcanic eruptions was terrible for a person, but by bringing fire into his cave, a person "tamed" him and "put" him at his service. Since that time, fire has become a constant companion of man and the basis of his economy. In ancient times, it was an indispensable source of heat, light, a means for cooking, a hunting tool.
However, further cultural gains (ceramics, metallurgy, steelmaking, steam engines, etc.) are due to the comprehensive use of fire.

For long millennia, people used "domestic fire", maintained it from year to year in their caves, before they learned how to get it themselves using friction. This discovery probably happened by chance, after our ancestors learned how to drill wood. During this operation, the wood was heated and, under favorable conditions, ignition could occur. Paying attention to this, people began to widely use friction to make fire.

The simplest method was to take two sticks of dry wood, in one of which a hole was made. The first stick was placed on the ground and pressed against the knee. The second was inserted into the hole, and then they began to quickly rotate between the palms. At the same time, it was necessary to press hard on the stick. The inconvenience of this method was that the palms gradually slipped down. Every now and then I had to lift them up and again continue to rotate. Although, with a certain skill, this can be done quickly, nevertheless, due to constant stops, the process was greatly delayed. It is much easier to make fire by friction, working together. At the same time, one person held the horizontal stick and pressed on top of the vertical one, and the second quickly rotated it between the palms. Later, they began to clasp the vertical stick with a strap, moving which to the right and left, you can speed up the movement, and for convenience, they began to put a bone cap on the upper end. Thus, the entire device for making fire began to consist of four parts: two sticks (fixed and rotating), a strap and a top cap. In this way, it was possible to make fire alone, if you press the lower stick with your knee to the ground, and the cap with your teeth.

And only later, with the development of mankind, other methods of obtaining an open fire became available.

Second place in the responses of the Internet community took Wheel and Wagon

It is believed that its prototype may have been skating rinks, which were placed under heavy tree trunks, boats and stones when they were dragged from place to place. Perhaps at the same time the first observations on the properties of rotating bodies were made. For example, if for some reason the log-skating rink was thinner in the center than at the edges, it moved under the load more evenly and did not drift to the side. Noticing this, people began to deliberately burn the rinks in such a way that the middle part became thinner, while the side ones remained unchanged. Thus, a device was obtained, which is now called a "slope". In the course of further improvements in this direction, only two rollers at its ends remained from a single log, and an axis appeared between them. Later, they began to be made separately, and then rigidly fastened together. So the wheel was opened in the proper sense of the word and the first wagon appeared.

In subsequent centuries, many generations of craftsmen worked to improve this invention. Initially, solid wheels were rigidly fastened to the axle and rotated with it. When moving on a flat road, such wagons were quite suitable for use. On a bend, when the wheels must turn at different speeds, this connection creates great inconvenience, since a heavily laden wagon can easily break or roll over. The wheels themselves were still very imperfect. They were made from a single piece of wood. Therefore, the wagons were heavy and clumsy. They moved slowly and were usually harnessed to slow but powerful oxen.

One of the oldest carts of the described design was found during excavations in Mohenjo-Daro. A major step forward in the development of locomotion technology was the invention of a wheel with a hub mounted on a fixed axle. In this case, the wheels rotated independently of each other. And so that the wheel would rub less against the axle, they began to lubricate it with grease or tar.

In order to reduce the weight of the wheel, cutouts were cut out in it, and for rigidity they were strengthened with transverse braces. Nothing better could have been invented in the Stone Age. But after the discovery of metals, wheels with a metal rim and spokes began to be made. Such a wheel could rotate ten times faster and was not afraid of hitting stones. Harnessing swift-footed horses to the wagon, a person significantly increased the speed of his movement. Perhaps it is difficult to find another discovery that would give such a powerful impetus to the development of technology.

Third place rightfully occupied Writing

There is no need to talk about the great significance of the invention of writing in the history of mankind. It is impossible to even imagine what path the development of civilization could have taken if, at a certain stage of their development, people had not learned to fix the information they needed with the help of certain symbols and thus transmit and store it. It is obvious that human society in the form in which it exists today simply could not have appeared.

The first forms of writing in the form of signs inscribed in a special way appeared about 4 thousand years BC. But long before that, there were various ways of transmitting and storing information: with the help of branches, arrows, smoke from fires, and similar signals, folded in a certain way. From these primitive warning systems, more sophisticated ways of capturing information later emerged. For example, the ancient Incas invented the original system of "recording" with the help of knots. For this, wool laces of different colors were used. They were tied with various knots and attached to a stick. In this form, the "letter" was sent to the addressee. There is an opinion that the Incas, with the help of such a "knot letter", fixed their laws, wrote down chronicles and poems. "Knot writing" is also noted among other nations - it was used in ancient China and Mongolia.

However, writing in the proper sense of the word appeared only after people invented special graphic signs to fix and transmit information. The most ancient type of writing is pictographic. A pictogram is a schematic drawing that directly depicts the things, events, and phenomena in question. It is assumed that pictography was widespread among various peoples at the last stage of the Stone Age. This letter is very visual, and therefore it does not need to be specially studied. It is quite suitable for transmitting small messages and for recording simple stories. But when there was a need to convey some complex abstract thought or concept, the limited possibilities of the pictogram were immediately felt, which is completely unsuitable for recording what is not amenable to a picturesque image (for example, such concepts as cheerfulness, courage, vigilance, good sleep, heavenly azure, etc.). Therefore, already at an early stage in the history of writing, pictograms began to include special conventional icons denoting certain concepts (for example, the sign of crossed arms symbolized exchange). Such icons are called ideograms. Ideographic writing also arose in pictographic writing, and one can quite clearly imagine how this happened: each pictorial sign of a pictogram began to be more and more isolated from others and associated with a certain word or concept, denoting it. Gradually, this process developed so much that primitive pictograms lost their former visibility, but gained clarity and certainty. This process took a long time, perhaps several millennia.

Hieroglyphic writing became the highest form of the ideogram. It first appeared in ancient Egypt. Later, hieroglyphic writing became widespread in the Far East - in China, Japan and Korea. With the help of ideograms, it was possible to reflect any, even the most complex and abstract thought. However, for the hieroglyphs not dedicated to the secret, the meaning of what was written was completely incomprehensible. Anyone who wanted to learn how to write had to memorize several thousand icons. In reality, it took several years of constant practice. Therefore, few people knew how to write and read in antiquity.

Only at the end of 2 thousand BC. the ancient Phoenicians invented the alphabetic sound alphabet, which served as a model for the alphabets of many other peoples. The Phoenician alphabet consisted of 22 consonants, each representing a different sound. The invention of this alphabet was a great step forward for mankind. With the help of the new letter, it was easy to convey graphically any word without resorting to ideograms. It was very easy to learn from him. The art of writing has ceased to be the privilege of the enlightened. It has become the property of the whole society, or at least most of it. This was one of the reasons for the rapid spread of the Phoenician alphabet around the world. It is believed that four-fifths of all alphabets known today originated from the Phoenician.

So, Libyan developed from a variety of Phoenician writing (Punic). The Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek writing came directly from the Phoenician. In turn, on the basis of the Aramaic script, Arabic, Nabataean, Syriac, Persian and other scripts developed. The Greeks made the last important improvement to the Phoenician alphabet - they began to designate with letters not only consonants, but also vowels. The Greek alphabet formed the basis of most European alphabets: Latin (from which, in turn, French, German, English, Italian, Spanish and other alphabets originated), Coptic, Armenian, Georgian and Slavic (Serbian, Russian, Bulgarian, etc.).

Fourth place, after writing takes Paper

Its creators were the Chinese. And this is no coincidence. Firstly, China already in ancient times was famous for book wisdom and a complex system of bureaucratic management, which required constant accountability from officials. Therefore, there has always been a need for inexpensive and compact writing material. Before the invention of paper in China, people wrote either on bamboo boards or on silk.

But silk was always very expensive, and bamboo was very bulky and heavy. (An average of 30 hieroglyphs was placed on one board. It is easy to imagine how much space such a bamboo “book” should have taken up. It is no coincidence that they write that a whole cart was required to transport some works.) Secondly, only the Chinese for a long time knew the secret of production silk, and paper business just developed from one technical operation of processing silk cocoons. This operation was as follows. Women engaged in sericulture boiled silkworm cocoons, then, spreading them on a mat, lowered them into water and ground them until a homogeneous mass was formed. When the mass was taken out and the water was strained, silk wool was obtained. However, after such mechanical and heat treatment, a thin fibrous layer remained on the mats, which, after drying, turned into a sheet of very thin paper suitable for writing. Later, women workers began to use defective silkworm cocoons for purposeful papermaking. At the same time, they repeated the process already familiar to them: they boiled the cocoons, washed and crushed them to obtain paper pulp, and finally dried the resulting sheets. Such paper was called "cotton" and was quite expensive, since the raw material itself was expensive.

