Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22290362

by abrax3141 • 6 years ago

253 555 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Not levers and wheels and gears, but Velcro and paper clips. I’d put “modern” as after 1700, and “simple” as “you can pretty much build it yourself”, but you can argue theses (as I’m sure you will! :-)

metaloha• 6 years ago

Rice cookers. Totally ingenious.

dossy5• 6 years ago

Rice cooker = hipster Instant Pot.

JoeAltmaier2• 6 years ago

Isn't that reversed? Instant Pot === hipster Rice Cooker

afarrell• 6 years ago

You can cook chicken in 23 minutes in a rice cooker?

overcast• 6 years ago

Most used kitchen item by far in my house, almost used daily.

abrax314110• 6 years ago

Not sure this counts as "simple".

mhh__4• 6 years ago

My dad still uses the family (his dad's) rice cooker from the mid 1950s, so they aren't that complicated, they're basically a heater and thermal cutoff

PSA for anyone who doesn't: Wash your fucking rice

schwap• 6 years ago

A basic rice cooker is a very simple device.

btschaegg• 6 years ago

Then I'd like to submit the Bialetti (Mokka-)style coffee maker :)

solarkraft• 6 years ago

So what am I missing using a pot on the stove?

jfk134• 6 years ago

Not much; you just have to be a bit more careful to manage the heat and time appropriately.

dossy5• 6 years ago

Binder clips.

"The binder clip was invented in 1910 by Washington resident Louis E. Baltzley, who ultimately was granted U.S. Patent 1,139,627 for his invention."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binder_clip

dossy5• 6 years ago

The incandescent light bulb.

"In 1761, Ebenezer Kinnersley demonstrated heating a wire to incandescence."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb

Jaruzel3• 6 years ago

I still don't think LED (or Halogen) house bulbs are anywhere near as good as the classic incandescent bulb.

Most LED bulbs give me a headache. Bad LED bulbs cause 'strobing' in my vision which is even worse.

jes5199• 6 years ago

I’ve gotten used to LEDs but I recently picked up an incandescent night light bulb- 25 watts for a dim glow. It gets really warm! 25 watts is an absurd amount of power. And people light rooms with multiple 60s! That’s bonkers

kick• 6 years ago

There are LED bulbs this doesn't apply to. The flicker is so intense, damaging, and nauseating that people have tried to make standards to help get rid of it:

https://standards.ieee.org/standard/1789-2015.html

madhadron3• 6 years ago

This isn't the LED itself. It's the circuitry running current through the light emitting material. Unlike incandescents and fluorescents where the medium itself smooths out poor signal from the circuitry, LEDs show you the quality of the signal going in.

Then there's the question of whether the color emission mix is designed so that your eye perceives it as an approximation of a blackbody spectrum. That's an issue of matching doping to our biology and one of those things that I think is just about settled in decent quality bulbs.

Once the doping mix and the quality of circuitry is fixed, the incandescent lightbulb is at best an historical curiosity.

clashandcarry• 6 years ago

I find Philips brand bulbs appear to have circuitry to "smooth out" the voltage and provide consistent light levels. I use my phone camera's slow motion mode to record my bulbs and see the flicker. Every brand I've tested via the above method, save for Philips, have suffered from flicker.

Give Philips a try? May just be worth the premium. Hopefully a standard like the one mentioned in a comment below is put into place.

JoeAltmaier2• 6 years ago

Maybe some non-device inventions: the staff system; the germ theory of disease; currency without a gold standard; public health; public education

arbitrage3• 6 years ago

as in musical staves? good one!

madhadron3• 6 years ago

Musical staves aren't after 1700, though. The five line staff we used today was widespread by the 16th century, and staff notation goes back to the 11th century.

dnautics4• 6 years ago

currency without a gold standard is arguably the original system of money (see debt: the first 5000 years)

pmdulaney• 6 years ago

It's kind of an oxymoron because if it were simple it would have been invented before modern times.

But I'll say backpacks for everyday commuter use and trashcans with wheels (what they refer to in British TV shows as "wheely bins").

aidenn02• 6 years ago

Simplicity is only somewhat related to invention.

The compound bow was not invented until 1966, but any technically-inclined person from the early-modern era would immediately understand how it works from a picture.

willvarfar3• 6 years ago

Tangential, but if you want to nerd out on bow tech, the slingshot channel is awesome! Rapid fire repeating bows with half draw-weight, all made in the classic mad inventor in a garage charm!

A good intro https://youtu.be/f3fcNyZoEIw

nathell• 6 years ago

Zipper (1851) and ballpoint pen (1888) would be my picks.

ryanmercer4• 6 years ago

The development, and successful commercialization, of the ballpoint pen is a really interesting hole to dive down.

John Loud is like check this cool thing I made, it doesn't really work though. Laszlo Biro comes along and makes it viable, everyone tries to rip him off, then Marcel Bich comes along and is like "Biro, let me have that, everyone sit down Bic has this!".

Stuff You Should Know did a podcast episode about it once. IIRC it was a decent listen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXB7479t0XM

hatmatrix• 6 years ago

Meanwhile, Levi's 501 still pretending like 1851 didn't happen

Jaruzel3• 6 years ago

The basic internal combustion engine.

Without it, we'd still be spending half our lives travelling places.

abrax314110• 6 years ago

Important, def! But I don't think that this could count as "simple".

abyssin• 6 years ago

Not saying it didn't have an impact, but I'm nitpicking about the impact it had on how we spend our time: "Marchetti's constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day, which is approximately one hour. [...] Ever since Neolithic times, people have kept the average time spent per day for travel the same, even though the distance may increase due to the advancements in the means of transportation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant

zip1234• 6 years ago

I would say the internal combustion engine has not meaningfully cut people's day to day travel. Where prevalent, many just live further away and travel a long time still. I understand that long distance travel has been revolutionized by engines (steam and internal combustion), but I'm not certain about day to day travel. Many people near me are in a car for multiple hours per day. I would love to see a study on average 'commute' times in the 17-1800s.

roosgit• 6 years ago

Liquid paper.

Invented in 1956 by a typist, in her kitchen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Paper

ph4• 6 years ago

I'm having trouble seeing how this even makes the top 100 list of "most important".

estebarb2• 6 years ago

12 years ago we still relayed on notebooks and pens for everything. Then smartphones appear and life changed forever. And also devices like clocks, calculators, cameras, gps, planners, maps, agendas, erasers and liquid paper become redundant.

akeck• 6 years ago

Maybe not "most important", but a few dollars worth of post-it notes can turn any wall into a "business application" that can potentially cost thousands to turn into code.

abrax314110• 6 years ago

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ableman/sets/72157594421824427...

pcurve• 6 years ago

I don't know if you were being sarcastic, but the post it note meetings only provide illusion of getting things done and they can often be destructive if not conducted well or relied on too heavily. Your mileage will vary of course.

013a• 6 years ago

Though, many people say the exact same thing about Jira, so...

purplezooey• 6 years ago

priceless comment

davidw3• 6 years ago

Bicycles are pretty amazing, although there's no way you could 'build one yourself'.

miguelmota• 6 years ago

Bicycles may seem simple but took many decades to get it right.

Your comment also reminded me of this gallery of drawings from people attempting to create a bicycle from memory which is pretty funny https://twistedsifter.com/2016/04/artist-asks-people-to-draw...

notatoad2• 6 years ago

The most astounding thing about bicycles is that we did actually get it right. looking at the first ~100 years of iteration, you'd kind of assume that it was one of those things that would just keep evolving forever. But then they found the classic diamond frame design, and bikes have been fundamentally the same since then.

plopz• 6 years ago

What a frustrating article, they say its missing a key component but doesn't say what.

blackearl• 6 years ago

I'd love to see some of these built out and tested. I'm assuming most would snap in half when riding over the first curb. Thanks for sharing!

blacksmith_tb• 6 years ago

Well, you can certainly assemble a bike from a pile of components, a pair of wheels, and a frame (try and do that with a sedan...) And it's not beyond most people to learn how to weld or braze a frame together from tubing (or even glue up carbon fiber or bamboo into a frame, at room temp). But smelting the steel and aluminum at home to make the parts is admittedly not practical.

dcuthbertson• 6 years ago

try to do that with a sedan...

Well, it can be done. There's a guy who rebuilt a Tesla Model S from a pair of junked Teslas.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA

kqr• 6 years ago

Not only not practical -- essentially requires a highly refined metal industry to begin with, as I understand it.

It's no surprise the first mass producers of bicycles were weapons manufacturers -- they were the ones with the high quality steel supplies and equipment that allowed for tight tolerances.

dvirsky2• 6 years ago

Seat-belts maybe. Not as important as the car itself obviously, but definitely simple and super impactful.

pesfandiar• 6 years ago

Super impactful indeed, even though it is paradoxically designed to reduce the impact.

acd2• 6 years ago

Volvo opened up the patent for modern three way seat belts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt https://www.volvotrucks.com/en-en/news/volvo-trucks-magazine...

some1else• 6 years ago

A twistlock and corner casting together form a standardized rotating connector for securing shipping containers. The primary uses are for locking a container into place on a container ship, semi-trailer truck or railway container train, and for lifting of the containers by container cranes and sidelifters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistlock

dvirsky2• 6 years ago

Actually the shipping container itself is pretty much high up there I guess. Pretty revolutionary for a box.

hencq• 6 years ago

You might already be familiar with it, but I can heartily recommend the book The Box by Marc Levinson [1]. It describes how a simple idea of putting items in a container first, instead of directly on a ship, completely changed the world. It is for example the reason why Oakland and New Jersey eclipsed San Francisco and New York as ports. When Malcolm McLean, the inventor of the humble container, died in 2001, container ships all over the world, at an agreed moment, sounded their horns in tribute.

