5 Great Inventions That Changed The World | VisualWorld

 5 Great Inventions That Changed The      World | VisualWorld

If you run your eyes down the list of great inventions that changed the world, you will be amazed that many everyday items are lot older than you thought they were.

                       

                                              1.  SHOE

  Native Americans insulate human feet from the ground.

 

From their earliest use, simply as a protective covering for the feet, to the vast fashion industry producing them today, shoes have been essential items for humans. As with any invention from antiquity, it is uncertain when shoes were first worn, and archeological evidence has continued to complicate the issue. The oldest shoes in existence are from around 7000B.C.E  and  were discovered in America.

The earliest shoes appear to have been constructed variously from rope, leaves, and animal skins. As these are all highly perishable materials, archeological examples are rare, but some argue that there is other evidence pointing to shoe use from up to 40,000 years ago. Archeologists examining ancient bones have noticed a reduction in the size and strength of toe bones during this period, which they attribute to the feet being covered. However, this conclusion is far from proved.

The original designs for most shoes is similar to that of the modern sandal, and consisted of a protective sole held onto the foot by bonds or straps.

 

 

2. CRANE

“Archimedes had stated that given the force, any given     weight might be moved…”

 

The extent to which human beings extend their natural capabilities through the use of machines is something that distinguishes us from other members of the animal kingdom. Cranes are an example of this; the ability to raise and maneuver weights vastly greater than those that people could lift and move unaided has played a defining role in the development of human society.

The earliest cranes have been dated to approximately 550 B.C.E., although there are Greek architectural constructions still in existence that predate this by several hundred years, and that undoubtedly would have required some sort of supporting pulley mechanism.

Cranes continued to be used extensively in ancient Rome, where a “treadmill crane” was used to help in building projects. In reconstructions, single blocks of stone weighing as much as 100 tons have been lifted considerable heights above the ground using this technology. Cranes fell out of use for a while, only to reappear in the late Middle Ages. They have continued to see heavy usage through to the present day.

 

3. PRINTING PRESS

“It shall scater the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light …to shine amongst men.”

 

Writing was an important step in the advancement of civilization, but few books were produced and they reached a limited number of people. It was only when the printing press was developed that knowledge and ideas were spread more widely.

In 1450 Johannes Gutenberg(circa 1400-1468), a German printer, developed a technique where letters produced from molds of metal alloy were arranged into words, then locked together  using a template to produce a whole page of typeface. This was sufficiently robust to print many hundreds of identical pages and hence the production of books became widespread, enabling more people to learn to read and increasing the demand for reading material.

Gutenberg’s press would have had limited usefulness without appropriate inks. Before his time, simpler printing methods made use of water-based inks, and Gutenberg himself introduce more robust oil-based inks, including colored inks that were printed experimentally in some copies of his bible.

 

4. PRESSURE  COOKER

“He [Papin] doth not think …that any thing better can be made for such things, as must be stew’d…”

There is a story that when French scientist and inventor Denis Papin (1647-1712) first demonstrated his wonderfully named “digester” to London’s Royal Society in 1679, the device exploded. So another invention swiftly came into begin: Papin’s safety value, which went on to have other applications.

By 1682, a refined version of the steam digester proved excellent at cooking food and making nutritious bones soft and tasty. Papin was an interesting character of diverse scientific intrests. Trained in medicine as a young man, he had long been interested in food preservation. His tightly sealed digester vessel showed how atmospheric pressure affected boiling points. Under high pressure, water in the vessel produced steam the cooked food quickly at temperatures far higher than those possible in saucepan. The cooked food was meltingly soft, its nutrients and flavor  were preserved, and the cooker used little fuel.

Papin went on to experiment with similar principles in various important early steam-engine prototypes that he developed. His digester became the modern pressure cooker, which still works very much to his template.

5. NEWSPAPER

“ A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not”

 

In 1605 Johann Carolus (1575-1634) published the first printed issue of Relation aller Furnemmen und gedenckwurdigen Historien  in Strasbourg, France, thereby giving the world its first newspaper.

Initially Carolus copied his newsletters by hand and sold them to rich subscribers. But in order to make his publication affordable to more people, and thus increase his revenue, he bought a printing shop in 1604. Despite his modern approach, Relation did not survive, so today the Dutch daily Haarlems Dagblad (after merging with the Oprechte Haarlemsche Courant from 1656) is the world’s oldest existing newspaper.

The internet now poses a danger to many newspapers, more than a billion people worldwide still read a daily newspaper in print every day.