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Fire -

The natural phenomenon that is fire changed the course of human evolution. The oldest unequivocal evidence of the earliest control of fire dates as far back as 400,000 years, to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. But there is evidence to suggest controlled use of fire by our ancestors, Home erectus, began earlier, around one million years ago.

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The wheel -

The oldest known wheel is from Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), created around 3500 BCE by the Sumerian people for use in shaping pottery. This was 300 years or so before somebody inserted rotating axles into solid discs of wood to invent the chariot.

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The compass -

The Chinese are credited with inventing the first crude compass, sometime around 200 BCE. It was made of lodestone, a naturally magnetized stone of iron. It wasn't until the 11th century that they developed a magnetic compass that could be used for navigation.

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The automobile -

French engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot (1725–1804) is credited with inventing the first working self-propelled mechanical land vehicle, the fardier à vapeur, in 1769. This was the world's first automobile.

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The steam engine -

The world's first commercially used steam-powered device, a steam pump, was invented by British engineer Thomas Savery (c. 1650–1715) in 1698. It was used for pumping flood water from mines.

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Concrete -

The precursor to concrete was invented in about 1300 BCE as damp burned limestone used by laborers in the Middle East that when coated to the outsides of their pounded-clay fortresses and home walls reacted chemically with gases in the air to form a hard, protective surface. The ancient Egyptians and later the Roman used early forms of concrete as a mortar in their construction projects. One of the most impressive examples of its use is found in Rome: the roof of the pantheon was built using granite and concrete to make it the best-preserved monument from antiquity.

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Gasoline -

Originating in the oil fields of Pennsylvania in 1859, gasoline, a fuel derivative of petroleum, was initially discarded as a byproduct after the distillation of oil to produce kerosene. It wasn't until 1887 when Carl Benz developed a gasoline-powered automobile that the byproduct was recognized as a valuable fuel.

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The railroad -

British mining engineer Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) is responsible for inventing the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive, which also became the first-ever locomotive to haul a train, an event that took place on a tramway in Wales on February 21, 1804. Pictured is Trevithick's original blueprint.

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The airplane -

On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright famously achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled flight. It marked the beginning of the pioneer era of aviation.

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The lightbulb -

A genuine lightbulb moment was achieved on January 27, 1880 when Thomas Edison (1847–1931) patented his electric lamp.

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The electric battery -

In 1799, Italian physicist and chemist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) announced his voltaic pile⁠—the world's first practical battery. The volt unit is named in his honor.

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The printing press -

The advent of the printing press helped information travel around the globe. It was invented in Germany, around 1440, by goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1400– 1468).

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The telegraph machine -

Samuel Morse (1791–1872) led the way in developing the telegraph, a device that sent electric signals across wires. He also invented Morse code, an alphabet or code in which letters are represented by combinations of long and short light or sound signals. Pictured is the machine used to send the first telegraph messaged from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore on May 24, 1844.

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Steel -

The Chinese were the first to work cast iron, around 500 BCE. They later created steel by melting together wrought iron with cast iron. But it was during the Industrial Revolution that British engineer Henry Bessemer (1813–1898) developed a process that blasted air through molten pig iron to create carbon-free, pure iron in 1856.

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The transistor -

Pictured is a replica of the first working transistor invented in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Laboratories in the United States. The transistor is an essential component in nearly every modern electronic gadget.

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The telephone -

It was over this instrument (pictured) that on March 10, 1876 the first "Hello" sounded, or more specifically when Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922) spoke the sentence, "Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you." Bell was speaking to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, using his invention, a telephone transmitter. It was the first phone call made in history.

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Pasteurization -

French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) pioneered the world's understanding of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation, and pasteurization. His research in the 1860s demonstrated that thermal processing would deactivate unwanted and potentially harmful microorganisms, a procedure used widely today in the dairy industry and other food processing industries to achieve food preservation and food safety.