Naturally, in the end, the question arose: is it possible to make paper only from silk, or can any fibrous raw material, including vegetable origin, be suitable for the preparation of paper pulp? In 105, a certain Cai Lun, an important official at the court of the Han emperor, prepared a new grade of paper from old fishing nets. It was not as good as silk, but was much cheaper. This important discovery had huge consequences not only for China, but for the whole world - for the first time in history, people received first-class and affordable writing material, an equivalent replacement for which to this day. The name of Cai Lun is therefore rightfully included among the names of the greatest inventors in the history of mankind. In the following centuries, several important improvements were made to the paper-making process, which allowed it to develop rapidly.

In the 4th century, paper completely replaced bamboo planks from use. New experiments have shown that paper can be made from cheap vegetable raw materials: tree bark, reed and bamboo. The latter was especially important, since bamboo grows in China in large numbers. Bamboo was split into thin slivers, soaked with lime, and the resulting mass was then boiled for several days. The filtered thick was kept in special pits, carefully ground with special beaters and diluted with water until a sticky, mushy mass was formed. This mass was scooped up using a special form - a bamboo sieve, mounted on a stretcher. A thin layer of the mass along with the form was placed under the press. Then the form was pulled out and only a paper sheet remained under the press. The pressed sheets were removed from the sieve, folded into a pile, dried, smoothed and cut to size.

Over time, the Chinese have achieved the highest art in paper making. For several centuries, they, as usual, carefully kept the secrets of paper production. But in 751, during a clash with the Arabs in the foothills of the Tien Shan, several Chinese masters were captured. From them, the Arabs learned to make paper themselves and for five centuries sold it very profitably to Europe. The Europeans were the last of the civilized nations to learn how to make paper themselves. The Spaniards were the first to adopt this art from the Arabs. In 1154, paper production was established in Italy, in 1228 in Germany, in 1309 in England. In subsequent centuries, paper has received the widest distribution throughout the world, gradually conquering more and more new areas of application. Its significance in our life is so great that, according to the well-known French bibliographer A. Sim, our era can rightly be called the "paper era."

Fifth place occupied Gunpowder and Firearms

The invention of gunpowder and its distribution in Europe had enormous consequences for the further history of mankind. Although the Europeans were the last of the civilized peoples to learn how to make this explosive mixture, it was they who were able to derive the greatest practical benefit from its discovery. The rapid development of firearms and the revolution in military affairs were the first consequences of the spread of gunpowder. This, in turn, led to the deepest social changes: the knights clad in armor and their impregnable castles were powerless before the fire of cannons and arquebuses. Feudal society was dealt a blow from which it could no longer recover. In a short time, many European powers overcame feudal fragmentation and turned into powerful centralized states.

There are few inventions in the history of technology that would lead to such grandiose and far-reaching changes. Before gunpowder became known in the West, it already had a long history in the East, and was invented by the Chinese. Saltpeter is the most important component of gunpowder. In some areas of China, it was found in its native form and looked like flakes of snow that powdered the ground. Later it was discovered that saltpeter is formed in areas rich in alkalis and decaying (nitrogen-delivering) substances. When kindling a fire, the Chinese could observe flashes that arose during the burning of saltpeter with coal.

For the first time, the properties of saltpeter were described by the Chinese physician Tao Hong-jing, who lived at the turn of the 5th and 6th centuries. Since that time, it has been used as an ingredient in some medicines. Alchemists often used it when conducting experiments. In the 7th century, one of them, Sun Si-miao, prepared a mixture of sulfur and saltpeter, adding to them a few shares of the locust tree. While heating this mixture in a crucible, he suddenly received a violent flash of flame. He described this experience in his treatise Dan Ching. It is believed that Sun Si-miao prepared one of the first samples of gunpowder, which, however, did not yet have a strong explosive effect.

Subsequently, the composition of gunpowder was improved by other alchemists, who experimentally established its three main components: coal, sulfur and potassium nitrate. The medieval Chinese could not scientifically explain what kind of explosive reaction occurs when gunpowder is ignited, but they soon learned to use it for military purposes. True, in their lives gunpowder did not at all have that revolutionary influence that it later had on European society. This is explained by the fact that the masters have been preparing a powder mixture from unrefined components for a long time. Meanwhile, crude saltpeter and sulfur containing foreign impurities did not give a strong explosive effect. For several centuries, gunpowder was used exclusively as an incendiary agent. Later, when its quality improved, gunpowder began to be used as an explosive in the manufacture of land mines, hand grenades and explosives.

But even after that, for a long time they did not guess to use the power of the gases that arose during the combustion of gunpowder to throw bullets and nuclei. Only in the XII-XIII centuries, the Chinese began to use weapons that very vaguely resembled firearms, but they invented firecrackers and rockets. The Arabs and Mongols learned the secret of gunpowder from the Chinese. In the first third of the 13th century, the Arabs achieved great skill in pyrotechnics. They used saltpeter in many compounds, mixing it with sulfur and coal, adding other components to them and making fireworks of amazing beauty. From the Arabs, the composition of the powder mixture became known to European alchemists. One of them, Mark the Greek, already in 1220 wrote down in his treatise a recipe for gunpowder: 6 parts of saltpeter to 1 part of sulfur and 1 part of coal. Later, Roger Bacon wrote quite accurately about the composition of gunpowder.

However, about a hundred years passed before this recipe ceased to be a secret. This second discovery of gunpowder is associated with the name of another alchemist, the Feiburg monk Berthold Schwarz. Once he began to grind a crushed mixture of saltpeter, sulfur and coal in a mortar, as a result of which an explosion occurred that scorched Berthold's beard. This or another experience gave Berthold the idea to use the power of powder gases to throw stones. It is believed that he made one of the first artillery pieces in Europe.

Gunpowder was originally a fine floury powder. It was not convenient to use it, because when charging guns and arquebuses, the powder pulp stuck to the walls of the barrel. Finally, it was noticed that powder in the form of lumps was much more convenient - it was easily charged and, when ignited, gave off more gases (2 pounds of powder in lumps gave a greater effect than 3 pounds in pulp).

In the first quarter of the 15th century, for convenience, they began to use grain gunpowder, which was obtained by rolling powder pulp (with alcohol and other impurities) into dough, which was then passed through a sieve. So that the grains do not fray during transportation, they learned how to polish them. To do this, they were placed in a special drum, during the spinning of which the grains hit and rubbed against each other and compacted. After processing, their surface became smooth and shiny.

Sixth place ranked in the polls : telegraph, telephone, internet, radio and other types of modern communication

Until the middle of the 19th century, the only means of communication between the European continent and England, between America and Europe, between Europe and the colonies, was steamship mail. Incidents and events in other countries were learned with a delay of whole weeks, and sometimes even months. For example, news from Europe to America was delivered in two weeks, and this was not the longest time yet. Therefore, the creation of the telegraph met the most urgent needs of mankind.

After this technical novelty appeared in all parts of the world and telegraph lines circled the globe, it took only hours, and sometimes even minutes, for the news on electrical wires from one hemisphere to rush to the other. Political and stock reports, personal and business messages on the same day could be delivered to interested parties. Thus, the telegraph should be attributed to one of the most important inventions in the history of civilization, because with it the human mind won the greatest victory over distance.

With the invention of the telegraph, the problem of transmitting messages over long distances was solved. However, the telegraph could only send written dispatches. Meanwhile, many inventors dreamed of a more perfect and communicative method of communication, with the help of which it would be possible to transmit the live sound of human speech or music over any distance. The first experiments in this direction were undertaken in 1837 by the American physicist Page. The essence of Page's experiments was very simple. He assembled an electrical circuit, which included a tuning fork, an electromagnet, and galvanic cells. During its oscillations, the tuning fork quickly opened and closed the circuit. This intermittent current was transmitted to an electromagnet, which just as quickly attracted and released a thin steel rod. As a result of these vibrations, the rod produced a singing sound similar to that of a tuning fork. Thus, Page showed that it is possible in principle to transmit sound using electric current, it is only necessary to create more advanced transmitting and receiving devices.

And later, as a result of long searches, discoveries and inventions, a mobile phone, television, the Internet and other means of communication of mankind appeared, without which it is impossible to imagine our modern life.

