251–260 of 583 posts
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
Earplugs! Improved sleep quality can have huge health benefits and the world is noisier than ever. ...might have been invented before 1700 though.
I worked for almost 15 years in Audiology and saw many people with issues in part from sleeping with ear plugs.
Most could not sleep without earplugs even in very quiet situations, and some even developed hyperacusis.
For the prevention of hearing-loss due to noise, they have been excellent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They cause inner ear bacteria to quintuple overnight, shouldn't be a problem with a healthy immune system, but still
I would imagine that the improvement to sleep quality outweighs any possible ear bacteria problems, at least in otherwise healthy people sleeping in noisy locations. I also question the “quadruple” claim, a quick internet search doesn’t back that up.
Washing Machine. Recent iterations are more complex( repair engineer could plug into ours and diagnose all sorts of things, including checking results of previous washes), however the principle behind it isn't that complex. It has made life easier for so many households.
An excellent talk on its affects by the late Hans Rosling https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_mac...
Refrigeration, particularly because it has revolutionized our food infrastructure.
Someone didn’t think of putting wheels on luggage until relatively recently, in 1987. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/business/05road.html
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…
Post-it Notes
Many of the inventions I see listed here rely on some form of electricity.
Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times. Materially ... Well, "yourself" precludes anything computerized, unless you mean "program". It also precludes a huge range of materials science advances. Technically, you can make steel and concrete yourself with enough real-world minecrafting…
Hand washing isn't modern by any stretch of the imagination. Promoting it is modern, though.