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Antibiotics -

A number of scientists can lay claim for advancing the use of antibiotics, including Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the late 1800s. But it is the discovery by Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming (1881–1955) of penicillin in 1928— the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance—that remains one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine.

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The X-ray -

A huge advance in medicine was made by German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen after he invented the X-ray in 1895. The image shows the hand of his wife, Anna, with ring visible, in what is considered one of the first radiograph images ever produced.

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The refrigerator -

Scottish inventor James Harrison (1816–1893) is regarded as a pioneer in the field of mechanical refrigeration, though the first patent was issued to American inventor Albert T. Marshall, in 1899. The first widespread refrigerator was the General Electric "Monitor-Top" refrigerator of 1927. Pictured here is a model from 1934. The product offered the world new ways to preserve food, medicines, and other perishable substances.

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The photograph -

One of the earliest surviving camera photographs is this image taken in 1827 by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833). With it, Niépce effectively invented photography.

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The banknote -

The first known banknote was developed in China during the Tang and Song dynasties, starting in the 7th century. This also makes China the first country in the world to use paper money.

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Nails -

When exactly the nail was invented is unclear. Archaeologists have unearthed bronze nails in Egypt dating back to around 3400 BCE. The use of hand-wrought nails was commonplace until the 1790s and early 1800s, after which they were mass produced as steel wire nails.

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Hand tools -

The evolution of hand tools can be traced back to the Stone Age. During the Iron Age, iron replaced bronze, and tools became even stronger and more durable. The Romans refined theirs to shape what is similar to those being produced today. Pictured is a prehistoric flint sickle used in harvesting grain.

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Gunpowder -

The invention of gunpowder by Tang dynasty Chinese alchemists around 850 CE led to military applications in China and eventually around the world. Probably used initially in fireworks, the explosive compound eventually made its way into firearms, and a whole new era of warfare was developed.

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Television -

On January 26, 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird (1888–1946) successfully demonstrated his "televisor" invention to members of London's Royal Institution and a reporter from the Times newspaper. The image shown is the first known photograph of a moving image produced by what would become known as a television.

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The pill -

The invention of the contraceptive pill marked one of the most significant medical advances of the 20th century. The pill, a combination of the hormones estrogen and progestin, was developed in the US in the 1950s by the American biologist Gregory Pincus (1903–1967). Other names associated with this revolutionary development include Margaret Sanger, Carl Djerassi, and Min Chueh Chang.

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The computer -

British mathematician and mechanical engineer Charles Babbage (1791–1871) can lay claim for inventing the first mechanical computer in the 1820s. But equal kudos goes to Alan Turing, who designed and built the code-busting Colossus, the world's first electronic programmable computer, at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire in 1943.

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The credit card -

The idea of credit has been around for a long time. In 1946, a Brooklyn banker named John Biggins put forward the idea of a using a plastic card to obtain credit. By 1950, Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara, founders of Diners Club, advanced the concept. By 1958, American Express and Visa had introduced their own credit cards.

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The ATM -

Various names are associated with the invention of the ATM (Automatic Teller Machine). But it is Armenian-American entrepreneur Luther George Simjian (1905–1997) that most people credit with making cash deposits and withdrawals through a hole in the wall a seamless transaction.

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The Internet -

What we know today as the Internet was being developed in the United States as early as the 1950s. There is no single inventor of the Net, rather a team of computer scientists, notably Vinton Cerf and Robert Khan. The first workable prototype of the Internet arrived in the late 1960s, with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network.

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Email -

The advent of the Internet made possible the development of email. The first was sent in 1971. Incidentally, a computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson (1941–2016) is credited with choosing to use the @ symbol to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since.

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The World Wide Web -

One of the single most influential inventions of the modern age is the World Wide Web. The father of the Web is English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who proposed his revolutionary idea in 1989.

Sources: (History) (Smithsonian Magazine) (National Geographic) (New World Encyclopedia) (Million Mile Secrets)

See also: How the world worked before the World Wide Web

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