Seventh place in the top 10 according to the polls Automobile

The automobile is one of those greatest inventions, which, like the wheel, gunpowder or electric current, had a colossal influence not only on the era that gave birth to them, but also on all subsequent times. Its multifaceted impact goes far beyond the transport sector. The automobile shaped modern industry, spawned new branches of industry, arbitrarily rebuilt production itself, for the first time giving it a mass, serial and in-line character. It transformed the appearance of the planet, which was surrounded by millions of kilometers of highways, put pressure on the environment and even changed human psychology. The influence of the car is now so multifaceted that it is felt in all spheres of human life. He became, as it were, a visible and visual embodiment of technical progress in general, with all its advantages and disadvantages.

There were many amazing pages in the history of the car, but perhaps the brightest of them dates back to the first years of its existence. One cannot help but be struck by the speed with which this invention went from appearance to maturity. It took only a quarter of a century for the car to turn from a capricious and still unreliable toy into the most popular and widespread vehicle. Already at the beginning of the 20th century, it was basically identical to a modern car.

The immediate predecessor of the gasoline car was the steam car. The steam cart, built by the Frenchman Cugno in 1769, is considered to be the first practical steam car. Carrying up to 3 tons of cargo, she moved at a speed of only 2-4 km / h. She also had other shortcomings. The heavy vehicle did not obey the helm very well, constantly ran into the walls of houses and fences, causing destruction and suffering considerable damage. The two horsepower that her engine developed was hard to come by. Despite the large volume of the boiler, the pressure dropped rapidly. Every quarter of an hour, to maintain pressure, it was necessary to stop and kindle the firebox. One of the trips ended in a boiler explosion. Fortunately, Kuno himself survived.

Cugno's followers were more fortunate. In 1803, Trivaitik, already known to us, built the first steam car in Great Britain. The car had huge rear wheels about 2.5 m in diameter. A cauldron was attached between the wheels and the rear of the frame, which was served by a stoker standing on the back. The steam car was equipped with a single horizontal cylinder. From the piston rod through the connecting rod-crank mechanism, the drive gear rotated, which was engaged with another gear mounted on the axis of the rear wheels. The axis of these wheels was pivotally connected to the frame and turned with a long lever by the driver, sitting on a high irradiation. The body was suspended on high C‑shaped springs. With 8-10 passengers, the car reached speeds of up to 15 km / h, which, of course, was a very good achievement for that time. The appearance of this amazing car on the streets of London attracted a lot of onlookers who did not hide their delight.

The car in the modern sense of the word appeared only after the creation of a compact and economical internal combustion engine, which made a real revolution in transport technology.
The first gasoline-powered car was built in 1864 by the Austrian inventor Siegfried Markus. Fascinated by pyrotechnics, Marcus once set fire to a mixture of gasoline and air vapors with an electric spark. Struck by the force of the ensuing explosion, he decided to create an engine that would use this effect. In the end, he managed to build a two-stroke gasoline engine with electric ignition, which he installed in an ordinary wagon. In 1875, Marcus created a more advanced car.

The official glory of the inventors of the car belongs to two German engineers - Benz and Daimler. Benz designed two-stroke gas engines and was the owner of a small plant for their production. The engines were in good demand and Benz's business flourished. He had enough funds and leisure for other developments. Benz's dream was to create a self-propelled carriage with an internal combustion engine. Benz's own engine, like Otto's four-stroke engine, was not suitable for this, since they had a low speed (about 120 revolutions per minute). With a slight decrease in the number of revolutions, they stalled. Benz understood that a car equipped with such an engine would stop in front of every bump. What was needed was a high-speed engine with a good ignition system and an apparatus for the formation of a combustible mixture.

Cars improved rapidly Back in 1891, Edouard Michelin, the owner of a rubber products factory in Clermont-Ferrand, invented a removable pneumatic tire for a bicycle (a Dunlop tube was poured into the tire and glued to the rim). In 1895, the production of removable pneumatic tires for cars began. For the first time these tires were tested in the same year at the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race. The Peugeot equipped with them hardly reached Rouen, and then was forced to retire, as the tires were constantly punctured. Nevertheless, experts and motorists were amazed at the smoothness of the car and the comfort of driving it. Since that time, pneumatic tires have gradually come into life, and all cars began to be equipped with them. The winner of these races was again Levassor. When he stopped the car at the finish line and stepped on the ground, he said: “It was crazy. I was doing 30 kilometers per hour!” Now at the finish line there is a monument in honor of this significant victory.

Eighth place - Light bulb

In the last decades of the 19th century, electric lighting entered the life of many European cities. Appearing first on the streets and squares, it very soon penetrated into every house, into every apartment and became an integral part of the life of every civilized person. It was one of the most important events in the history of technology, with enormous and manifold consequences. The rapid development of electric lighting led to mass electrification, a revolution in energy and major shifts in industry. However, all this might not have happened if the efforts of many inventors had not created such a common and familiar device for us as an electric light bulb. Among the greatest discoveries of human history, she undoubtedly belongs to one of the most honorable places.

In the 19th century, two types of electric lamps became widespread: incandescent and arc lamps. Arc light bulbs appeared a little earlier. Their glow is based on such an interesting phenomenon as the voltaic arc. If you take two wires, connect them to a sufficiently strong current source, connect them, and then push them apart at a distance of several millimeters, then something like a flame with a bright light is formed between the ends of the conductors. The phenomenon will be more beautiful and brighter if two pointed carbon rods are used instead of metal wires. With a sufficiently large voltage between them, a light of dazzling power is formed.

For the first time, the phenomenon of a voltaic arc was observed in 1803 by the Russian scientist Vasily Petrov. In 1810, the English physicist Devi made the same discovery. Both of them obtained a voltaic arc, using a large battery of cells, between the ends of charcoal rods. Both of them wrote that the voltaic arc can be used for lighting purposes. But first it was necessary to find a more suitable material for the electrodes, since the charcoal rods burned out in a few minutes and were of little use for practical use. Arc lamps had another inconvenience - as the electrodes burned out, it was necessary to constantly move them towards each other. As soon as the distance between them exceeded a certain permissible minimum, the light of the lamp became uneven, it began to flicker and went out.

Foucault, a French physicist, designed the first manually adjustable arc lamp in 1844. He replaced charcoal with hard coke sticks. In 1848, he first used an arc lamp to illuminate one of the Parisian squares. It was a short and very expensive experience, since a powerful battery served as a source of electricity. Then various devices were invented, controlled by a clockwork, which automatically shifted the electrodes as they burned.
It is clear that from the point of view of practical use, it was desirable to have a lamp that was not complicated by additional mechanisms. But was it possible to do without them? It turned out that yes. If two coals are placed not against each other, but in parallel, moreover, so that an arc can form only between their two ends, then with this device the distance between the ends of the coals is always kept unchanged. The design of such a lamp seems very simple, but its creation required great ingenuity. It was invented in 1876 by the Russian electrical engineer Yablochkov, who worked in Paris in the workshop of Academician Breguet.

In 1879, the famous American inventor Edison took up the improvement of the electric light bulb. He understood that in order for the light bulb to shine brightly and for a long time and have an even, unblinking light, it is necessary, firstly, to find a suitable material for the thread, and, secondly, to learn how to create a very rarefied space in the balloon. A lot of experiments were done with various materials, which were set up with Edison's characteristic scope. It is estimated that his assistants tested at least 6,000 different substances and compounds, while over 100 thousand dollars were spent on experiments. At first, Edison replaced the brittle paper charcoal with a more durable one made from coal, then he began to experiment with various metals, and finally settled on a thread of charred bamboo fibers. In the same year, in the presence of three thousand people, Edison publicly demonstrated his electric light bulbs, illuminating his house, laboratory and several adjacent streets with them. It was the first long life light bulb suitable for mass production.

penultimate, ninth place in our top 10 are antibiotics, and in particular - penicillin

Antibiotics are one of the most remarkable inventions of the 20th century in the field of medicine. Modern people are far from always aware of how much they owe to these medicinal preparations. Mankind in general very quickly gets used to the amazing achievements of its science, and sometimes it takes some effort to imagine life as it was, for example, before the invention of television, radio or steam locomotive. Just as quickly, a huge family of various antibiotics entered our lives, the first of which was penicillin.

Today it seems surprising to us that back in the 30s of the 20th century, tens of thousands of people died every year from dysentery, that pneumonia in many cases ended in death, that sepsis was a real scourge of all surgical patients, who died in large numbers from blood poisoning, that typhus was considered the most dangerous and incurable disease, and pneumonic plague inevitably led the patient to death. All these terrible diseases (and many others, previously incurable, such as tuberculosis) were defeated by antibiotics.

