181–190 of 583 posts
The modern idea of a library catalog came around in the early 1800s, and probably accelerated the pace of knowledge transfer and acquisition quite a bit. In its original form, index cards, it was ubiquitous for almost 200 years before being replaced by computerized systems. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog
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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.
For anyone confused as to why: We (not just people but life on Earth) are mostly made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen was something of a bottleneck because it's so much less ubiquitous than the other three, which are three of the four most common elements in the universe.
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My dad still uses the family (his dad's) rice cooker from the mid 1950s, so they aren't that complicated, they're basically a heater and thermal cutoff PSA for anyone who doesn't: Wash your fucking rice
-> Wash your fucking rice What? Sure, if you want to remove some of the starch, but what if you don't? I don't really know why you should if you don't want to, unless it was dirty, but rice today comes pretty clean of debris and bugs. Plus, it's going to be cooked, so no problem there.
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
Ah, the problem is that modern inventions are really embedded in a practice and theory. The invention may be simple but the practice and theory are not. So I would put up soap as a contender. Simple, saves hundreds of thousands of life, prevents diseases and so forth. But soap, as an invention, is embedded in the modern practice of washing, which requires our modern knowledge of germs and diseases, as well as our mod…
In terms of profound impact on modernity, the metal screw-cutting lathe.
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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.
The process for making ammonia from air (nitrogen) and hydrogen. Allowed a huge increase in agricultural output that saved a few billion people from starvation. Haber-Bosch process.
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.
Window screens and indoor plumbing are the 2 greatest improvements for our daily lives.
Since OP didn’t provide reasons, I will. Window screens: malaria prevention. Indoor plumbing: make sanitation so convenient that you don’t have any reasons not to use it (vs throwing the old night bucket outta the window). Obviously city scale sanitation == no dysentery, cholera...etc.
I was impressed with the sophistication of the one present in Glanum, a small (but wealthy) Roman provincial town abandoned in the 2nd century. The sewer system runs underneath the main street: baths, villas, and the abatoir connect to it.
To say nothing of the ones in major cities of the time.
"simple" is a strong requirement. I don't know how to make anything of most things proposed!!! If we were thrown to the Earth 10000 years ago, we would be able to bootstrap our current tech in less than a century?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge
[edit] - actually it's answering a slightly different question I guess - how to reboot after a cataclysm, but the path is more-or-less the same I think :)