Typically that means big-ticket items. One thinks of dazzling intellectual breakthroughs: the telescope, the steam engine, the airplane, the wheel.... Those were all tremendous, of course.
But often it''s some mundane little nothing of a
device that changes history. It might be no more than a slight improvement on some earlier invention. If it intersects with a historic moment, it can become a pivot. Then, like the lever that lifts the elephant, it produces
consequences far out of proportion to the ingenuity of the thing itself.
I''ve drawn up a list of nine such items. There might be better examples, but any such list illustrates, I think, the way our lives are interwoven (almost creepily) with the things we make.
1 - chariot
2 - Concrete
3 - Horse collar
4 - Longbow
5 - Eyeglasses
6 - Rotary
printing press
7 - Barbed wire
8 - Carborundum
9 - Bakelite
More summaries about the History''s Most Underrated Inventions