Even more striking is the effect of these drugs on military medicine. It is hard to believe, but in previous wars, most soldiers died not from bullets and shrapnel, but from purulent infections caused by wounds. It is known that in the space around us there are myriads of microscopic organisms of microbes, among which there are many dangerous pathogens.

Under normal conditions, our skin prevents their penetration into the body. But during the injury, dirt entered the open wounds along with millions of putrefactive bacteria (cocci). They began to multiply with tremendous speed, penetrated deep into the tissues, and after a few hours no surgeon could save a person: the wound festered, the temperature rose, sepsis or gangrene began. A person died not so much from the wound itself, but from wound complications. Medicine was powerless before them. At best, the doctor managed to amputate the affected organ and thus stopped the spread of the disease.

To deal with wound complications, it was necessary to learn how to paralyze the microbes that cause these complications, to learn how to neutralize the cocci that got into the wound. But how can this be achieved? It turned out that it is possible to fight against microorganisms directly with their help, since some microorganisms in the course of their life activity emit substances capable of destroying other microorganisms. The idea of ​​using microbes to fight germs dates back to the 19th century. Thus, Louis Pasteur discovered that anthrax bacilli die under the action of some other microbes. But it is clear that the solution of this problem required a lot of work.

Over time, after a series of experiments and discoveries, penicillin was created. Penicillin seemed like a real miracle to seasoned field surgeons. He cured even the most seriously ill patients who were already ill with blood poisoning or pneumonia. The creation of penicillin turned out to be one of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine and gave a huge impetus to its further development.

Well, the last tenth place in the survey results took Sail and ship

It is believed that the prototype of the sail appeared in ancient times, when a person just started building boats and dared to go to sea. In the beginning, the sail was simply a stretched animal skin. The person standing in the boat had to hold it with both hands and orient it relative to the wind. When people came up with the idea to strengthen the sail with the help of a mast and yards, it is not known, but already on the oldest images of the ships of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut that have come down to us, you can see wooden masts and yards, as well as stays (cables that keep the mast from falling back), halyards (tackle for lifting and lowering sails) and other rigging.

Therefore, the appearance of a sailing ship must be attributed to prehistoric times.

There is much evidence that the first large sailing ships appeared in Egypt, and the Nile was the first deep river on which river navigation began to develop. Every year from July to November, the mighty river overflowed its banks, flooding the entire country with its waters. Villages and cities were cut off from each other like islands. Therefore, ships were a vital necessity for the Egyptians. In the economic life of the country and in communication between people, they played a much greater role than wheeled carts.

One of the earliest types of Egyptian ships, which appeared about 5 thousand years BC, was the barque. It is known to modern scientists from several models installed in ancient temples. Since Egypt is very poor in forests, papyrus was widely used to build the first ships. The features of this material determined the design and shape of ancient Egyptian ships. It was a sickle-shaped boat, bound from bundles of papyrus, with a bow and stern curved upward. To give the ship strength, the hull was pulled together with cables. Later, when regular trade with the Phoenicians was established and Lebanese cedar began to arrive in Egypt in large quantities, the tree began to be widely used in shipbuilding.

An idea of ​​what types of ships were built at that time is given by the wall reliefs of the necropolis near Saqqara, dating back to the middle of the 3rd millennium BC. These compositions realistically depict individual stages in the construction of a plank ship. The hulls of the ships, which had neither a keel (in ancient times it was a beam lying at the base of the bottom of the vessel), nor frames (transverse curved beams that ensure the strength of the sides and bottom), were recruited from simple dies and caulked with papyrus. The hull was strengthened by means of ropes that fitted the vessel along the perimeter of the upper plating belt. Such vessels hardly had good seaworthiness. However, they were quite suitable for swimming on the river. The straight sail used by the Egyptians allowed them to sail only with the wind. The rigging was attached to a bipedal mast, both legs of which were set perpendicular to the ship's midline. At the top, they were tightly bound. The beam device in the ship's hull served as a step (nest) for the mast. In the working position, this mast was held by stays - thick cables that went from the stern and bow, and legs supported it towards the sides. The rectangular sail was attached to two yards. With a side wind, the mast was hastily removed.

Later, by about 2600 BC, the bipedal mast was replaced by the one-legged one that is still used today. The one-legged mast made sailing easier and for the first time gave a ship the ability to maneuver. However, a rectangular sail was an unreliable means that could only be used with a fair wind.

The main engine of the ship was the muscular strength of the rowers. Apparently, the Egyptians own an important improvement of the oar - the invention of oarlocks. They did not yet exist in the Old Kingdom, but then the oar began to be fastened with rope loops. This immediately allowed to increase the power of the stroke and the speed of the vessel. It is known that the elite rowers on the ships of the pharaohs did 26 strokes per minute, which allowed them to reach a speed of 12 km / h. They controlled such ships with the help of two steering oars located at the stern. Later, they began to be attached to a beam on the deck, by rotating which it was possible to choose the desired direction (this principle of steering the ship by turning the rudder blade remains unchanged to this day). The ancient Egyptians were not good sailors. On their ships, they did not dare to go to the open sea. However, along the coast, their merchant ships made long journeys. So, in the temple of Queen Hatshepsut there is an inscription reporting on a sea voyage made by the Egyptians around 1490 BC. to the mysterious country of incense Punt, located in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bmodern Somalia.

The next step in the development of shipbuilding was taken by the Phoenicians. Unlike the Egyptians, the Phoenicians had an abundance of excellent building material for their ships. Their country stretched in a narrow strip along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Extensive cedar forests grew here almost at the very shore. Already in ancient times, the Phoenicians learned how to make high-quality dugout single-deck boats from their trunks and boldly went out to sea on them.

At the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, when maritime trade began to develop, the Phoenicians began to build ships. A marine vessel is significantly different from a boat; its construction requires its own design solutions. The most important discoveries along this path, which determined the entire subsequent history of shipbuilding, belong to the Phoenicians. Perhaps the skeletons of animals led them to the idea of ​​installing stiffening ribs on one-poles, which were covered with boards on top. So for the first time in the history of shipbuilding, frames were used, which are still widely used.

In the same way, the Phoenicians first built a keel ship (originally, two trunks connected at an angle served as a keel). The keel immediately gave the hull stability and made it possible to establish longitudinal and transverse bracing. Sheathing boards were attached to them. All these innovations were the decisive basis for the rapid development of shipbuilding and determined the appearance of all subsequent ships.

Other inventions in various fields of science, such as: chemistry, physics, medicine, education and others, were also recalled.
After all, as we said earlier, this is not surprising. After all, any discovery or invention is another step into the future, which improves our life, and often prolongs it. And if not every, then very, very many discoveries deserve to be called great and are extremely necessary in our life.

Alexander Ozerov, based on the book by Ryzhkov K.V. "One Hundred Great Inventions"

The greatest discoveries and inventions of mankind © 2011

1918 - Mass spectrometer

University of Chicago professor Arthur Dempster (1886-1950) revolutionized chemical analysis with an instrument that measured the weight of isotopes in minutes and detected the chemicals present. The Toronto inventor also discovered uranium-235, a fissile type of heavy metal atom. Later, the scientist participated in the Manhattan Project.

1921 - Tetraethyl lead

The efficiency of carbureted engines is directly dependent on the compression ratio, but increasing the compression ratio causes misfiring -<детонацию>, and this in turn adversely affects the operation of the engine. Thomas Midgley (1889-1944), laboratory worker in Dayton, Ohio, spent 5 years researching anti-knock fuel additives. This additive was lead, which was used until recently, until new alternatives gradually replaced this pollutant. Another invention of T. Midgley was freon, a fire-resistant coolant, which has now been replaced by new types of coolers.

1923 - Business management

Alfred P. Sloan (1875-1966), long before Stephen Cowie and Tom Peters, pioneered modern corporate governance. It helped him save the corporation<Дженерал Моторс>from collapse and make it the most powerful in the world. He also applied a type of management with an independent board of directors, executive and financial committees - a balance of power, which by now is a thing of the past. He empowered business units that had proven to be financially efficient with the right to make decisions, a style that became widespread.
1923 - Multi-plane camera
Walt Disney (1901-1966) and Madame Roy's brother turned a small animation studio into grand entertainment, from the adventures of Mickey the Mouse to live-action films (<Фантазия>, <Золушка>, <Питер Пэн>). Disney's biggest contribution to cinema is considered to be the multi-angle camera. Whereas in the traditional way of animation the cells were stacked on top of each other, giving little depth to the image, the multiplane camera placed each cell on a separate level and thus the elements of the scene could move independently, closer to reality.

