I love the Nintendo Switch. It’s one of my favorite pieces of technology I own, and is a technological marvel. The screen, the size, the portability, switching seamlessly between handheld and docked modes, the controller pairings.
But this is neither an ad, nor even a blog post about the Nintendo Switch. This is about humanity’s greatest inventions, and as much as I love it, the Nintendo Switch doesn’t even crack to the top 501, especially if you look at all the components that make it happen. The battery, the transistor, electronics, the computer!
I’ve put a lot of thought into this, and have certainly forgotten (or intentionally omitted!) some of your favorites. It’s impossible to see the water you’re swimming in. But near as I can reckon, here are the best 5 things we’ve created as a special
5. Indoor Plumbing
Water on demand? Being able to use the bathroom without having to venture out into the cold or heat? Removing the smell! I recognize that this captures dozens of smaller innovations (not the least of which is the p-trap), but this is a communal effort within living history that dramatically improved life for all who have it.
4. Written Language
The ability to pass things on exactly as they are, to record thoughts and ideas, to connect the past and future. Written language is culture, preservation, and clarity of communication. The fact that we have oral stories passed down for generations is nothing short of remarkable, but being able to record it verbatim2 is a game-changer in story creation and preservation. And we’re all made out of stories.
3. Electricity
Lighting alone increased the amount of work[^3] a person could do by 30%. No longer were days controlled entirely by the sun, no longer were we beholden to the weather and daylight to set our schedules and live our lives. And oh how we’ve built atop it! Refrigeration deserves its own entry on the longer form of this list3, and that functions entirely upon electricity.4,5
2. Glasses
We have conquered physics, at least one aspect of it. I have terrible vision. Without glasses, my field of view looks somewhere between an NES game and a Georges Seurat painting. Glasses have opened the world to those who in history would be greatly secluded from it. I fear I’m underselling it here — restoring sight is a classic miracle. Right from the miracle textbook! Honorable mention to contacts for the miniaturization technology, but full credit to the OG.
1. Agriculture
Thousands6 of scholars sigh, groan, and tear at their teeth and hair as I lump dozens of technologies into one broad bucket. This is nothing new; you should see me move house! Agriculture let us establish communities (which eventually became cities). It let us create permanent caves with flowers and fruits, to have community and not mammoth-chase all day. It allowed for Dog, and horse and oxen7, and it dramatically and permanently changed the human experience for the better. When people ask us what separates us from the animals, some say culture, others say tool use. Both are wrong. It’s agriculture8.
I know I’m snubbing the internet, the computer, and even the humble transistor here. Those have all had untold impact on the world around us. But sticking to the greats, I just don’t think I can put them above giving sight to the blurry-eyed, the star-gazers, and the elderly, or the ability to use the bathroom without leaving the comfort of your home or dealing with chamber pots. Say what you will about cars, they’ve reduced inbreeding, opened up the world, and have absolutely transformed the world (not always for the better!)
This list is heavily biased, but I can defend it (and will in the comments, until I decide I care not to). Disagree? Make your own.
An earlier draft of this game 3 of the top 5 spots to “things needed to write things down (paper, pencil, written language)”. In recognition of the double standard I was applying to plumbing (sewer systems! Valves! Potable water treatment! Sewage sanitation! Pipes! Pressure systems and water towers!), I relented and reorganized the list. All the same, our society is founded on the technologies that let us share our ideas. Writing is a form of immortality, one we’ve both expanded upon and forgotten how to marvel at.
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If I was going to put a single electronic device on here, it would be the lamp. If I was going to put two, it would be the lamp and the smartphone, the most successful consumer device of all time. I was going to remark about the touch screen here, and then I remembered that the Switch has one as well. Computers and alarm clocks may also go above the Switch, solely because of some of the hand-wavey combining of other technology I’m doing. If P-trap isn’t its own entry, clock should be able to be wrapped into “every device with a computer”. But the reason I did a top 5 and not a top 50 is to avoid these fiddly distinctions! ↩
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As a storyteller, I sometimes tweak my stories in their pacing or flow to capitalize on the audience at hand. It’s an incredible trick of the medium that you can’t do with a canonical, written version (though it doesn’t stop me from trying — I’ll regularly ad lib or embellish words on a page when reading them aloud). ↩
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Which again, I have no intent to make. ↩
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I recognize that there are refrigerators that do not use electricity, and that refrigeration predates electricity. I am confident you understand what I am trying to say here. ↩
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As are computers and a hundred other inventions I’ve snubbed. ↩
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Extrapolating from the size of my audience, statistically two. ↩
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Saddle and yoke are certainly within the top 25. ↩
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Fear not pedants, I have beaten you to the inevitable (frantically googling “can animals do agriculture” and clicking on the first reddit post that confidently states I’m wrong. Here’s an archived BBC article about fish, crab, and ants that farm, as well as ants that herd livestock(!) If you still want to argue this point, we can cut to the end where I admit that ants are humans too. ↩