[1] https://g.co/kgs/vCK3nB

ufmace• 6 years ago

I was going to post the standardized shipping container myself. It was apparently a massive boost to transportation efficiency when the industry moved to a standard container that a single simple crane could rapidly load and unload from any ship and load onto a truck or railcar. It seems that, before this, most goods were transported in barrels or other one-off small containers loaded and unloaded from ships by manpower. Could take weeks to load and unload a ship.

leoh• 6 years ago

It's not as simple as you'd like, but the little known Bosch-Haber process, which produces ammonia for farming, staved off mass famines and may be why many readers of HN are alive today.

ghaff2• 6 years ago

After which, Haber went on to play a key role in helping Germany develop chemical weapons for World War I.

new26286• 6 years ago

Would the world be better or worse off without the population boom that resulted from the invention?

robbrown4512• 6 years ago

Better to whom? How do you define "better" if not relative to some entity able to appreciate the difference between good and bad?

DonaldFisk• 6 years ago

General anaesthesia.

harryh3• 6 years ago

Standardized shipping containers massively decreased the cost of global commerce which is perhaps the most important force in the modern world.

arcturus17• 6 years ago

Nice one, but we could get into a debate on whether a convention counts as an invention.

harryh3• 6 years ago

Ya, I dunno if it counts either. Just seemed like an interesting answer so I threw it out there.

mjd3• 6 years ago

The often-overlooked Twistlock is an important part of this, and I think it answers the objections about the “invention” being only a convention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twistlock

On review: another comment here says the same. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22291068

riskneutral• 6 years ago

I’ve got an even simpler one: the standardized shipping pallet.

harryh3• 6 years ago

An excellent example of complementary goods! :)

ken5• 6 years ago

Does standardization count as an invention? Then I'd put the metric system higher than shipping containers.

I'm not sure "you can pretty much build it yourself", either. The actual process is pretty involved [1]. Even if each step is simple, it's a lot of work, and building a large 3D object to precise specifications is not easy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7l6AQN1KV0

On that note, though, I submit arc welding as a simple modern invention of great importance. Living in a city, it's rare that I'm not within 2 steps of some object that was joined with arc welding. The basic structure of an arc welder is really simple: an electric current, a wire feeder, and some way (like a noble gas) to protect it.

gramakri• 6 years ago

Washing machine and dish washer

ganzuul• 6 years ago

That's actually a big one because of how much time women would spend on these chores.

candiddevmike• 6 years ago

Aluminum beverage cans are an engineering marvel:

https://youtu.be/hUhisi2FBuw

TimSchumann4• 6 years ago

Fun fact -- 15,000+ aluminum cans are manufactured every second. Every. Second.

Really hope Bill keeps putting out videos, but I understand how life gets and it's not his full time job.

s9w2• 6 years ago

is that right? That would be something like 5 per day per person on earth.

deg4uss3r• 6 years ago

My dad worked in a plant growing up, right before college my summer job was cleaning the washing ovens to "make sure I value my education and don't drop out." Amazing to see the aluminum pucks and machinery and get up close and take it apart to clean it, I don't think my dad was worried after the foreman asked him if I was going to be mechanical engineer.

slipwalker• 6 years ago

toilet paper, maybe ?...

jfk134• 6 years ago

Why? Cleaning with water works fine - better, in many people's opinion.

rafaelvasco• 6 years ago

First water of course, and then paper to dry it. If any residue is found, repeat the process.

sebastianconcpt2• 6 years ago

The sanitation system.

jfk134• 6 years ago

Ours may be more sophisticated in various ways, but sanitation systems were invented long ago. https://www.harappa.com/lothal/14.html

sebastianconcpt2• 6 years ago

Totally.

dotancohen• 6 years ago

And the roads.

octokatt• 6 years ago

Plastic. We're now drowning in a new problem, but plastic and its impact on sanitation (particularly medical sanitation, like disposable needles, which then supports vaccinations) has dramatically improved life quality and length.

Losing a child to disease before the age of five is no longer a universal human experience, portrayed in the Robert Frost poem below.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53086/home-burial

ken5• 6 years ago

Can I make plastic myself?

arbitrage3• 6 years ago

Simple ones, sure!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#History

technotarek• 6 years ago

Antibiotics?

abrax314110• 6 years ago

Not simple.

michaelmcmillan• 6 years ago

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis on discovering the effects of washing your hands before operating on patients. Simple, yet highly effective.

umvi• 6 years ago

His story is so sad though. He was ostracized by the other doctors and medical community who didn't believe him and indeed openly mocked him. He remained outspoken about his findings until a colleague forced him into an asylum where he was beaten by the guards and died.

tptacek3• 6 years ago

They didn't believe him in part because he was a notorious asshole, and in part because he was insistent on a root cause analysis of hand-washing that was clearly false. He also didn't "invent" handwashing, which was already the normal protocol by the time he began practicing; rather, his contribution was a particular antiseptic handwashing protocol (chlorinated lime).

m4635• 6 years ago

I listened to the Joe Rogan episode on victorian medicine and it made a weird sort of sense: Why wash your hands after being in the morgue if you were just going to get them dirty again with surgery?

EDIT: Joe Rogan Episode #1272 - Lindsey Fitzharris

nsfyn55• 6 years ago

Unix Pipes - BWK pointed out in his memoir how a small piping implementation done in a single day changed Unix(and computing) forever.

abrax314110• 6 years ago

APL was around in the late '60s and is basically just pipes.

ThePhysicist• 6 years ago

Sterilization of medical equipment. Easy to do even at home if you know how, probably saved hundreds of millions of lives since it was invented.

wincy• 6 years ago

Someone didn’t think of putting wheels on luggage until relatively recently, in 1987.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/05/business/05road.html

todd8• 6 years ago

A few weeks ago I was going through some stuff in our storage unit and found an originally very nice suitcase. It's of no value to me now because it has no wheels.

Imagine how much more difficult air travel would be without the wheels!

ryanmercer4• 6 years ago

I don't have to imagine it. We had 2 massive suitcases when I was a kid that were built like tanks. You actually had to be pretty thoughtful when you put them into the trunk because of their size.

But here's the thing. You pulled up to the terminal back then, parked, got out. Walked away from the car and checked your bag right there on the sidewalk if you weren't getting there at some weird hour and then said bye to whoever dropped you off and they left. You walked inside and checked into your flight and didn't have to think about luggage until you got to wherever.

When you got to your destination, there were a bunch of luggage carts and you'd throw in 25 cents or 50 cents or whatever and get one, load up whatever and take it to the shuttle or car rental. If you were feeling rich, you'd just leave the cart and not worry about getting your change back. If you were feeling like a cheapskate you could take the cart to a return and get some or all of your change back.

Picking someone up? You parked the car, went inside the airport, went through a metal detector and had your change/wallet/purse x-rayed and walked right up to the gate and waited for their plane to pull up.

I remember one time we picked up my grandparents and my dad was a state police officer. We went through security, he put his gun and badge (out of uniform) on the conveyor belt, no one freaked out, they checked his police ID against his face, made me push a button on my pager to show them it was a real electronic device and told us keep moving. Then in that area, there was some smoke coming from the ceiling outside. No panic, no evacuation, some fire fighters pulled up outside and came in through a gate, poked around at the ceiling tiles and decided everything was ok while everyone just casually sat around. This would have been 1997 probably, dad died in early 1998 and I don't think I had the pager in 1996 (context: my father had bought a pager and payed for service in advance, then as a detective the department gave him one so they used it to reach me when I was out and about on my bike or at a friend's and someone was on the internet).

Different times. I'm only 34.

PascLeRasc• 6 years ago

Imagine it? I've been living it and it's so much better. Try to get from one side of O'Hare to the other for your connection leaving in 20 minutes with a rolling suitcase vs with a comfortable medium-large backpack.

Boarding flights is easier, getting around outside is easier (try rolling your suitcase around the cobble streets of Paris), fitting into tight restaurants is easier.

Look into /r/onebag if you want to learn more. Check out the Minaal, it's literally life-changing if you travel often.

cryptoz• 6 years ago

Article notes that it was 1970 that the idea was had and patent application filed, not an original idea in 1987. But your point stands.

It's a good link though, as it also tells the story of how the luggage-with-wheels idea was hated on by people who heard about it. The story here isn't that it took so long to think of the idea, but that it took a long time for anyone to actually want it.

So why did it take so long for wheeled luggage to emerge? Mr. Sadow recalled the strong resistance he met on those early sales calls, when he was frequently told that men would not accept suitcases with wheels. “It was a very macho thing,” he said.

timonoko• 6 years ago

What? I have a large suitcase with wheels from 1979. I was plannig to build "portable computer" in it, but Osborne-1 destroyed this plan.

Grustaf5• 6 years ago

Aren’t wheels only useful inside the airport? As soon as it gets rustic you want a back-back or a trunk with a shoulder strap.

dsfyu404ed2• 6 years ago

Luggage trunks have had a pair of wheels on one edge since forever.

ncmncm2• 6 years ago

It needed development of tough plastics to become practical. Until very recently you had to be careful to get bags where the wheels wouldn't snap off eagerly.

OfflineSergio• 6 years ago

The idea of Open Source software

mhh__4• 6 years ago

The metric system is pretty good

Smoosh• 6 years ago

I can't believe they never implemented metric time and dates (calendar). Now we seem to be forever* stuck with what we have - a glaring inconsistency in some fundamental units of measurement.

* Forever is a long time; after several civilizations crumble and rebuild, perhaps there will be an opportunity.

dublin9• 6 years ago

Metric time and dates notably fail to work with the observed motion of the Solar system. The time metrics we use are determined by the rhythms of the Earth, Moon, and Sun. Metric time offers no benefit. (And for the record, Napoleon tried to decree decimal dates and times, but even the French weren't having any of that crap...)

techbio• 6 years ago

I'll suggest the thermostat (and throw in the rest of control theory).

acvny• 6 years ago

The greatest invention/discovery of modern times is electricity. It is the second fire and much much more..

abrax314110• 6 years ago

Fire is old. Electricity-- or at least it's control -- not so old, but I'm not sure I'd count it as simple. Making a functional battery or generator that doesn't just create or store trivial amounts energy is quite a challenge.

stan_rogers3• 6 years ago

Huge powerful batteries are simple. It's making them small and lightweight that's the hard part.

werber2• 6 years ago

Condoms

jfk134• 6 years ago

How modern do you think they are?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3649591/

werber2• 6 years ago

wow, awesome source, thanks!

mjd3• 6 years ago

I read “modern” as “post-world-war-II” and suggest:

Drywall.

juliend2• 6 years ago

I would say the Telegraph.