1924 - Mutual Fund

L. Sherman Adams, Charles H. Leroyd and Ashton L. Carr founded the Massachusetts Investors Trust, which became the first worldwide unlimited investment fund with a capital of $50,000. In 5 years, using brokerage channels for accessing the stock market, the fund increased its assets to $14 million Today, investment in mutual funds is $6.1 trillion.

1924 - Food freezing

Before Clarence Birdseye (1886-1956), cooking and cryogenics had nothing in common. After leaving college, Birdseye worked as a naturalist for the American government. In Labrador, his attention was drawn to the method of freezing, which was used by the natives to preserve the taste of fresh fish. Experimenting with other foods, Birdseye improved the freezing process and in 1924 opened a frozen seafood company in New York. By 1934, Birdseye's frozen meats and vegetables filled the refrigerators of grocery stores across the country.

1925 - Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs)

Theodore Newton Weil (1845-1920), who retired after his second term as president of ATT, merged the engineering departments of ATT and Western Electric. The research results were<обречены>for success: 6 Nobel Prizes and other awards. His name is associated with achievements such as the transistor, the push-button telephone, digital signaling and switching, optical communications, and the digital signal processor. Today, Bell Labs has shrunk to a division of Lucent Technologies.

1926 - Rocket engine

Robert Hutchings Goddard (1882-1945) - Clark University physicist. Inspired by H. G. Wells<Война миров>, he devoted most of his professional life to developing mathematical theories of propellants and theorizing that a rocket engine could develop enough thrust to fly into space. Goddard applied his theories when launching the first rocket, which took place in 1926 on a field near the city of Auburn (Massachusetts). The rocket, which externally was a 3-meter projectile with a liquid-fuel engine in the nose, rose only 12 m. This short flight was the first giant step in rocket science.

1927 - Television

Philo Taylor Farnsworth (1906-1971), at the age of 15, presented his chemistry teacher with a project for electronic transmission of images over long distances. After 4 years, he developed the imaging cathode ray tube, a vacuum tube in which phosphorus glowed when exposed to electrons. In 1927, he first transmitted an electronic image - a horizontal line. In later life, Farnsworth worked on missile control systems and nuclear fusion control, but his first invention remained the most significant.

1928 - Penicillin.

After serving in field hospitals for years. World War I Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) persistently but unsuccessfully tried to find a means to fight infections that brought more casualties than weapons. One day, while cleaning out his cluttered laboratory and sorting through old medical utensils, he discovered that a mold had killed the staph bacteria. In 1945 he won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of penicillin.

1929 - Synthetic rubber

The Belgian Julius Niuland (1878-1936), a graduate of the Catholic University of Notre Dame, was fond of clothing and artificial fabrics. In 1929, he discovered that acetylene could polymerize into an elastic substance. Two years later, DuPont, who funded the research, advertised the resulting material as neoprene. Synthetic rubber is still used today in cable insulation, diving suits, and refrigerator sealing.

1930 - Jet engine

Sir Frank Whittle (1907-1996), while still a cadet at the Royal Air Force Military School, wrote a dissertation that would radically change the future of aircraft construction. He predicted that propeller engines would be replaced by an aircraft engine using a system of turbines and compressed air to ignite atomized fuel. Whittle patented his work in 1930, but spent another 10 years getting a turbine-powered aircraft into the air. In 1941, during a test flight, the first jet aircraft reached a speed of 595 km / h, which far exceeded the capabilities of a propeller-powered aircraft.

1933 - Frequency modulation

Edwin Howard Armstrong (1890-1954), creator of modern radio. By 1913, he had found a way to amplify radio signals with a feedback loop. During World War I, he improved signal reception and tuning with a superheterodyne circuit that converted high frequency signals to intermediate frequency signals. His main idea was that data should be transmitted using radio signals that vary in frequency and not in amplitude (AM). This idea made it possible to get rid of most of the interference characteristic of AM radio transmissions. Armstrong was tried to be stopped by those who invested heavily in the development of amplitude modulation, but in the end the victory went to frequency modulation.

1933 - Drywall.

One of the smartest ideas in building after brick, which was unveiled in 1933, is stucco workpiece. This made it possible to reduce the huge costs for the production of interior finishing works. The blank, which is a mixture of recycled paper and a cheap mineral - gypsum, has a low cost. As experts say, this is dirt between two layers of garbage, for which money is paid. Product invented by U.S. Gypsum (<Гипс>), today they are produced by many, but the name remains the same - Sheetrock (sheetrock).

1934 - Investment appraisal

For most of history, investing has been about emotional choices.<куда инвестировать>. Benjamin Graham (1894-1976) and David Dodd (1895-1988), professors at Columbia University, during<большого краха>published a book<Анализ финансовой деятельности компаний>, which became the first rational justification for the assessment of the stock and bond market. This work plays the role of a kind of bible for investors. Warren Buffett is Graham and Dodd's most famous student.

1934 - Nylon.

Due to shortages during World War I, Wallis Hume Carosas (1896-1937), a student at Tarkio College, was assigned to head the Department of Chemistry. He later achieved a professorship at Harvard and then worked at a research center<Дюпон>. There he created the first synthetic fiber. Caroses failed to see the success of nylon, which became not only a substitute for silk stockings, but also found wide use in industry. In April 1937, in a state of depression, he committed suicide.

1937 - Blood bank

Bernard Fantouche (1874-1940), seized with an idea<запасов крови>similar to those that were intended for wounded soldiers during the First World War, he created the first blood bank at the Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

1937 - Pulse code modulation

Alec H. Reeves (1902-1971), engineer for International Telephone & Telegraph, ushered in the era of digital communications. Reeves developed a communication device that converted audio signals into electronic pulses, transmitted them over ordinary telephone lines, and then the pulses were converted back to an analog signal at the receiving location.

1938 - Xerography.

Chester Floyd Carlson (1906-1968), a New York patent lawyer, was overwhelmed with the job of copying patent applications. In 1934, he began developing a device that could transfer an image from an illuminated photographic plate onto a blank sheet of paper. After 4 years, he succeeded. In 1946, he made a deal with the Haloid Co., which produced the first commercial copy machine.

1939 - Automatic transmission (AKP)

Earl Thompson, owner of an old Fierce-Arrow with a noisy gearbox, has spent 30 years researching ways to soften shifting. As a result of his work, Hydra-Matic appeared - the first AMS. As soon as Oldsmobile used automatic transmission in their cars in 1940, it immediately received 25,000 orders. Automatic transmissions were also used by the American troops - they were installed in light tanks during the Second World War.

1939 - Helicopter

The practical implementation of Igor Sikorsky's (1889-1972) obsession with vertical flight brought about changes in the way warfare, rescue and travel were carried out. Sikorsky, Russian by birth, fled to the United States from the Bolsheviks and the revolution. There he founded Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corp. (now a division of United Technologies), where he developed the amphibious assault aircraft and the amphibious aircraft, both types of aircraft that launched air travel to South America. In 1931, he patented the design of the helicopter: the main rotary engine at the top and the vertical rotary engine at the tail, which provided the device with unique maneuverability, a great achievement of the project. In September 1939, he built the first VS-300 helicopter.

In 1935, Sir Robert Watson-Watt (1892-1973), a physicist from Scotland, was admitted to the State Physics Laboratory, where he developed the first radar technology. Using a shortwave radio device, he determined how electromagnetic waves should be reflected from distant objects so that they could then be amplified and analyzed by a signal processing device. As a result, the first radar station (RLS) appeared, and with it all modern navigation systems.

1942 - Electronic computer

John W. Atanasoff (1903-1995), physicist at Iowa State College, sketched the idea for the first computer on a napkin just after<вечера с виски и прогулки на автомобиле со скоростью 160км/ч>. As a result of the work, such important and still applied ideas as a regenerative memory device, a binary arithmetic device, and the addition of certain logic gates to create an electronic adder appeared. He completed his 300 kg table-sized device in 1942. Although his ideas had already been applied to the ENIAC computer, Atanasoff was only recognized after a patent hearing in 1973.

1945 - Nuclear energy.

For 4 days in August 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, killing more than 200 thousand people. Nuclear explosions marked the end of World War II and the beginning of the nuclear age. In 1957, in the area of ​​the city of Shippingport (Pennsylvania), the world's first nuclear reactor was launched, which supplied Pittsburgh and surrounding areas with electricity. But hopes for a complete transition of the United States to nuclear energy were not destined to come true due to an accident in the Three Mile Island region in 1979.

