Soldato
Major Inventions
- Thread starter Tesla
- Start date
Soldato
Self driving cars
The majority of the internet and computer technology in general
Segways
Drones
Graphene
Artificial hearts and other organs
Lab grown meat
eReaders
Gene editing
Solid State Storage
The majority of the internet and computer technology in general
Segways
Drones
Graphene
Artificial hearts and other organs
Lab grown meat
eReaders
Gene editing
Solid State Storage
Associate
Pen drives ......used to burn so much stuff to cd....i haven't bought a blank cd for at least 10 years
depends what you count as inventions over iterations.
But there's been absolutely loads
batteries are now good enough for electric cars and bikes
automonus driving
CRISPER (the dna slicing tool thingy mabob)
resuable rockets which will have a drastic effect on the world once they ramp up.
the intercooler by reaction engines
tablet & smart phones
drones
edit - why a thread revival from over 10 years ago just to say wifi and 4g.
But there's been absolutely loads
batteries are now good enough for electric cars and bikes
automonus driving
CRISPER (the dna slicing tool thingy mabob)
resuable rockets which will have a drastic effect on the world once they ramp up.
the intercooler by reaction engines
tablet & smart phones
drones
edit - why a thread revival from over 10 years ago just to say wifi and 4g.
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laser disk pre-dated the CD.
Here's an example. The company I work at has invented mid air haptic feedback using ultrasound (uses the vibration to create physical feedback for virtual objects). That's pretty cool stuff and I think counts as an invention by the OP's definition. Potentially even world changing (eg in cars where touch screens can distract drivers, you would now be able to feel the buttons on a touch screen while keeping your eyes on the road).
Caporegime
I think carbon fibre - although it was in use more than 20 years ago but manufacturing methods have now allowed it to become mainstream. It's fantastic stuff.
MRI was invented in the 1970's not the last 20 years.
Soldato
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2012
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think the issue is many "inventions" have their roots in much older ideas, or are older than people would think but have only now just become available.
take 3d printing, there's not really anything special about it except for the refinement of the technology allowing it to actually be usable on a wide scale.
same thing with modern cad systems, cad's been around longer than 20 years but it's really taken hold and become a common occurrence tool now.
take 3d printing, there's not really anything special about it except for the refinement of the technology allowing it to actually be usable on a wide scale.
same thing with modern cad systems, cad's been around longer than 20 years but it's really taken hold and become a common occurrence tool now.
Associate
The first computer design is widely accepted to that of Charles Babbage, and the first computer program is widely recognized to be that written by Ada Lovelace for it. Babbage's design wasn't made until 1991.
Then there were all the huge electronic computer systems of the 20th Century, none of which had a mass market potential.
The technology we enjoy as computers probably starts with the development of the microprocessor, but even that is useless without the supporting components that go together to make a computer.
Man of Honour
I think there are some more important inventions than the wheel:
Knapping. Stone tools were so important that they were a significant evolutionary pressure. They didn't just change society, they changed people.
Farming. Probably the biggest change to society. Pretty much everything we think of as society and civilisation stems from farming and the resultant change from hunter-gatherer to farmer. Few people farm nowdays but it's still the bedrock of human civilisation.
Writing. It played a big role in the preservation and spread of knowledge and it's utterly essential for anything even vaguely approaching a modern level of knowledge.
Pottery. Seriously. Pottery was the plastic of the past. It made a very big difference. It also led to the development of controlled sustained high temperature kilns which quickly led to the next item on my impromptu list...
Smelting of copper. Important in itself but much more important as the crucial new invention that made it possible to deliberately make bronze. I write "deliberately" because bronze (and, more commonly, other useful copper alloys such as copper+arsenic) was made unintentionally before then as a result of smelting copper ore that happened to contain the right other materials in roughly the right proportion.
Man of Honour
Using the OP's restrictions, that's not within the last 20 years because it's an improvement to an older invention (vibrators were invented in the 1880s).