In the book [CODE: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Softwar](https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...), Charles Petzold talks about how it's foundational to the eventual invention of the computer.

Back then, it also meant coast to coast communications were almost instantaneous. And soon after, transatlantic cable-enabled telegraph boosted commerce between America and Europe.

aidenn02• 6 years ago

Smokeless gunpowder? It completely changed the dynamics of the battlefield, and you said "important" not necessarily "good"

estebarb2• 6 years ago

"simple" is a strong requirement. I don't know how to make anything of most things proposed!!!

If we were thrown to the Earth 10000 years ago, we would be able to bootstrap our current tech in less than a century?

arbitrage3• 6 years ago

10,000 years? I think so. 1,000 years? Maaaaybe.

allannienhuis• 6 years ago

This book is an attempt at answering that question, although it's not exactly step-by-step (especially as the book progresses), it gives the framework for rebooting civilization - the paths to follow.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114087-the-knowledge

[edit] - actually it's answering a slightly different question I guess - how to reboot after a cataclysm, but the path is more-or-less the same I think :)

kwhitefoot6• 6 years ago

Yes. So long as we had a few reference works, freedom from attack by competing tribes, and landed on productive agricultural land.

Simple radios are very easy and allow us to stick together over wider ranges than the locals, knowledge of simple medical concepts and sanitation keeps us alive and healthy longer.

Understanding how to build effective shelters and storage systems allows us to keep an agricultural surplus which enables some of us to devote our time to bootstrapping.

The biggest problem would be people jockeying for short term power instead of pulling together for long term success.

war102511• 6 years ago

The thing you are missing, which is a massive hurdle that is underappreciated, is that you need access to raw materials. Most of the modern gadgets we use require things that you can't just find out your front door.

netule• 6 years ago

The hypodermic needle.

LeoPanthera2• 6 years ago

Earplugs! Improved sleep quality can have huge health benefits and the world is noisier than ever.

...might have been invented before 1700 though.

dartdartdart1• 6 years ago

They cause inner ear bacteria to quintuple overnight, shouldn't be a problem with a healthy immune system, but still

LeoPanthera2• 6 years ago

I would imagine that the improvement to sleep quality outweighs any possible ear bacteria problems, at least in otherwise healthy people sleeping in noisy locations.

I also question the “quadruple” claim, a quick internet search doesn’t back that up.

jordan801• 6 years ago

Try a white noise generator. I live with noisy roommates and it has changed my life. Ear plugs fall out, and can prevent you from hearing real emergencies and your alarm clock.

I went from borderline psychotic from them waking me up, to sleeping like a rock.

jrace3• 6 years ago

They can cause you to become reliant on sleeping with earplugs. Our hearing system does not turn off at night, and by using earplugs you may be increasing your night time hearing sensitivity.

I worked for almost 15 years in Audiology and saw many people with issues in part from sleeping with ear plugs.

Most could not sleep without earplugs even in very quiet situations, and some even developed hyperacusis.

For the prevention of hearing-loss due to noise, they have been excellent.

geoffreyy• 6 years ago

Someone has to say it... Squatty Potty

fit2rule2• 6 years ago

The IUD.

abrax314110• 6 years ago

IUDs aren't simple. The concept of contraception is simple, and condoms (as mentioned elsewhere are), but both of those are old.

fit2rule2• 6 years ago

I dunno, I think Gräfenbergs Ring is pretty darn simple:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gräfenberg%27s_ring

TopHand• 6 years ago

Window screens and indoor plumbing are the 2 greatest improvements for our daily lives.

allhacks• 6 years ago

Since OP didn’t provide reasons, I will.

Window screens: malaria prevention.

Indoor plumbing: make sanitation so convenient that you don’t have any reasons not to use it (vs throwing the old night bucket outta the window). Obviously city scale sanitation == no dysentery, cholera...etc.

nickserv• 6 years ago

Sanitation systems are really old, though.

I was impressed with the sophistication of the one present in Glanum, a small (but wealthy) Roman provincial town abandoned in the 2nd century. The sewer system runs underneath the main street: baths, villas, and the abatoir connect to it.

To say nothing of the ones in major cities of the time.

phamilton• 6 years ago

Except window screens still aren't common in Europe.

indentit• 6 years ago

That doesn't mesh with my experience. When I moved from the UK - where windows open outwards and its not really possible to have screens - to the countryside in mainland Europe where mosquitoes and flies are much more common, one can buy mosquito nets for windows from the supermarkets. I don't regret that purchasing decision at all - being able to have the window open at night in summer means I can actually get some sleep :)

iancmceachern• 6 years ago

Refrigeration, particularly because it has revolutionized our food infrastructure.

jessaustin• 6 years ago

Many inventions only make sense in our specific modern context. Every primate that has ever lived could appreciate refrigeration and air conditioning.

turc16562• 6 years ago

I second this. Was going to post but saw I was beaten to it already.

wufufufu• 6 years ago

Cardboard boxes?

ryanmercer4• 6 years ago

Common soap bars, they weren't really a thing until the mid 1850's and you had to make your own soap unless you were wealthy prior to that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#19th_century

Similarly, liquid soap which came to be around the same time.

pppp• 6 years ago

Liquid soaps are a poor choice from an environmental/cost standpoint. Most of the soap goes down the drain and is wasted. Bar soap stays on your hands and last many times longer.

ryanmercer4• 6 years ago

That may be the case now, but liquid soaps revolutionized laundry when they came to be. Washing clothes with bar soap is a royal pain. Powdered laundry detergents really didn't start to catch on until the 1940's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry_detergent

Also, washing machines didn't really start to catch on until the mid 1940's, prior to that it was still pretty much scrub boards. Scrub boards are bad enough with liquid soap.

cosmodisk• 6 years ago

Washing Machine. Recent iterations are more complex( repair engineer could plug into ours and diagnose all sorts of things, including checking results of previous washes), however the principle behind it isn't that complex. It has made life easier for so many households.

dnautics4• 6 years ago

You can get a simple one that is probably 80% of the way to a modern commercial washing machine, and several orders of magnitude better than going to a stream and washing:

for example "wonderwash"

willvarfar3• 6 years ago

An excellent talk on its affects by the late Hans Rosling https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_magic_washing_mac...

BrandoElFollito2• 6 years ago

Thank you for that link. Right before reading your reply I was trying to remember where I read about how it changed women's life and this is actually that talk my memory had remains of.

acd2• 6 years ago

On the number of hours saved by Washing machines and Dishwashers. Liberating women from having to do these tasks and instead contributing to the general economy instead.

war102511• 6 years ago

the number of hours saved by Washing machines and Dishwashers.

This is true, but to some extent over-stated I think.

We have a family of five, and don't use our dishwasher. I just do the dishes every morning while I listen to the news on the radio. It takes less than an hour.

As far as washing machines, I agree that they are quite convenient, but the truth is most clothing doesn't need to be washed nearly so often as people do.

Without a washing machine, you would just do laundry less often.

I think modern plumbing is the actual time saver. Not having to haul water from the river or the well frees up a ton of time. Having waste water safely disposed of is a massive boon to hygiene.

jcranmer• 6 years ago

Since you've allowed modern to include the Industrial Revolution, I would submit the invention that started it: the flying shuttle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_shuttle

(How did this cause the Industrial Revolution? It made weaving so much faster, that the spinning industry had to come up with machines to supply the weaving industry.)

alanbernstein• 6 years ago

This is an answer to the "most important invention" question I've never heard before, and it's a great answer for the "simple" qualifier too. I've never even heard of this device before.

akgerber2• 6 years ago

The mills at Lowell are a National Historic Park now and they still have a weaving line running. It's a fascinating place to visit.

harshalizee• 6 years ago

The flying shuttle is still in use in various parts of Asia, especially India in the manufacture of still sarees.

kragen11• 6 years ago

Isn't almost all woven cloth woven with flying shuttles now?

deepspace• 6 years ago

As an aside, from the Wikipedia article:

... using treadles to raise and lower the heddles, which opened the shed in the warp threads. The operator then had to reach forward while holding the shuttle in one hand and pass this through the shed; the shuttle carried a bobbin for the weft.

That is a quite a bit of industry-specific jargon packed into a single paragraph. Without context this could easily be mistaken for Star Trek jargon.

kragen11• 6 years ago

Any woman born in England between 1200 and 1800 would have known all of these words except for being a bit nonplussed by “operator”. Most of the men, too.

Gibbon1• 6 years ago

There also the spinning jenny which increased the rate at which a worker could spin thread and yard eightfold.

m4635• 6 years ago

Another one is the railroad wheel -- the shape that self-centers the train on the rails without using the flange.

steve_adams_86• 6 years ago

Wow, I inherited a heavily used one of these from my grandmother 20 years ago, and never understood what it was. It was used in an odd way to hold dried flowers and plants, and I assumed it was some sort of Dutch tradition to do this. Now I know! Thanks for that. This makes my little memento that much more interesting.

bachmeier• 6 years ago

In terms of economic importance, the assembly line was extremely simple yet had a massive impact.

exabrial• 6 years ago

Sewers - literally prevents plagues

jbay808• 6 years ago

Deployed widely in modern times, but invented in antiquity.

brutt• 6 years ago

Software.

rhacker• 6 years ago

Definitely far from simple, but definitely important.

say_it_as_it_is• 6 years ago

The idea of human rights is simple, fairly modern, and very important -- one of the most important today.

fao_• 6 years ago

I mean, it only takes a glance through Kenny's history of philosophy books to see that as a concept, it's not a very modern idea.