1947 - Cell phone

D.H. Ring, an employee of Bell Labs, dreamed of building a mobile communication system using low-power transmitters located in prescribed service areas. However, the decision of the US Federal Communications Commission to limit the number of radio frequencies for mobile communications delayed the development of the idea. The decision of the federal commission remained without revision until 1968.

1947 - Microwave

Percy L. Spencer (1894-1970), Raytheon engineer, brought the kitchen into the space age. In 1945, while standing by the operating tube of the magnetron, the main component of shortwave radars, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket was beginning to melt. He experimented with corn kernels, which he placed on a pipe, and made a discovery. In 1947, the world's first microwave oven Radarange appeared.

1947 - Snapshot.

By working on light polarization, Edwin Herbert Land (1909-1991) was able to reduce glare in glassware, lamps, and military goggles. After working with non-polarizing filters, Land invented a camera that developed pictures in seconds.

1947 - Transistor

John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain worked under William R. Shockley at Bell Labs. They noticed that when electrical signals were applied to the contacts of the germanium crystal, the output power was higher than the input power. All three received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956.

1947 - Tupperware plastic tableware

Earl Silas Tupper (1907-1983) began to develop his commercial talent at the age of 10, when he delivered family-owned products from door to door. In 1938 he left the company<Дюпон>where he was an engineer and founded Tupper Plastics Co. Tupper developed a process for the production of tough, fat-free plastic from black polyethylene slag by refining it. This is how plastic products (Tupperware) appeared - plastic dishes, bowls and cups with airtight, waterproof lids. But his real achievement was the multi-level marketing organization he created from a growing army of housewives.

1948 - Long-playing record (LP)

Peter Carl Goldmark (1906-1977) loved music. However, the cellist and pianist from Budapest did not like the short playing time of 78 rpm records. By slowing down the record to 33 1/3 rpm and using softer vinyl instead of shellac, Goldmark was able to increase the number of spiral grooves and double the playing time. The long-playing record, or LP, became a kind of catalyst for the music industry, as it allowed classical works to be recorded in their entirety.

1949 - Magnetic core storage device

An Wang (1920-1990), physicist, was born in Shanghai. He worked at the Computing Laboratory at Harvard University, where he developed<устройство управления передачей импульсов>, the first way to store information on a computer without the use of large magnetic drums.
His real breakthrough was the use of electricity to control the polarity of thousands of tiny ring-shaped ferrite magnets. Jay Forrester, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, modified magnetic core memory, after which it served as the basis for high-speed computer memory until it was replaced by microprocessors. Wang sold the memory patent to IBM for $400,000. He created his own company, Wang Laboratories, which was the first to produce desktop calculators and minicomputers. Wang Laboratories was actively developing, but after the death of Wang ceased to exist.

1952 - Thorazine (chlorpromazine)

Henri Laboriat (1914-1995), French-born surgeon, spent many years looking for a way to reduce the suffering of patients after anesthesia. He found a way out: before the operation, patients were given chlorpromazine (trade name - Thorazine). He also convinced the brother-in-law of one of his colleagues, a psychiatrist, to use this remedy for the treatment of mentally ill patients. As a result, patients who only walked for a long time were able to communicate with people. The drug blocks the dopamine (dopamine) that causes schizophrenia, and patients can live outside of a psychiatric hospital. The US Food and Drug Administration approved this remedy in 1952.

1954 - FORTRAN programming language

John W. Backus (1924) led a group of engineers at IBM that developed the first high-level programming language. In the course of replacing the abstract assembly language with English words and well-known algebraic symbols, the Fortran language appeared, which became the language of physical sciences and is the basis of almost every programming language.

1954 - Polio vaccine.

In 1952, Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and Albert Sabin (1906-1993) worked hard on a vaccine against polio, a virus that inflames nerve cells in the spinal cord and can cause paralysis, muscle atrophy, and death. In the same year, 52,000 Americans contracted polio, of which about 3,000 died. Salk, an expert on influenza diseases, used his acquaintance with D. Basil O'Connor, president of the National Foundation, to create an antiviral vaccine by injecting a virus into the body in sufficient quantities to produce antibodies. Salk tested the effect of the vaccine on himself and his family members and in March 1953 announced the results on the radio<Си-Би-эС>. A year later, they began to vaccinate the population, as a result, cases of paralytic outcome from poliomyelitis fell from 13.9 per 100 thousand in 1954 to 0.5 in 1961. Salk became a hero. He later participated in the work on a vaccine against HIV infection.
Sabin considered oral vaccination to be more effective. In 1957, they conducted field trials of the vaccine. In June 1961, the American Medical Association approved the Sabin vaccine. From 1962 to 1964, more than 100 million Americans were vaccinated, and by the mid-1960s, the easy-to-administer Sabin vaccine became the go-to vaccine. The disease has been eradicated.

1955 - Fast food (Fast Food)

Ray Kroc (1902-1984), despite his thriving milkshake machine business, realized he could make more money making hamburgers. In 1955 he opened the first diner<Макдоналдс>in Des Plaines (Illinois). The Golden Arches have changed the American landscape and turned restaurants into thriving businesses like Kemmons Wilson's hotels. Kroc became a national figure by making money out of nothing.

1956 - Container shipping

Malcolm McLean (1913-2001), a trucking magnate, was dissatisfied with the pace at which cargo was delivered domestically and internationally. Changing the design of the truck trailer in the manner of a railway car and a ship's hold made it possible to speed up the loading procedure. The first cargo ship with containers on board left New Jersey in 1956, starting a new industry that set a precedent for FedEx.

1956 - Drive.

Reynold B. Johnson of IBM developed the IBM 305 RAMAC (Random Access Control Reader). The device consisted of 50 rotating magnetic disks with a diameter of 60 cm, which were located one above the other. The read-write mechanism moved between disks, providing faster access to data than magnetic tape. After the capabilities of the device were demonstrated at the World's Fair in Brussels in 1958, magnetic tape media was abandoned.

1956 - Optical fiber.

Once, when Narinder Kapani was still living in India, the teacher told him that light only propagates by reflected light in a straight line. Kapani took this statement as a challenge. In 1956, he empirically derived the term<волоконная оптика>: A bundle of flexible glass rods coated with a reflective material transmitted the image from one end to the other without distortion and with minimal loss of light. Later to<оптическим волноводам>the laser beam was also assigned. However, the development of high-speed fiber-optic communication took several decades.

1956 - Ampex VRX-1000.

Charles Paulson Ginsburg (1920-1992) joined Ampex in 1952. Video recording devices of that time worked at an unnecessarily high speed - 6 m / s, so the consumption of video film was very high. In his Ampex VRX-1000 device, Ginsburg used recording heads that rotated at high speed, which significantly reduced the speed of the tape mechanism. Ginsburg's invention redefined the future of analog audio and video recorders.

1958 - Implantable electronic pacemaker.

Wilson Greatbatch (1919) accidentally installed the wrong resistor in a heartbeat monitor. He noticed that the impulse signal of the device began to imitate the beating of the heart. After making design changes to the device, he assembled 50 pacemakers in his backyard shed. Ultimately, the device was tested on dogs and humans.

1958 - Laser.

Three people claim to have each invented the laser, a device for amplifying light by stimulated emission of radiation. However, the patent for the invention belongs to Gordon Good. At first, an intense light beam was used for cutting and drilling metals and other materials. In 1964, Kumar Patel of Bell Labs invented the dioxide laser, which enabled surgeons to perform highly complex operations using a photon beam instead of scalpels.

1959 - Triple buckle seat belt.

Niels Bohlin (1920-2002), a Swedish engineer, came to the position of head of the safety department of the Volvo car company from Saab Aircraft, where he was involved in the work on the pilot's ejection device. 14 years before the invention of airbags, he put forward the idea that the use of a seat belt that would hold the upper and lower body of a seated person in place would reduce the number of injuries among drivers and passengers. But it didn't just end with the device: Bolin had to spend years persuading both car manufacturers and the government to make the seatbelt part of the standard equipment in cars. According to representatives of the US Department of Transportation, a seat belt saves the lives of 12,000 Americans every year.

1959 - Integrated circuit

Robert Noyce (1927-1990), an electrical engineer at Fairchild, and Jack S. Kilby (1923), an electrical engineer at Texas Instruments, are equally credited as the masterminds of the information age. Without knowing each other, they solved the problem of minimizing the discrete elements of a computer circuit board and transferring them to a wafer of silicon (Noyce) and germanium (Kilby). This greatly increased the performance of the computer and at the same time reduced its cost. The two companies eventually agreed to share the patents, but Fairchild was the first to mass-produce chips. The integrated circuit is still the key achievement of the electronic era.

