Global Future


	January 31st, 2000

The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years
John Brockman (Editor)
Simon & Schuster, New York (2000)

A small number of inventions made civilization, expanded knowledge, and allowed us to achieve.

Book Review © Dr. Terry J. van der Werff, CMC

The millennial fever of the past few months has mostly subsided. In its wake was a vast outpouring of thoughts on persons of the century or millennium and predictions about the future. No one with access to a newspaper or television could have failed to notice. A positive side effect was to stimulate thoughts about significant people, places, events, books, art, ideas, and things.

I stumbled across edge.org, which John Brockman moderates, as the hundred or so essays which constitute this book were being debated last year. He has done a great service in presenting them to the reading public. The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2,000 Years is a pot-pourri, ranging from the familiar - printing press, electric motor, computer - to the less familiar, even offbeat - thermos, eraser, classical music, hay. Each essay sparkles. Only the dullest of readers will fail to learn and be entertained by a book that invites dipping in for an essay or two.

Every few pages some wonderful phrasing caused me to see something in an entirely new way. A few examples:

"Farming, defined broadly, is the management of environment in ways that increase the human food supply." (Colin Tudge on "The Plow")
"And so the history of disease has been altered by moving the month- or year-long dispersal of disease to a timescale of hours." (Richard Potts on "Flying Machines")
"Music is a free invention of the human spirit, less dependent upon physical or physiological inventions than most other contrivances." (Howard Gardner on "Classical Music")
"Speech allows us to share and compare internal models of the external world, an ability that gave the human species a huge selective advantage." (Randolph Nesse on "Printing")
"Without grass in winter, you could not have horses, and without horses you could not have urban civilization." (Freeman Dyson on "Hay")
"If money is the blood and markets are the circulatory system of the global economy, then double-entry accounting ledgers are the nerve cells that control and respond to changes in the flow of money." (Gordon Gould on "Double-Entry Accounting")

Here are my five choices for the most significant inventions of the last two millennia:

	Indo-Arabic number system, including zero - science is unthinkable without it.
	Waterworks - clean water and waste disposal are more important for health than medicine.
	Printing press - which caused an explosion of literacy.
	Telescope & microscope - only by seeing things can we ask questions about their meaning.
	Otto von Guericke's static electricity globe - the first machine to produce electricity.

Read this book. You'll be better for it.

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