It's just that it's only in the 1800s and 1900s that general strikes forced the idea to actually be implemented. Before industrial work, if you stopped working the land you could be replaced (Strikes did still happen, but they were easier to deal with). The introduction of industrial work makes strikes harder to deal with, because instead of having to come up with 10 or 20 men for the fields, or exerting your force over them, you have to come up with a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand men to work the factory, or find a way to exert force over them. And while the labour is 'unskilled', you still need a certain level of understanding about, say, making steel, to avoid killing yourself and to properly manufacture the materials.

And then in the 20th century, globalisation -- or more accurately -- the resulting specialisation of facilities, made striking even more effective. To quote Tony Cliff:

    When 3,000 General Motors brake parts workers went on strike in 
    Dayton, Ohio, in 1996, they shut down General Motors operations across 
    the United States, Canada and Mexico. Over 125,000 General Motors 
    workers were laid off within days. The strike cost the company around 
    $45 million a day, and the Clinton government screamed at both sides 
    to settle.
    
    When an almost general strike took place in Denmark, Saab was forced 
    to stop car production in Sweden because it ran out of essential 
    components from Danish suppliers. The assembly of Saab’s convertible 
    motors in Finland was also forced to stop. Volvo also announced that 
    its production lines in Sweden and the Netherlands had been very badly 
    affected.
    
    In 1988, when Ford workers in Britain struck, they brought the whole
    of Ford Europe to a halt within three or four days.

(https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/2000/millennium...)

As I mentioned in another comment, the things that we take for granted: the ability for working men to vote (Something won by the Chartists in the 1800s), the ability for women to vote, human rights laws, worker's rights laws, the NHS, etc. were all given to us by strikes.

Synaesthesia4• 6 years ago

I think it’s not such a new idea, I mean there was the Magna Carta

powellzer• 6 years ago

The modern clothespin wasn’t invented until 1887. It was then that the coiled fulcrum came into play.

cranium• 6 years ago

I'm surprised nobody mentioned radio communication. The AM (Amplitude Modulation) transmission is even quite simple to understand and build.

You can even create an electric arc between the ground and the transmitting tower as a cheap (and dangerous) receiver: https://youtu.be/uo9nGzIzSPw

tgv• 6 years ago

I don't think a layperson can understand even the basic principle behind AM, let alone the actual device. It's not as "simple" as washing your hands.

irchans2• 6 years ago

I seem to recall building small AM transmitters in elementary school. I don't remember if I used a transistor or not. I think it was easy to construct the capacitor and the inductor. (I build it in the early 70's and don't really remember how.)

We also made crystal diode radios, but I have no idea how to construct a diode from scratch, so maybe those are not simple.

AWildC1823• 6 years ago

Back when radioshack existed they used to sell kits where you could assemble a crystal radio out of a handful of simple parts. This was the first real project my dad and I ever did and I was just a little kid at the time.

mynegation• 6 years ago

Important - yes, but would you consider it simple? AFAIU it relied on Maxwell's equations that I would not characterize as simple.

kwhitefoot6• 6 years ago

You don't need to know anything about Maxwell's equations to build a functioning radio. There are plenty of do it yourself books from the 1920s and 30s that explain in great detail how to do it including how to make rectifiers for battery charging, winding coils to get the right inductance, calculating the length of wire needed for the aerial and so on, together with the simple formulae that are needed.

cyanbane• 6 years ago

Birth Control.

RookyNumbas• 6 years ago

Definitely not simple. But the pill is probably the most important invention of the past century or two. Maybe the transistor comes close.

turc16562• 6 years ago

Very interesting proposal. I actually remember hearing some professor (of some sort of biological/sociological background) describe birth control as arguably creating a new species as far as females go because never before did they have any sort of reliable control over their reproduction. He actually believed that it was such an incredible event in human history that we have yet to fully understand its total impact on society and that we should consider modern women as fundamentally different now - to such a large degree that he considers them a new species of human females.

heavyarms• 6 years ago

I'm not sure about the whole "build it yourself" part, but the "Bessemer process" for making steel was a simple innovation improving on something that existed but made it so much more affordable that many experts think it was a significant contributor to a "second" industrial revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution

dcolkitt• 6 years ago

I don't know if it's the most important, but it's a great example of how a very simple innovation had huge benefits. The Fitch Barrier are those big orange barrels you see on the side of the road. They're filled with sand inside, and basically help to dampen the momentum of a car that veers off the road.

They were invented in the 1950s by John Fitch, a Formula 1 driver who just came up with them as a quick and dirty way to make the race track safer. One afternoon's random idea has managed to save over 17,000 lives and billions of dollars in damage.

csomar• 6 years ago

They fill them with water where I live. Seems easier to fill/empty but I'm not sure about the consequences on car collision.

na85• 6 years ago

In cold climates the water freezes and it's then basically like hitting a boulder.

quickthrowman• 6 years ago

I would nominate Jersey barriers as well, they’re easy to mass produce and there are machines that lay them down. Many roads would be undivided if it were not for jersey barriers.

geocrasher• 6 years ago

I owe my life to Jersey barriers. Around 1999 or 2000 I was driving an old Plymouth Barracuda (Slant 6 grandma's car, not a hemi monster) at 70 miles per hour in the fast lane on a freeway in Nevada. The car drifted to the left naturally because it needed an alignment and as I went to correct to the right nothing happened. The joint that connects the steering column to the steering gearbox had become disconnected. I didn't step on the brakes because they were also somewhat if he and might have sent me in any random direction!

Had it not been for the graduating slope of the jersey barrier I would have either gone over into oncoming traffic which was also doing 70 miles per hour or more, or I would have bounced back into traffic on my own side of the freeway with random results. I would not most likely not have survived.

Instead my front left tire caught the steepest graduation at the bottom of the jersey barrier which launched front left corner of the car up the barrier. But then a funny thing happened. I didn't flip over and I didn't go over it. Because the top section of the barrier is vertical I just came back down. This cycle happened several times until the car slowed down enough just to be sliding against the bottom of the barrier. At that point I was only doing about 30 miles per hour and could hit the brakes without worrying about what direction the brakes were going to take me. The car came to a stop. The only damage was a broken ball joint, a very messed up tire and wheel, and a bent fender lip!

A wrecker came and got me and delivered the vehicle to my house. I horse traded that car the very next week for an old Land cruiser that tried to kill me when it lost brakes, but that's another story. I drive better vehicles these days but only barely

crispyporkbites• 6 years ago

I’ve only ever seen them in North America, why is that?

jtlienwis• 6 years ago

The process for making ammonia from air (nitrogen) and hydrogen. Allowed a huge increase in agricultural output that saved a few billion people from starvation. Haber-Bosch process.

ajuc5• 6 years ago

Basically there would be ~2 times less people on Earth and over half of them would work in farming if not for this one invention.

dnautics4• 6 years ago

Sadly, in my professional opinion as a chemist, I would say that the the haber process, is not actually that simple, either in its original conception or as implemented now.

rriepe6• 6 years ago

For anyone confused as to why: We (not just people but life on Earth) are mostly made of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen. Nitrogen was something of a bottleneck because it's so much less ubiquitous than the other three, which are three of the four most common elements in the universe.

etangent2• 6 years ago

now imagine being someone who dislikes being around lots of people, and especially dislikes being around city people...

new26286• 6 years ago

Would the state of the Earth be better or worse if not for this development?

Aperocky• 6 years ago

over half of them would work in farming

Why would throwing more people at the problem solve or mitigate lack of fertilizer?

AngryData5• 6 years ago

Yeah but it is also a mixed bag because in order to satisfy the massive energy requirements we cheat by using fossil-fuel derived hydrogen which contributes to pollution and global warming. Without cheap fossil fuel hydrogen the energy costs of fertilizer production would rise multiple times over and likely dwarf every other industry in the world. Currently fertilizer production takes 1.2% of total world energy generation, but 10% or more without fossil fuel reagents is not unreasonable. 60% of the world's total crop yield is the direct result of fossil-fuel derived artificial fertilizer.

core-questions• 6 years ago

At some point we have to decide if the goal of humanity is continued population expansion or some other project. Of course, good luck with the latter.

narrator• 6 years ago

Not to mention Norman Borlaug's development of dwarf wheat which kicked off the green revolution and saved billions from starvation.

AareyBaba• 6 years ago

An almost unbelievable life history is Dr Pandurang Khankhoje who came to San Francisco from China in 1906, got a PhD in agriculture from UC Berkeley and ended up in Mexico helping the farmers develop high-yielding varieties of corn and wheat before Dr Norman Borlaug. https://www.livehistoryindia.com/cover-story/2020/02/09/dr-p...

snarf21• 6 years ago

1) Indoor plumbing 2) Washing machine

dinjin• 6 years ago

Internet. I know you can't build it easy. But if the building blocks were in place, its straight forward.

austincheney• 6 years ago

The most important overlooked or ignored invention is the antibiotic via syringe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Duchesne

PAGAN_WIZARD• 6 years ago

The electric motor/generator.

ilamont• 6 years ago

Bending light (1840s)

-> Fiber optics (1954)

--> fast network connectivity

---> Internet

---> Telephony

--> fiber optic endoscopy (1956)

---> better disease detection

---> laparoscopic surgery

dnautics4• 6 years ago

I love that fiber optics are really rather complex in the underlying theory, but they're so simple in construction (ok it can take some very complex machinery, but when it boils down to it you could easily make a functional, basic example yourself, useful for real purposes, say piping in sunlight to a room)

irchans2• 6 years ago

Post-it Notes

UnFleshedOne• 6 years ago

Doesn't that require specific adhesive (that is rather bad at being sticky)?

crtlaltdel2• 6 years ago

plastics

abrax314110• 6 years ago

Def. not simple!

crtlaltdel2• 6 years ago

idk...as far as complexity goes, plastics are not really all that bad. i'd argue that many machines are far more complex than a polymer when you consider what it's comprised of and how it functions.

salgernon• 6 years ago

I’d like to recommend James Burke’s series “Connections”[1] and “The Day the Universe Changed”[2] from the late 70s early 80s.