1962 - Satellite Telstar 1.

Thanks to this invention, we can call our cousin/brother in Vilnius, who in turn can watch the American Football Cup championship. The first commercial communications satellite was built by John R. Pierce (1910-2002) at Bell Labs. It took $ 3.5 million to put the satellite into orbit. The device was used to transmit television signals from Europe to the United States and transatlantic telephone communications. Pierce left Bell Labs in 1971 for Stanford University, where he taught and wrote science fiction novels under the name of J. J. Capling. He introduced the term<транзистор>but not many people know about it.

1962 - Modem.

Without this device, the Internet is impossible. The device was developed in the 1950s and was intended to improve the quality of data transmission in the US northern air defense zone. With the help of a modem, computers could communicate with each other, while the data was converted into analog signals that were transmitted over telephone lines. The first commercial model of a modem from AT&T, the Bell 103, appeared 40 years ago and transmitted data at a speed of 300 bps. Modern modems transmit data at a rate of one million bits per second.

1964 - Family of mainframe computers.

IBM's System/360 line of computers included a range of commercial computer models that used a single programming language. Thus, clients who were moving up in the company only needed to take the software with them. Gen M. Amdahl, creator of the System/360 line, left IBM in 1970 with the idea of ​​creating a competitive computer model.

1968 - Mouse

At a computer conference in San Francisco, Douglas Engelbart, an expert at Stanford Research Institute, made a strong impression on a crowded audience with his presentation of a prototype Windows program, teleconferencing, and a wooden device he called a mouse. Two decades later, Engelbart's invention has become a familiar PC accessory.

1969 - ATM.

For years, bankers have been talking about automatic cash machines. Donald Wetzel, a former minor league baseball player and IBM sales manager, received credit to develop the first working model of an ATM. VP of product planning for Docutel and later manufacturer of automated baggage handling equipment installed the first ATM at Chemical Bank's Long Island, New York branch. The first ATMs operated offline. Today, about 1.1 million ATMs are interconnected around the globe. Wetzel left Docutel and created companies that sold banking equipment.

1969 - Charge-coupled device

George Smith and Willard Boyle, scientists at Bell Labs, sketched out the idea of ​​a light-sensitive circuit that could record images in just an hour. Ultimately, the mechanism for storing and transmitting video images without the use of videotape was applied to video cameras, and by 1975 Bell Labs produced a broadcast camera. The same operating principle has been applied to fax machines and telescopes.

1969 - Internet

Who knew that the military-industrial complex would become the godmother for online pornography? In order for scientists working in the interests of the US military to communicate with each other via computer, the Arpanet network was created, consisting of two terminals at Stanford and the University of California at Los Angeles. Later, the State Science Foundation, using the same technology, created a network with greater bandwidth, which is the basis of the existence of the Internet to this day. As the commercialization of the network increased, Arpanet merged with the Internet.
1970 - Relational database
Edgar F. Thad Codd, a mathematician and graduate of Oxford University, was engaged in research in the field of computers, in 1970 he developed the concept of a relational database. Earlier databases were organized in a strict order; Codd's idea was that disparate groups of data could be combined using common fields. However, IBM management supported a more primitive system. However, the relational database is now the standard and foundation of Larry Ellison's Oracle fortune.

1970 - CD.

James T. Russell (1931), a physicist at the Battelle Memorial Institute Laboratory (Richland, Washington) and an amateur sound engineer, tried his best to improve the sound of his old vinyl records. He put forward the idea of ​​digitizing music and recording it on a photosensitive disk using light flashes. This would allow the computer to read music without physical contact with the source, which immediately solved the problem of aging and wear. The first CDs were from phonograph records. Russell went on to develop CD-ROM technologies (memory readers), which are now widespread and allow you to create not only music, but also DVD and software discs. Last year, 3 billion recording discs were sold.

1971 - Microprocessor.

Robert Noyce, a member of Fairchild's integrated circuit design program, co-founded the chip manufacturing company Intel. A group of specialists from this company, led by Marsyan (Ted) Hoff (1937), took another step in the miniaturization of computers, fitting the CPU into a single chip. The first microprocessor model, designed for the Japanese calculator company Busicom, could perform 60,000 operations per second, like the 30-ton ENIAC computer built two decades earlier. Try today to give Intel a loan for the development of a microcircuit with the expectation that they will subsequently buy out all the rights (except for the rights to microcircuits for calculators) for $60,000.

1971 - Answering machine.

In the 90s of the 19th century, Valdemar Paulsen patented a prototype of a modern answering machine - a telegraph phone, consisting of a telephone set, steel wire and an electromagnet. However, the commercial model of the device, suitable for sale on the market, appeared after 7 decades. PhoneMate's first answering machine, the Model 400, weighed 4 kg and could store up to 20 messages on a roll of tape. Today, 67% of American households use the lighter and cheaper phones from PhoneMate.

1972 - Computed tomographic image.

For more than 7 decades, doctors have used X-rays to penetrate the human body, but they could only see the skeleton. Godfrey Hounsfeld and Allan Cormack, working separately, created a method in which crystals were used instead of X-ray film, a camera rotated around a person, and a computer compared the resulting multiple images. As a result, it was possible to obtain a detailed image of the internal organs of the human body. Shortly thereafter, chemistry professor Paul Lauterber published a paper in which he proposed imaging using nuclear magnetic resonance, which led to the development of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, which makes it possible to obtain three-dimensional images of internal organs.

1972 - Ethernet technology.

Robert Metcalfe, of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, was responsible for setting up a single, high-speed network. His term (<стандарт локальных сетей>) means a system of wires and chips that allow computer systems to connect to each other at a local level without drowning each other out. His real achievement is Xerox's technology collaboration with Digital Equipment and Intel, which has made Ethernet technology the industry standard and is now the most widely used technology for LANs. In 1979, Metcalfe founded 3Com to develop Ethernet technology.

1972 - UNIX/C operating system.

The first operating system written in C that is still in use around the world. Bell Labs researchers Dennis Ritchie (1941) and Kenneth Thompson (1943) developed a system based on simple discrete commands that was used in multitasking devices and supported by users: one user could run a spell check while another was creating a document. Currently, C programming exists in various forms and implementations. Today, UNIX continues to be used to control most Internet servers and major economies.

1972 - Video games.

Nolan Bushnell (1943) came up with another way to keep the youth busy: he created Pong, a rough electronic tennis game, of which a home version was released later. Bushnell's Atari game became the top seller in the video game market, but was ultimately outclassed by the game<Пиццерия>. Now Sony and Microsoft have monopolized the industry that Bushnell started, and their US revenues exceed those of the film industry.

1974 - Catalytic afterburner.

After the U.S. Congress passed the Air Pollution Control Act (1970), Corning scientists Rodney Bagley, Irwin Lachman, and Ronald Lewis began developing an idea that allowed automakers to reduce emissions. As a result, scientists have created a ceramic honeycomb coating that is used in the exhaust system of a car and converts 95% of pollutants into water vapor and carbon dioxide.

1976 - Recombinant DNA.

Robert Swanson, a 29-year-old entrepreneur, and Herbert Boyer, a professor at the University of California (San Francisco), have teamed up to commercialize Boyer's major breakthrough in "recombinant DNA" - technology - creating combinations of DNA molecules that can bring great benefits to humanity, like insulin for diabetics, growth hormones for children, and antibodies for cancer patients. The two members founded the first biotech company, Genentech. The company rose to prominence in 1980 with $35 million in profits. Swanson died in 1999. Today, the company has a market value of $17 billion and sales of $2.2 billion.

1976 - Personal computer.

Apple co-founders Steven P. Jobs (1955) and Steven Wozniak (1950) made the PC as marketable as sports cars, ushering in the PC era. But because the company has never really taken the business market seriously, its success has been much more modest than that of its larger competitors, which have always embraced Apple's design and marketing innovations. Wozniak resigned in 1985. In the same year, Jobs was forced to leave the company, but in 1997 he was invited to lead the work on the transformation of the company.

1977 - Cash management accounts.

After meeting with members of the Stanford Research Institute, Thomas Christie, Chief Accountant<Мерил Линч>, proposed the idea of ​​a single account, which provided for the issuance of a checkbook, foreign exchange services, a Visa credit card and brokerage services. The idea remained without development, and the company<Мерил>almost forgot about her. Ultimately, the idea spread widely, inspiring those who dreamed of creating megabanks.