Almost every invention could be dismissed on the same basis. It's been a long time since there was anything completely new. For example, the car is obviously based on the cart (prehistoric) and the steam engine (the oldest known reference to a steam engine is in the 1st century BC but it might have been invented earlier).
Soldato
Of all time: The printing press is usually regarded as the most important/ifluential invention because it allowed the spread of knowledge quickly and cheaply and, because of that, very few inventions could ever have been invented without books from which the inventor learned.
I would agree with Tesla.
The invention is "optical storage". DVD is the same invention as a CD because they're both optical storage, as is blu-ray. It's using exactly the same physical method of data storage and recall (optical storage), the only difference is small variations which allow various densities of data storage.
The only thing which lets a dvd hold 4GB more than a CD does is simple "moore's law" applied to optical storage.
Optical storage simply gets more denser over time because the tools which allow reading/writing from a disk become more micro-accurate.
I mean back in 1995 it was certainly theoretically possible to make a 100GB Compact Disc, but the thing is they had to think about precision vs production cost. It would just be too expensive to make a laser pickup precise enough to read 100GB worth of pits from a 12CM disc.
Now in 2017 it's getting cheaper and cheaper to make such high density laser pickup systems and it's called blu-ray, but the basic idea is still the same as a CD in 1995.
So a lot of "inventions" are aren't really inventions in their own right, but are rather made possible possible due to advancements in manufacturing.
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Man of Honour
There's a lot of popular disinformation about her:
The person you're thinking of wasn't called Ada Lovelace. "Lovelace" was part of the title she acquired when her husband inherited a title. It wasn't part of her name. Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace. The Honourable Augusta Ada Byron before she was married. Which was also, obviously, a title and not a name so "Ada Byron" (another common mistake nowadays) is also wrong. Off the top of my head, I don't know what her title would have been after her marriage and before her husband inherited his title. Her name would have been Augusta Ada Gordon before she married but that would never have been used because the title would have overwritten it and she was born into that title. Likewise for her married name after she gained the more senior title. Off the top of my head, I don't know what would have been correct for the time between her marriage and her becoming Countess of Lovelace.
It might be "widely recognised" as the first computer program, but it's not true. The claim is made on the basis of a program (more accurately, an algorithm) she wrote that did something (I forget what) with Bernoulli numbers. Not only was it not the first program written (that one was written by, unsurprisingly, Babbage), it wasn't even the first program she wrote. Not only was it not even the first program she wrote, it wasn't even the first version of that particular program. Not only was it not even the first version of that particular program, she didn't write most of it (Babbage did). It is the first known example of one programmer fixing a mistake in another programmer's work. Babbage got part of the maths wrong. Ada, Countess of Lovelace was a much better mathematician than Babbage and noticed the mistake very quickly.
It's a shame because the simplistic (and false) claim of FIRST! overshadows what she actually did, which was more impressive. She thoroughly understood the concept of a general purpose computer. Might not sound like much nowadays, but at the time if there had been a meeting of everyone who thoroughly understood the idea that meeting could probably have been held in a lift. Her letters are often rather weird (she was hitting the drugs pretty hard) but her understanding of the concept is clear, to the extent that she was able to correctly speculate about possible future uses of a general purpose computer.
Also, Babbage's computer has never been built. His calculator was first built long after his death. 1991 sounds right for that, although I don't know off the top of my head. At least some parts of the calculator were built in his lifetime, as was a scale model. He kept changing it before it was finished, though, because he kept thinking of ways to make it better. Brilliant inventor, rubbish businessman. The computer was, of course, far larger and far more complicated and he'd have had a very hard time getting that built even if it did finalise the design and say "that's good enough, build it to that design". There's an ongoing attempt to build his computer for the first time but it's proving very slow going because there's a mass of drawings from numerous different (and often incompatible) versions of it. Maybe if he could have stuck with one version long enough to get it built he could have gone on to make improved versions, but he didn't work that way.
Soldato
Blue led lights.