He was a bbc journalist covering NASA and doing science communication and one of his particular fascinations (and mine, having grown up with his work) is the cumulative effect of ideas and technology shape not only how we interact with the modern world, but how we perceive it.

[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/ [2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0199208/?ref_=m_nm_knf_wr_t3

kej• 6 years ago

Just want to add that Connections and some of his other videos are available on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22james+burk...

DaveInTucson• 6 years ago

Many of these are on YouTube as well, just search for "James Burke Connections"

kwhitefoot6• 6 years ago

He's still at it. See https://www.facebook.com/James-Burkes-Knowledge-Web-16366425...

hooande3• 6 years ago

seconding this. Connections is an amazing series about this topic

ZguideZ2• 6 years ago

Some of the greatest TV ever made. Shaped my young mind.

astrodust• 6 years ago

Fantastic and unique in that it cuts across what seem to be unrelated fields to show how one discovery, even accidental, can have enormous and profound implications.

grabbalacious• 6 years ago

This clip from his first Connections series is a favourite of mine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPcZ_5uCldg

Near the end it provides an answer to OP's question 'What's the most important modern simple invention?' although whether this in fact would be Burke's answer, I don't know.

schwarz• 6 years ago

There was also a Connections pc game https://www.oldpcgaming.net/connections-cd-review/

jedberg• 6 years ago

I highly recommend the podcast "50 things that made the modern economy".

They're in season two now, with a second set of 50 things.

Every podcast is about a simple invention that had a huge impact.

Incidentally the Haber-Bosch Process (mentioned in this thread) is number two, after the diesel engine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Things_That_Made_the_Modern...

robofanatic• 6 years ago

a Pen

willvarfar3• 6 years ago

The pencil, surely? Although you can get a long way with chalk, slate and charcoal, so perhaps not?

mathgeek• 6 years ago

Pencils are not a modern invention [0], which is why it doesn't fit the question. The ballpoint pen, as an example, is a 19th century patent [1], so pens in general might fit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballpoint_pen

omarhaneef2• 6 years ago

Ah, the problem is that modern inventions are really embedded in a practice and theory. The invention may be simple but the practice and theory are not.

So I would put up soap as a contender. Simple, saves hundreds of thousands of life, prevents diseases and so forth.

But soap, as an invention, is embedded in the modern practice of washing, which requires our modern knowledge of germs and diseases, as well as our modern effective plumbing system to bring the clean water and dispose of the dirty water.

Of course if it didn't require those it wouldn't be modern.

avian• 6 years ago

"The earliest recorded evidence of the production of soap-like materials dates back to around 2800 BC in ancient Babylon." [1] Soap is not a modern invention and its usefulness in cleaning was recognized way before modern knowledge about diseases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap#Ancient_Middle_East

new26286• 6 years ago

And arguably, soaps available in shops are getting worse with every iteration. Enter a big store in most of the developed world, and you can hardly find a regular soap bar anymore (only liquids, "hydrating bars", etc.). Craft markets still have them luckily.

DantesKite• 6 years ago

Reminds me of Jonathan Blow's observation that knowledge doesn't necessarily make it to the next generation and progress is sometimes lost.

https://youtu.be/pW-SOdj4Kkk

omarhaneef2• 6 years ago

I hope you see you’re making my point. Soap without the hygiene practices isn’t soap with hygiene practices. And those practices are predicated on a theory of germs

kd5bjo• 6 years ago

The modern idea of a library catalog came around in the early 1800s, and probably accelerated the pace of knowledge transfer and acquisition quite a bit. In its original form, index cards, it was ubiquitous for almost 200 years before being replaced by computerized systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog

azepoi• 6 years ago

More recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mundaneum

cuspycode3• 6 years ago

The condition "you can pretty much build it yourself" forces me to exclude many things with important impact like for example nuclear reactors, LSD, birth control pills, and the silicon transistor. But I think steam engines (or Rankine cycle engines in general) and penicillin are simple enough to qualify.

AnimalMuppet2• 6 years ago

I thought of penicillin, too, but "build it yourself" ruled it out, in my view.

cuspycode3• 6 years ago

I was thinking that growing a penicillin producing mold culture (like Fleming did) is something anyone could do, but I have to admit that I have no clue about how much more processing is needed before it can be applied medically as an antibiotic.

Synaesthesia4• 6 years ago

When I read Alexander Shulgin, the psychedelic chemist’s biography, I was struck by the fact that when he wanted to do LSD with some friends, he actually synthesised it in his lab.

cuspycode3• 6 years ago

Yeah, Shulgin was a special case, he was a genius biochemist after all. And there are of course lots of people who have synthesized LSD using fairly standard lab equipment. But it's not like something anyone could do.

AWildC1823• 6 years ago

Depends heavily on your definition of "build yourself"...

The airplane is a big one and I'm building one myself in my garage, as did the inventors of the first airplane. Hell, a solid chunk of all other inventions were created in someones garage. Compared to a full scale airplane, making nuclear reactors or transistors yourself is even easier and the transistor is easily the single biggest invention of the past century.

robot• 6 years ago

bicycle?

0027• 6 years ago

Modern mathematical notation, binary, or pretty much any software development language

dTal2• 6 years ago

3D printing.

I know, I know - overhyped. But you know what's a funny thing? It's incredibly basic tech. Stepper motors and thermoplastic. We could have had something like it at pretty much any time over the past century, and in its modern form from about 1960 or so. It has unquestionably revolutionized prototyping and short-run manufacturing, and we just didn't think of it. The idea was just too zany and expensive - the people with enough money to invent a 3d printer could afford to just pay someone to make their prototype by hand. It's a rare modern example of the "ancient greek railway problem"; Hellenistic culture posessed all the technology to begin making crude steam trains, and almost certainly had the technical drive to approach making practical ones, if only they had thought of it or considered it a worthwhile thing to do.

(Although there is the interesting question of data management. The .gcode for a small print can still run into the megabytes. CAD software was thin on the ground in 1970 too. So maybe therein lies the difficulty - what good is a 3D printer if you must painstakingly transcribe your blueprints into movement instructions by hand?)

Synaesthesia4• 6 years ago

But it’s not nearly as important in industry or manufacturing as say, precision machining or injection moulding.

spacemark2• 6 years ago

The assertion that "we just didn't think of it" is not even remotely correct. The late transition to the consumer market and the broad expansion in industry in the last 20 years has far more to do with the expiration of patents in the early 2000's than anything else. 3D printing for rapid prototyping has been around for decades.

dTal2• 6 years ago

I was not aware of that. How depressing.

Still, I think some of my point can still be salvaged - this implies that it was patented in the early 80s, which by my reckoning is still well after it became possible.

musingsole• 6 years ago

Further still, the control software has only recently become efficient enough at the same time that computation is cheap enough to make slicing 3D models a minutes task instead of a months task.

h2odragon• 6 years ago

IMO the invention of microstepping controllers made 3d printing possible; and when they started getting cheap enough for hackers to play with is when all the previous ideas became practical to implment, and then got patented.

There's something to be said for the availability of cheap, high precision stepper motors: these things were a much bigger deal to acquire and control not that long ago.

hooande3• 6 years ago

I respectfully disagree. 3D printing has not lived up to its hype or potential. The process is slow and sensitive to conditions. The commercial applications are relatively limited. It has radically transformed rapid prototyping, which is very important. But it's hard to compare it to the ubiquitous daily utility of paperclips or even velcro.

I have much more hope for the next generation of 3D printing, whatever that is

romwell2• 6 years ago

I disagree with that.

It has also transformed hobby/craft markets and arts. The only thing stopping it is UX at this point (you still need to have both craft and computer skills to use them).

I have very little use for paperclips, actually, but if I needed one, I could easily 3D print it. And that ability - to imagine things and have them come out of the machine - gives the magical empowering feeling that most of the people still have yet to encounter.

I disagree that it's a simple invention, though. The hardware is simple, yes, but it's nothing without software. And the software we need to make 3D printing less of an exercise in patience is simply not yet there, even now.

CAD is not accessible. Slicing is not accessible (sure, Cura will spit G-code without you doing anything - but what do you do when your print fails or falls apart because one of the myriad settings was not set right for this particular print?). Mesh leveling was not a thing on consumer 3D printers five years ago (!). Ditto for variable-width layers. And no slicers have the printhead follow curves in 3D, it's layer by layer in everything I've used, even if the model allows for something more.

What I'm saying is that that we don't have the software to utilize the existing simple hardware to its fullest potential. And without software, a 3D printer is a glorified glue gun.

(Sure, we could've had "3D-printing" pens a-la 3Doodler decades ago. They are fun, but hardly revolutionary).

AngryData5• 6 years ago

I sort of agree, however there are ways to print metal parts via a sintering process, and if your printer doubles as CNC to cleaning up critical surfaces even better. They just cost a lot of money, but that is changing, just like 3d printers becoming cheaper as the required parts become common commodities.

6nf3• 6 years ago

Plastic 3d printers are not that amazing. Sure you can prototype a bit faster but we have wonderful methods of mass producing plastic parts very cheaply and quickly. 3d printing of plastic is not that revolutionary for the industry.

Metal 3d printing is a different story, if that gets cheap enough it will be a real game changer. It's very expensive to make metal parts from solid and you can't use casting except for certain metals. If you could 3d print accurate steel parts cheaply and quickly it could actually replace expensive deductive production processes.

kragen11• 6 years ago

I followed the RepRap blogs closely during the late noughties, up to about 2010, and there was a lot more to it than just thinking of it, even 20 years after the FDM patent. The use of PLA simplified a lot of curling problems, but even so, rafts and brims were also necessary inventions without heated beds. The pinch gear extruder design took a lot of debugging. It took them years to get a reliable hotend design because they didn't know about Kapton, which also helped a lot with bed heating. Bed leveling, stringing, and filament diameter consistency were hugely underestimated problems. And a lot of trial and error was needed to get good slicing and PID parameters.