1979 - Spreadsheet

Daniel Bricklin (1951) and Bob Frankston (1949) invented the VisiCalc computer program, which freed accountants and other professionals from hours of paperwork by making it easier to record financial data and speed up comparative analysis. The VisiCalc program became in some way a contribution to the computerization process, as it showed the real possibilities of using a PC. Due to legal problems, VisiCalc was sold to Lotus, which used a spreadsheet in version 1-2-3 of the program.

1984 - Liquid crystal display.

Liquid crystals, which exist between solid and liquid states, were discovered by the Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888. After 80 years, two independent groups of scientists from RCA Labs and Kent (Utah) created the first liquid crystal display based on the generalization of the results of exposure to crystals by electric charges. At first, liquid crystal displays were used in watches. By 1984, it was possible to improve the resolution of liquid crystals, which made it possible to transmit images, and not just text, and laptops and portable computers appeared.

1987 - Mevacor ("Mevacor").

It took Merck scientists more than 35 years to create Mevacor, a cholesterol-lowering drug. The tablet blocks the enzyme that is responsible for the formation of mevalonic acid, the acid does not affect the liver, and cholesterol is not produced. Led by P. Roy Vagelos, CEO of Merck, the scientists created Zocor, a second-generation drug that proved that taking all cholesterol-lowering drugs reduced the risk of heart attack. In 1995, the US Food and Drug Administration approved Zocor as a heart attack prevention drug, which greatly increased demand for the drug from people who had already suffered a heart attack.

1991 - World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee, a software consultant, developed the Enquire program, which provided a documented connection of computers around the world, making cyberspace travel a reality. In 1993, Marc Andreessen created the Mosaic program, which allowed you to view images and text. Two years later, Netscape's search engine ushered in the era of online advertising.

1995 - Internet business.

Enticed by a new form of business, Jeffrey Bezos began selling books online at Amazon.com, and Pierre Omidiar launched Ebay, an online marketplace. Hundreds of other entrepreneurs followed suit, selling everything from bicycles to chewing gum.

2000 - Automated sequencer.

Using 300 high-speed DNA sequencing devices, genetics guru J. Craig Venter revolutionized the scientific world: his company Celera Genomics, in just over two years, on a budget of $270 million, managed to decipher the complete human genetic code. Studying genetic differences among people will allow scientists to more effectively diagnose and ultimately cure diabetes and schizophrenia.

Every year or decade there are more and more scientists and inventors who give us new discoveries and inventions in various fields. But there are inventions that, once invented, change our way of life in the most enormous way, moving us forward on the path of progress. Here are just ten great inventions that have changed the world we live in.

List of inventions:

1. Nails

Inventor: unknown

Without nails, our civilization would surely collapse. It is difficult to establish the exact date of the appearance of nails. Now the approximate date of the creation of nails is in the Bronze Age. That is, it is obvious that nails could not have appeared before people learned how to cast and form metal. Previously, wooden structures had to be built using more complex technologies, using complex geometric structures. Now the construction process has become much easier.

Until the 1790s and early 1800s, iron nails were made by hand. The blacksmith would heat a square iron bar and then beat it on four sides to create the sharp end of the nail. Machines for making nails appeared between the 1790s and the early 1800s. Nail technology continued to evolve; After Henry Bessemer developed the process to mass-produce steel from iron, the iron nails of yesteryear gradually fell out of favor, and by 1886, 10% of nails in the US were made from mild steel wire (according to the University of Vermont). By 1913, 90% of the nails produced in the US were made from steel wire.

2. Wheel

Inventor: unknown

The idea of ​​a symmetrical component moving in a circular motion along an axis existed in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and Europe separately at different time periods. Thus, it is impossible to establish who and where exactly invented the wheel, but this great invention appeared in 3500 BC and became one of the most important inventions of mankind. The wheel facilitated work in the areas of agriculture and transportation, and also became the basis for other inventions, ranging from carriages to clocks.

3. Printing press

Johannes Gutenberg invented the manual printing press in 1450. By 1500 twenty million books had been printed in Western Europe. In the 19th century, a modification was made, and the iron parts replaced the wood ones, which speeded up the printing process. The cultural and industrial revolution in Europe would not have been possible were it not for the speed with which the printing press made it possible to distribute documents, books and newspapers to a wide audience. The printing press allowed the development of the press, and also gave people the opportunity to educate themselves. The political sphere would also be unthinkable without millions of copies of leaflets and posters. What can we say about the state apparatus with its endless number of forms? All in all, a truly great invention.

4. Steam engine

Inventor Story by: James Watt

Although the first version of the steam engine dates back to the 3rd century AD, it was not until the early 19th century with the advent of the industrial age that the modern form of the internal combustion engine emerged. It took decades of design, after James Watt made the first drawings, according to which the combustion of fuel releases high-temperature gas and, as it expands, puts pressure on the piston and moves it. This phenomenal invention played a decisive role in the invention of other mechanisms such as automobiles and airplanes that changed the face of the planet we live on.

5. Bulb

Inventor: Thomas Alva Edison

The invention of the light bulb was developed during the 1800s by Thomas Edison; he is credited with the title of the main inventor of a lamp that could burn for 1500 hours without burning out (invented in 1879). The idea of ​​the light bulb itself does not belong to Edison and was expressed by many people, but it was he who managed to choose the right materials so that the light bulb burned for a long time and became cheaper than candles.

6. Penicillin

Inventor: Alexander Fleming

Penicillin was accidentally discovered in a petri dish by Alexander Fleming in 1928. The drug penicillin is a group of antibiotics that treats several infections in humans without harming them. Penicillin was mass-produced during World War II to rid military personnel of STDs and is still used as the standard antibiotic against infections. It was one of the most famous discoveries made in the field of medicine. Alexander Fleming received the Nobel Prize in 1945, and newspapers of the time wrote:

"To defeat fascism and liberate France, he made more whole divisions"

7. Phone

Inventor: Antonio Meucci

For a long time it was believed that Alexander Bell was the discoverer of the telephone, but in 2002 the US Congress decided that Antonio Meucci had the right to primacy in the invention of the telephone. In 1860 (16 years earlier than Graham Bell), Antonio Meucci demonstrated an apparatus that could transmit voice over wires. Antonio called his invention Telektrofon and applied for a patent in 1871. This set the stage for one of the most revolutionary inventions that almost everyone on our planet has in their pockets and on their desks. The telephone, which later also developed as a mobile phone, has had a vital impact on mankind, especially in the areas of business and communication. The expansion of audible speech from inside one room to the whole world is a feat unparalleled to this day.

8. Television

Zworykin with an iconoscope

Inventor: Rosing Boris Lvovich and his students Zworykin Vladimir Konstantinovich and Kataev Semyon Isidorovich (not recognized as a discoverer), as well as Philon Farnsworth

Although the invention of television cannot be attributed to one person, most people acknowledge that the invention of modern television was the merit of two people: Vladimir Kosma Zworykin (1923) and Philo Farnsworth (1927). It should be noted here that in the USSR Kataev Semyon Isidorovich was engaged in the development of a TV using parallel technology, and Rosing described the first experiments and principles of operation of electric television at all at the beginning of the 20th century. Television was also one of the great inventions that has evolved from mechanical to electronic, from black and white to color, from analog to digital, from primitive models without a remote control to intelligent, and now all to 3D versions and small home theaters. People usually spend about 4-8 hours a day watching TV, and this has greatly affected family and social life, as well as changed our culture beyond recognition.

9. Computer

Inventor: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and others.

The principle of the modern computer was first mentioned by Alan Turing and later the first mechanical computer was invented in the early 19th century. This invention has really done amazing things in more areas of life, including the philosophy and culture of human society. The computer has helped launch high-speed military aircraft, put spacecraft into orbit, control medical equipment, create visual images, store vast amounts of information, and improve the functioning of cars, telephones, and power plants.

10. Internet and World Wide Web

Map of the entire computer network for 2016

Inventor: Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee

The Internet was first developed in 1973 by Vinton Cerf with the support of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Its original use was to provide a communications network to research laboratories and universities in the United States and to expand overtime. This invention (along with the World Wide Web) was the main revolutionary invention of the 20th century. In 1996, over 25 million computers were connected via the Internet in 180 countries, and now we even had to switch to IPv6 to increase the number of IP addresses, since IPv4 addresses were completely exhausted, and there were about 4.22 billion of them.

The World Wide Web, as we know, was first predicted by Arthur C. Clarke. However, the invention was made 19 years later in 1989 by CERN employee Tom Berners Lee. The web has changed the way we think about various areas, including education, music, finance, reading, medicine, language, etc. The web is potentially superior all the great inventions of the world.