221–230 of 583 posts
It's not as simple as you'd like, but the little known Bosch-Haber process, which produces ammonia for farming, staved off mass famines and may be why many readers of HN are alive today.
Sewers - literally prevents plagues
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm having trouble seeing how this even makes the top 100 list of "most important".
12 years ago we still relayed on notebooks and pens for everything. Then smartphones appear and life changed forever. And also devices like clocks, calculators, cameras, gps, planners, maps, agendas, erasers and liquid paper become redundant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Liquid soaps are a poor choice from an environmental/cost standpoint. Most of the soap goes down the drain and is wasted. Bar soap stays on your hands and last many times longer.
That may be the case now, but liquid soaps revolutionized laundry when they came to be. Washing clothes with bar soap is a royal pain. Powdered laundry detergents really didn't start to catch on until the 1940's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_detergent Also, washing machines didn't really start to catch on until the mid 1940's, prior to that it was still pretty much scrub boards. Scrub boards are bad enough wi…
> A twistlock and corner casting together form a standardized rotating connector for securing shipping containers. The primary uses are for locking a container into place on a container ship, semi-trailer truck or railway container train, and for lifting of the containers by container cranes and sidelifters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistlock
Actually the shipping container itself is pretty much high up there I guess. Pretty revolutionary for a box.
[1] - https://g.co/kgs/vCK3nB
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The assertion that "we just didn't think of it" is not even remotely correct. The late transition to the consumer market and the broad expansion in industry in the last 20 years has far more to do with the expiration of patents in the early 2000's than anything else. 3D printing for rapid prototyping has been around for decades.
I was not aware of that. How depressing. Still, I think some of my point can still be salvaged - this implies that it was patented in the early 80s, which by my reckoning is still well after it became possible.
In undergrad in 2001 I had a professor that had a 3D printed airplane model with a wingspan of ~5" that he thought was so damn cool (it was some now-defunct military airplane he helped design or something). He was also very fond of pointing out that the model cost his former employer $500 to print, so we better handle it with care. And rightfully so, because if we treated it like a toy it would have fallen apart in under a semester. Compared to what I print today using my MK3s for, I dunno, 50 cents, his $500 printed airplane was a piece of crap.
Point is there have been a lot of technological advances, patents aside, that have made 3D printers viable for anything outside of extremely high-value rapid prototyping / mold forming / other narrow niche applications in the last 20 years.
The humble ball point pen. People forget how cumbersome and/or expensive it was to write before cheap ball point pens became a thing. You had to use fountain pens. The cheap ones leaked and were an absolute mess to carry around. The ones that didn't leak were expensive. I can now buy more pens for $100 than I'll ever use in years and just stash them everywhere I want
I just checked and you can get a pack of 60 Bic Ballpoint pens for $4.50.
I’d like to recommend James Burke’s series “Connections”[1] and “The Day the Universe Changed”[2] from the late 70s early 80s. He was a bbc journalist covering NASA and doing science communication and one of his particular fascinations (and mine, having grown up with his work) is the cumulative effect of ideas and technology shape not only how we interact with the modern world, but how we perceive it. [1] https://m.i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically there would be ~2 times less people on Earth and over half of them would work in farming if not for this one invention.
Would the state of the Earth be better or worse if not for this development?
Choose your poison :) Both result in wars and death of millions of people.