The end result of all this, plus some design errors from learning mechanical engineering as they went, was that for many years the mean time between failures on a RepRap was a few hours.

Other than that, yeah, you could have done it with a $30k PDP-8.

brandav• 6 years ago

transistor.

abrax314110• 6 years ago

Also not simple.

puranjay2• 6 years ago

The humble ball point pen.

People forget how cumbersome and/or expensive it was to write before cheap ball point pens became a thing. You had to use fountain pens. The cheap ones leaked and were an absolute mess to carry around. The ones that didn't leak were expensive.

I can now buy more pens for $100 than I'll ever use in years and just stash them everywhere I want

war102511• 6 years ago

I can now buy more pens for $100 than I'll ever use in years

I just checked and you can get a pack of 60 Bic Ballpoint pens for $4.50.

ralusek• 6 years ago

I mean it's one banana, Michael, what could it cost...10 dollars?

bawolff• 6 years ago

Well i don't think i use 1333 pens in "years", so math checks out

hoistbypetard4• 6 years ago

Haven't pencils always been inexpensive?

puranjay2• 6 years ago

Then you have to carry around a sharpener with you everywhere

Never seen anyone walking around with a pencil clipped to their shirt pocket.

inetknght• 6 years ago

Instead of leaking everywhere we now have a new problem: ink dries up before it's used and now they're landfill.

dublin9• 6 years ago

Fountain pens are the ultimate in no-waste - Clean them, refill them and keep using them. I have a handful, the oldest is 73 years old, but I have several that are around 50 years old. Cleaning, refilling with ink, and very rarely, a new nib (quality fountain pens have nibs coated with very hard metals that last for decades) keeps them going indefintely. Quality is worth the cost here, but by the late 1920s we knew how to build quality fountain pens that do not leak and definitely last!

greggyb3• 6 years ago

And now you can get a cheap fountain pen that won't leak and writes delightfully.

Financially, you're probably better off with hundreds of cheap Bics, but fountain pen ink lasts a long time.

inetsee• 6 years ago

I just started exploring fountain pens (inspired by a previous HN posting), and the feature that appeals to me the most is the variety of ink colors available for fountain pens. Most ballpoint pens seem to have just a handful of ink colors, but it seems to be possible to get a lot more colors for fountain pens, and some of the colors are really exotic.

RandallBrown3• 6 years ago

and writes delightfully

If you're right handed.

Fountain pens simply don't work for lefties, without writing in a completely unnatural way.

leipert• 6 years ago

How do you learn writing?

In Germany, as far as I know, everyone learns writing with foundation pens. You can search for images with „Schreiblernfüller“ to get an idea how they look.

MivLives• 6 years ago

Pencils mostly. It's not really common for kids to use pens outside of maybe drawing until later on at least not in the US.

ignoramous• 6 years ago

Not OP, but it is common in India for schools to ask kids to not use ball-points and use fountains instead.

AngryData5• 6 years ago

In the US ive never used or even seen anyone use a fountain pen, although ive heard of enthusiasts for them here.

biztos2• 6 years ago

O/T for inventions but:

I'm American and have lived in Germany a lot. In the 1970's in California, we learned to write with pencils.

By the time I was in high school and used pens (mostly ballpoints, some felt-tipped) and also typewriters, I thought of myself as a pretty serious stationery nerd.

Then I went to Germany and everybody at school used fountain pens, which I didn't even know how to fill! People probably thought I was an absolute barbarian, sticking to my ball-points.

Then came university: in America, at the end of the 80's, you would be considered rather unserious if you didn't at least type up your assignments. Computers were an option but the minimum effort was to type things, libraries had lovely quiet-ish electronic typewriters for that purpose.

And back I went to Germany, where -- at University! -- everybody was writing everything with those same damned Füller!

And now, in 2020, at least the kids still are. Drop into any McPaper[0] and you will see a ton of cheap plastic fountain pens for the school kids. (Fortunately for me, the roller ball has also taken pretty firm hold, and people don't look at you funny anymore for not carrying around an ink bottle.)

I have a really nice fountain pen, a Pelikan[1], and I almost never use it because I can't commit to thinking about the ink that much. In the end, the Germans out-nerded me.

[0]: Really, there's a chain called McPaper: http://www.mcpaper.de

[1] https://www.pelikan.com/pulse/Pulsar/en_US_INTL.Core.display...

musicale• 6 years ago

When I discovered fountain pens and small-nib felt tip calligraphy pens I switched to them for all correspondence and most note taking; I only use ball point pens when I have to. Even round/bullet point felt tip pens are better.

I would love to see felt tip calligraphy pens developed with more ink and a longer life.

m4635• 6 years ago

My FAVORITE of all time is the Pentel Energel 0.7mm gel pen.

Super low friction, no blotching, high contrast readable ink.

aaronblohowiak5• 6 years ago

The surface plate. Modern precision all stems from the concept of a flat reference. However, the technique to make a surface as flat as possible (which is based on simple geometry) was first discussed in the early 19th c.

In terms of profound impact on modernity, the metal screw-cutting lathe.

jvm_• 6 years ago

The 1751 Machine that Made Everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA

6nf3• 6 years ago

The metal lathe is not really a 'modern' invention is it?

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

There's an upward spiral of precision:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe#Modern_scr...

aaronblohowiak5• 6 years ago

The screw cutting metal lathe is within the time frame given by the OP.

kragen11• 6 years ago

I think the idea of grinding three surfaces against each other to make them flat dates to the Sumerians and may have been independently discovered in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

aaronblohowiak5• 6 years ago

Please cite your source about the three surfaces method dating back to Sumerians.

dsfyu404ed2• 6 years ago

I disagree. The modern (read:1800s) horizontal milling machine was really what enabled the industrial revolution. The kinds of parts you can make cheaply on a lathe is much less diverse than on a mill with proper tooling. Don't get me wrong, you need parts with circles but all the other shapes are what really enabled the industrial revolution. Mills and the complex shapes they can quickly create allowed us to cheaply crank out the tooling to make all sorts of things.

aaronblohowiak5• 6 years ago

it takes many many high precision screws to make a milling machine work, so I think you are making my point for me :)

dublin9• 6 years ago

I'd argue firearms are the most important mechanical devices, as they and their production led directly to interchangeable parts, mass production, and precision tooling of all kinds. The modern world is literally impossible without firearms. And yes, you can make crude firearms yourself, but good ones require more skill and capability.

fortran77• 6 years ago

One Click Ordering

yarone• 6 years ago

Contact Lenses. My favorite and most day-to-day useful technology.

adv0r• 6 years ago

roundabouts

kwhitefoot6• 6 years ago

The telegraph and the telephone. The enabled economies of scale and speed of decision making that were not possible before.

axilmar• 6 years ago

This. This is what enabled our modern world. None of what the other mentions would be possible without communications.

wiggles_md• 6 years ago

The Toyota Way. Totally transformed manufacturing.

superkitty3• 6 years ago

calculator

danielovichdk• 6 years ago

Toothbrush.

0xff00ffee• 6 years ago

The latex condom.

nodivbyzero• 6 years ago

Electric battery

abrax314110• 6 years ago

As elsewhere, making a non-trivial battery ain't so simple.

mongol• 6 years ago

Would be interesting to hear about most famous inventions in other countries. From Sweden, or Swedish inventors: Dynamite. The sun valve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_valve). The milk separator. Tetrahedron-shaped plastic-coated paper carton packaging. The self aligning ball bearing. All these were part of early history of what became larger companies existing to this day.

The adjustable spanner, the zipper and the propeller are also sometimes mentioned in this category within Sweden, but are the also referring to inventors with partly Swedish origin or for improvements of previous designs.

hoistbypetard4• 6 years ago

I think the soldering iron has to be in the hunt on all three (important, modern, simple) counts.

mNovak2• 6 years ago

Sort of implies that electricity was really the important innovation, to warrant the need for soldering? (Unless I'm totally missing the important application of soldering.)

I'd argue basic electric applications are pretty simple, and easily made by hand.

AWildC1823• 6 years ago

Sort of implies that copper smelting was really the important innovation, to warrant the need for electricity?

In all seriousness though, the printed circuit board might be a good one to bundle with that. The old methods of creating a mechanically robust compact electrical package were nowhere near as efficient. They're also very recent and very easy to make yourself, even if it's thin plywood with tinfoil glued on.

hoistbypetard4• 6 years ago

Electricity is obviously fundamental.

But I think that soldering (and the PCB, as @AWildC182 pointed out) facilitated certain widespread uses of electricity like radio and television that wouldn't have been democratized quite the way they were without it. i.e. TVs and radios would've had to hew to size and assembly labor restrictions of screw terminals and such.

jvanderbot3• 6 years ago

Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times.

Materially ... Well, "yourself" precludes anything computerized, unless you mean "program". It also precludes a huge range of materials science advances.

Technically, you can make steel and concrete yourself with enough real-world minecrafting, and good steel or concrete is probably hands down the most important factor in all our chemical, structural, and industrial processes.

Luckily there's a book with the most important inventions to re-engineer a complex, sustainable society called The Knowledge, and just about everything in there is build-able by a determined individual or small group (until you get to modern things). Not suprisingly, it mostly focuses on agriculture, medicine, steel, and concrete.

gwbas1c2• 6 years ago

Hand washing

Hand washing isn't modern by any stretch of the imagination. Promoting it is modern, though.

jvanderbot3• 6 years ago

Oops, you are correct. The modern connection to germ theory is most important.

ReedJessen• 6 years ago

Even then... Our Muslim friends have been promoting regular hand washing since the 600's CE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wudu

kragen11• 6 years ago

This book should be called The Misinformation. It omits crucial safety information and other details about many of the processes it mentions, and the author doesn't maintain a public list of known errata; it's entertainment, not education.

