Great Inventions — the ideas that changed us
Who invented the wheel, the printing press, the electric light, the telephone and the internet — and what each one changed for everyone. Ages 7–10.
Ages 7–10
What's inside
The Wheel — the first machine
The wheel is so ordinary that it is almost invisible, and yet somebody had to think of it first. It appeared in Mesopotamia around 5,500 years ago, in the land that is now Iraq. Before it, everything you owned had to be carried, dragged or left behind.
The Printing Press — copy-paste, in 1450
Before printing, every single book in Europe was copied out by hand, one letter at a time, usually by monks. A single Bible could take a scribe most of a year, so books were rarer and pricier than a horse. Then a German goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg worked out how to print pages by machine, and knowledge suddenly went cheap.
The Electric Light — the end of darkness
For almost all of human history, when the sun went down the day was basically over. People used firelight, candles and smoky oil lamps that were dim, smelly and dangerous. Then, around 1879, a glass bulb with a glowing thread inside made night-time safe, bright and useful.
The Telephone — voices across the world
Before the telephone, if someone you loved lived far away, you wrote a letter and waited weeks for a reply. In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell patented a device that could carry a human voice along a wire. For the first time in history, you could hear a friend who was not in the room.
The Internet — the world, connected
The internet is not a place or a company; it is millions of computers all agreeing to pass messages along for each other. It began in 1969 as a link between a few university computers in the United States. Today it connects more than five billion people, and most of it runs through cables lying on the seabed.
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