Three better alternatives: the Primitive Technology channel on YouTube, the Boy Scouts Handbook, and Wikipedia, which you can download as .zim files for offline reference. Other relevant YouTube channels include AvE, CodysLab, and Applied Science; in more specific areas you have NileRed, Abom79, Ben Eater, EEVblog, This Old Tony, GreatScott, ElectroBOOM, and NurdRage. Unlike the book you're recommending, they are by people who know how to do the things they are explaining, show their errors, and include the relevant calculations. There are other channels like How To Make Everything and King of Random which do not; they are entertaining but deadly.

General-purpose know-how books have gone out of fashion, though we still have the CRC Handbook and the Machinery's Handbook. In the 19th century there were a bunch of books like Dick's Encyclopedia of practical receipts and processes (ripped off, I think, from Cooley’s, or possibly vice versa) which covers a wide range of topics at a level sufficient to enable you to practice them; you could probably build a fair bit of Victorian technology from the recipes in Dick’s. (You aren't going to get a loom out of it, though; for that, see The Mechanism of Weaving, but YouTube is far superior.) I think the equivalent is more difficult to-day.

jvanderbot3• 6 years ago

Very good references! Thank you!

I do think the author tried to relay concepts and hints, rather than recipes. Given the compactness, a group of people starting largely from scratch and taking the book on faith could figure out a lot of stuff.

TimSchumann4• 6 years ago

Add The Essential Craftsman and Frank Howarth to that list to round out the woodworking skills.

One point you’re spot on about though, AvE is and will always be the absolute crème de la crème of the yous tubes.

eternalny1• 6 years ago

Hand washing. Modern disease control and prevention is borderline magic. Hand-washing is clearly the most important lifesaving and disease preventing invention in modern times.

I was recently in the hospital and was shocked at how often they used the hand-sanitizers.

The staff at all levels used them after literally everything.

I'm a former commercial pilot so I get the idea of having stuff drilled into your brain.

But I mean everyone from the food staff who delivered breakfast, to the orderlies who made the bed, to the doctors who touched nothing, would instinctively go to the anti-bacterial hand sanitizer on the wall, press it with their elbow, rub their hands, and leave the room.

It was pretty wild.

Balgair• 6 years ago

I volunteered in a hospital. They have competitions with 'secret shopper' nurses and admins. The prizes can be pretty good. A co-volunteer got ~$100.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

The benefits of washing your hands depends on a fairly large set of other improvements and inventions.

For most of history the water available was frequently contaminated with human and animal waste, along with whatever your local tanner was dumping in. Fixing that was a prerequisite to making hand washing useful.

And then there is the soap issue. While soap certainly has a long history, it was often unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Cloths were traditionally washed with urine.

naasking• 6 years ago

Alcohol might be easier than soap in those cases.

m4635• 6 years ago

Lister - the namesake of the (unrelated) Listerine.

gumby2• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t call it a recent invention although it might be recent in the west, but plenty of cultures in South Asia, Iran, and muslim world (at the very least) considered hand washing crucial for basic hygiene.

gwbas1c2• 6 years ago

Electricity: The ability to send energy down a wire, and then to have energy available "on tap" at any moment.

Many of the inventions I see listed here rely on some form of electricity.

hooande3• 6 years ago

The phonograph. The idea of "record something and play it again later" has significantly impacted all of our lives, and was barely even imagined prior to invention

dublin9• 6 years ago

^^THIS^^ is one of the best answers here. There's no doubt the ancient Greeks could have built a phonograph - the Anitkythera mechanism is proof.

acoye• 6 years ago

Compressor, so we can have refrigeration and feed million of people safely between other things.

pyfgcrl123• 6 years ago

How about electromechanical relay switch. As far as digital electronics goes, relay can, with some mental gymnastics, be considered grandfather of transistor (which, in turn, is one of the most important inventions of all time, but too complicated).

lebuffon2• 6 years ago

They were invented (I believe) to "relay" telegraph messages over long lines so it was indeed a digital amplifier. (Former Western Union employee)

zh3• 6 years ago

The drill and digger (for fossil fuel).

"Important" is perhaps a loaded word in this case.

dublin9• 6 years ago

Howard Hughes Sr's tricone rock bit truly revolutionized the world, and made the oil and gas industry possible. It's success was staggering: only a few years after he dropped dead of a heart attack, his son Howard, Jr (the one you usually think of) took over the company and was personally making over a million dollars a day - In the depths of the Depression!

lebuffon2• 6 years ago

I think the concept (rather than an invention) of negative feedback is very important. By that I mean envisioning that a machine can change it's own behaviour. This seems to have not been understood with early steam engines. People had to manually control valves to operate the first steam engines used as pumps in the U.K. James Watt and Mathew Bolton realized that coupling the output to the steam control valve would make it cycle automagically,

This concept permeates modern design so we don't always see it for the important development that it is IMHO.

abecedarius• 6 years ago

Good idea, but there was feedback control in antiquity.

superkitty3• 6 years ago

Amazon prime!

superkitty3• 6 years ago

Whatsapp!

kingkawn• 6 years ago

Rivets

Ingenious Mechanism + strong as hell

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivet

somberi• 6 years ago

For me: Electric Kettle, Umbrella and Bicycle.

I have used them for the last 45 years in the same shape and form.

If you gave me any of the "older" models from 40 years ago, the utility value will be similar to what I buy from the store today.

akgerber2• 6 years ago

The bicycle is only debatably simple, considering that it's the culmination of quite a few relatively-advanced technologies and processes: steelmaking, pneumatic tires, interchangeable parts, ball bearings, bowden cables, etc.

InitialLastName2• 6 years ago

Don't forget about very smooth roads, without which you would want even more technology.

glitchc• 6 years ago

Microwave. Self-explanatory.

ZguideZ2• 6 years ago

Canning and food preservation. It used to be all about salt salt salt.

divbzero• 6 years ago

The modern flush toilet. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush_toilet

Technically invented in the 1500s but not widely produced until the 1800s.

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

And of limited use without something to hook it up to.

The toilet itself is an input (or depending on your perspective, output) device. Without the additional process it's connected to, it doesn't buy you much.

London's first flush toilets were connected to existing cesspits, in the late 19th century. Connection to the (storm-water-handling) sewers was an unauthorised hack by plumbers of the day. Tim Harford has covered this in his podcast on major inventions.

jshowa3• 6 years ago

scientific method

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

Wood pulp paper, dimensional lumber (and related framing methods), and I see someone already mentioned the AM radio.

The manipulation of the aether thoroughly meets your definition of modernity, and the principles of constructing a simple radio aren't terribly complicated.

sedigive• 6 years ago

It's not the inventions that are most important but the thinking processes and curiosity that continue to investigate, tinker, design, and test new ideas and processes. Humans are problem solvers by nature and by survival instinct. Every invention is a product of the mind.

bravoetch• 6 years ago

The bicycle. I'm stunned it didn't come along earlier.

eucryphia• 6 years ago

Running hot water.

derefr2• 6 years ago

Apropos time to link my favorite blog: https://rootsofprogress.org/. It's an exploration of the things that helped humanity leap forward.

Spoilers: empirically-informed hygiene, and textile manufacturing techniques.

maxioatic• 6 years ago

Rubber o-rings, or as a generalization, rubber gaskets.

They allow the use of fluids in an extremely wide range of applications.

Also, unfortunately they led to the Challenger explosion in 1986.

sevilo3• 6 years ago

Pads and tampons. Some argue these are environmentally unfriendly and produce too much waste, but you have to think, not everyone is privileged enough to own a washing machine in their own home, particularly those in 2nd and 3rd world countries. I genuinely believed pads and tampons allowed women to be more productive in the work force and eventually lead to more equality, just hearing my mom and grandma's story of having to hand wash your own bloody (literally) period bands gives me nightmares, that was in the 70s, not that long ago.

kamakazizuru3• 6 years ago

I agree with pads & tampons being a great invention. Can we however please finally stop referring to "2nd and 3rd world" countries. Get on a plane - things are more similar than different in most parts of the world, stop perpetuating dated notions.

fudged712• 6 years ago

On your last point: Having recently returned from rural africa where girls miss significant amount of school for lack of pads & tampons (still), I can't exactly agree with this sentiment.

Edit: if you care to read more or donate, check these out http://www.zanaafrica.org https://www.huruinternational.org

Grustaf5• 6 years ago

When did you last visit a country where the gdp per capita is a few hundred dollars? Trust me, it’s pretty different.

air72• 6 years ago

These terms don't mean 2nd and 3rd tier countries. At least they didn't used to.

The three-world model arose during the Cold War to define countries aligned with NATO (the First World), the Eastern Bloc (the Second World, although this term was less used), or neither (the Third World). Strictly speaking, "Third World" was a political, rather than an economic, grouping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

sevilo3• 6 years ago

Get on a plane? Please, I'm from a plane. Being able to live in these highly developed western countries is a massive privilege. And trust me, a lot of things you take for granted these days, say birth control pills or IUD for women, are still frowned upon and not the easiest to access in China unless you're married, despite its development in the last 20 years. And even relatives who are making good earnings still wash their dishes by hand and dry their clothes with air, restaurants and food handling have little health inspection standards unless you're at a 5 star hotel. And I'm not talking about the rural parts of China, I'm talking about some of the most developed cities.

blompa3• 6 years ago

As an alternative to "2nd/3rd" or "developing" countries, I really like the "Four Levels of Global Income" model[0] that Hans Rosling put forth in his book Factfulness[1] (a must-read IMO).

It gives a much clearer perspective on how people live (and as you mentioned, how similarly people live across the world amongst the same income levels)

[0] https://www.gapminder.org/topics/four-income-levels/ [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Factfulness-Reasons-World-Things-Bett...

gridspy• 6 years ago

I think the most important prerequisite to being a parent is the desire to be a parent.

maerF0x0• 6 years ago

I dont think "you can pretty much build it yourself" applies here.

JustSomeNobody• 6 years ago

... safer and more healthy ...

Not for that dead child.

I think the most important prerequisite to being a parent is the desire to be a parent.

I don’t disagree with this. Thankfully adoption exists.

blompa3• 6 years ago

Menstrual cups are a step up from this!

They produce much less waste, are much less messy (almost never leak), and don't need to be changed as often (once every 6 - 12 hours and without the TSS risks that tampons have).

It's better to use running water to wash them out, but simply wiping them with tissue paper can work too (albeit a little messily), if water is scarce.

A downside that I've read about however is that just like with tampons, some cultures consider inserting anything into the vagina as losing your virginity so using them may be considered taboo.

sevilo3• 6 years ago

True. On your last point, I think that actually makes pads a more significant invention over tampons and menstrual cups, because it allowed women in very conservative cultures where losing your virginity before marriage is considered taboo, to still able to go about their normal daily actives during periods. Interesting me and friends from elementary school in China were never taught to use tampons, tampons and menstrual cups didn't become a thing until very recently.

2rsf• 6 years ago

without the TSS risks that tampons have

consumer reports disagrees with you

[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/women-s-health/menstrual-cup...

lubujackson• 6 years ago

You could also say the bra.

Less of a hygienic product for sure, bras spelled the end of corsets and really helped usher in many changes that led to a big increase in personal freedoms for women (both physically and socially).

kingca• 6 years ago

Hey, I would love to learn more about this. How did bras usher in a bunch of physical and social changes in freedoms for women? I'm not too read-up on any of these topics but I'm incredibly interested.

andreygrehov• 6 years ago

I live in New York and the majority of my friends do not have washing machine in their home. In fact, it’s a luxury to have one. In contrast, I’m originally from Ukraine where not having a washing machine is weird to say the least. There are many things that would make me call US a 2nd world country, so I’m having a hard time understanding which countries are 1st world countries.

ARandomerDude• 6 years ago

Wow. I've lived in the US all my life and I've never heard of a majority of anyone's social group not having a washing machine.

Have others experienced this? If so, in what city?

noelsusman• 6 years ago

This is only a thing in extremely dense, expensive American cities. Most Americans have washing machines in their home.

karaterobot• 6 years ago

After WWII, there were two superpowers splitting the world between them: the first world was the NATO West, and the second world was the Soviet East. Countries who were unaligned, or not considered sufficiently important, made up the so-called third world. If these terms ever meant anything, they don't anymore, and they certainly have nothing (directly) to do with washing machines!

woadwarrior01• 6 years ago

Although the terms first, second and third world are often used to connote standards of living, that’s not the original sense[1] in which these terms were coined. They were Cold War era terms used to classify countries into Western bloc, Soviet bloc and the countries not aligned with either of the aforementioned blocks. And going by measure, the US could never be a 2nd world country :)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_World

kilotaras• 6 years ago

One thing is the fact that it's expected to have both washing machine and dryer in US. This leads to additional space and ventilation requirements.

The solution would of course be ditching the dryer, but not both.

sys_64738• 6 years ago

Shoelaces. Without them we'd be tied in knots.

fudged712• 6 years ago

Biogas reactors

Silage

Pads/Tampons

Wearable Pedometers and Heart Rate sensors

callmeed• 6 years ago

I recommend reading How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

https://www.amazon.com/How-We-Got-Now-Innovations/dp/1594633...

Boll4• 6 years ago

The menstrual cup.

It is definitely more ecological and practical, without any chemicals or fragrance that are found in tampons / pads these days. I definitely see it as a more affordable (the initial cost is higher, but think long-run) solution.

meekaaku• 6 years ago

Not post 1700, Luca Pacioli's double entry accounting is simple but extremly effective one.

shubidubi• 6 years ago

A/C Productivity, mortality and convince.

tylerjwilk00• 6 years ago

. Duct Tape

. Bungie Straps

. Zip Ties

Not necessarily in that order.

mishal153• 6 years ago

Mosquito net. Modern cities may not find use for them but there is a pretty big chunk of world's population for whom this simple item is indispensable. Its cheap. Protects against diseases like malaria, dengue etc. And definitely helps with getting a good sleep. Many villagers in India build it themselves for the community and i hope it stays that way. I know its is popular in the subcontinent (India,pakistan, bangladesh, sri lanka.) Would love to know if other countries also use them

lowdose• 6 years ago

The wheels under the suitcase. Somebody came up with that idea after we got a man on the moon.

TomMckenny• 6 years ago

The cargo container: it has changed the entire planet culturally, economically and geopolitically. It would be hard to count the percentage of every day objects most people use world wide that owe their availability or existence to that standardized metal box.

RandallBrown3• 6 years ago

The invention there was more standardization than the actual box. Cargo boxes have existed as long as people have had cargo.

philwelch• 6 years ago

Sure but having a massive steel box that can be craned onto a truck or train provides a lot of value. So does the fact that the boxes are indistinguishable and locking. Theft by stevedores used to be a massive global tax on trade.

the_arun• 6 years ago

The basic ground breaking conceptual innovation is - "self serve".

The innovations with respect to tools - either support or serve that basic need.

All hygiene tools - Nail cutters, Contact Lenses, tooth pick, soap, tooth brush, shaving blade may fall in this category.

If we step little outside - I feel bicycle is one of the biggest innovation which triggered modern day - self serve - without depending on/troubling animals.

achenatx• 6 years ago

plumbing and sewers increased life expectancy more than any other improvement.

After that maybe the steam engine, electric generator, light bulb

batoure• 6 years ago

Waterless urinals

gumby2• 6 years ago

The limited liability corporation

bdowling• 6 years ago

This. The ability for investors to fund risky business ventures without being personally liable for the debts of the venture is what enabled the industrial revolution and led to most of the other inventions on this list.

Number two is casualty and other types of insurance.

sjwright• 6 years ago

At the risk of being controversial, perhaps the most modern simple invention is the internet and its ability to let randoms ask a basic question and have a thousand people contribute hundreds of cumulative man-hours to answering it.

(Maybe I'm being cynical, but I feel like the OP is asking this question for reasons beyond pure curiosity.)

WalterBright4• 6 years ago

Engines - replacement of muscle power. A steam engine isn't that hard to make (I built one in high school).

The Romans got pretty far without it, but it's hard to see them going further.

ken5• 6 years ago

I disagree: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/03/history-of-human-powe...

"There is no limit to the weight that humans can lift by sheer muscle power. Nor is there a limit to the height to which this weight can be lifted. The only advantage that [powered] cranes have brought us is a higher lifting speed."

We moved to engines because they were cheaper, not because we were anywhere near the limits of muscle power.

WalterBright4• 6 years ago

The history of the industrial revolution since the advent of the steam engine amply makes my point.

SamReidHughes• 6 years ago

The reason they have a higher lifting speed is because they have more power. In a directly proportionate sense. Lifting speed is literally power divided by weight.

dublin9• 6 years ago

Interestingly, the Romans might have entered the steam age if their empire had lasted just another few decades - there's a lot of evidence they were on the verge of an industrial revolution - look at their early water-powered textile and grain mills, which weren't seen again for centuries.

WalterBright4• 6 years ago

They could have built one, but the concept just never seemed to occur to them.

kraig911• 6 years ago

The invention of speech or is that to 'old'

pgt• 6 years ago

Soap

DoingIsLearning• 6 years ago

1953 -'Ambu' bags i.e. 'bag valve masks'

They are as simple as it gets but have saved millions of lives.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag_valve_mask

acd10j• 6 years ago

General Purpose Computers,It single handed accelerated lots of industries.

sunstone• 6 years ago

The toilet and sewer system has got to be down there somewhere.

bouncycastle• 6 years ago

Screws!

Or more accurately, the ability to mass produce them.

mn1024• 6 years ago

Pacifier

mikro2nd• 6 years ago

Mains sewerage.

awaze• 6 years ago

Equally important is contraception and elective abortion. Being able to control the timing of raising a family allows a much higher degree of freedom and also ensures a safer and more healthy environment to raise a child. I think the most important prerequisite to being a parent is the desire to be a parent. https://www.awazeuttarpradesh.com/blog/1337x/

s3nnyy• 6 years ago

Wheels on suitcases (taken from antifragile by N.Taleb)

manoj_venkat92• 6 years ago

Printing press. Without it, spread of knowledge would've been dwarfed and it put the industrial revolution in its full swing.

mjd3• 6 years ago

I'm late to the party, but I think the winner is the bra.

Wikipedia says:

The Dresden-based German, Christine Hardt, patented the first modern brassiere in 1899. Sigmund Lindauer from Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, Germany, developed a brassiere for mass production and patented it in 1912. In the United States, Mary Phelps Jacob received a patent in 1914 for the first brassiere design that is recognized as the basis for modern bras.
A bra is one of the most complicated garments to make. A typical design has between 20 and 48 parts, including the band, gore, side panel, cup, apex, neckline, underwire, strap, ring, slider, strap join, and closure.

Duke-Nukem-64• 6 years ago

Modern day plumbing/water/waste management. Clean water comes in, waste goes out. Don't have to give two thoughts about it.

nojvek• 6 years ago

Basic hygiene. Washing hands and yourself with hot water and soap. Not exchanging needles. Covering your mouth before sneezing. Tampons / pads, toilet tissue (although I prefer a faucet and doing a first pass with water. More hygienic and less tissue used. Also much better for the bottom)

Vaccines, anti-biopics and good hygiene and sanitary practices have doubled our average life span.

With a long life we’ve been able to achieve a lot more. Women have been more productive, we’ve created more wealth, have fewer children so each child has more resources and opportunities.

The state of US healthcare really makes me sad, but I’m hopeful we’ll keep on learning more about the human body and engineer more ways of fixing it and making us all live a longer, healthier, wealthier, happier life.

ImaTigger• 6 years ago

Ice making (someone else said refrigeration, but this is more specific).

Ask HN: What’s the most important modern simple invention?

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