 For eons humankind has had ideas some are winners and some hmm. Well, you get the point And as the idea of inventions goes there's the classification for the stuff You see while consuming a bucket of ice cream at 2 a.m. While watching whatever channel happens to be still broadcasting and those inventions that have literally changed the course of humankind Don't get us wrong. Cheapets are awesome and everything. They just lack that Tesla sparkle You are about to witness five inventions that change the world At five and where would we be without it? electricity The truth about the discovery of electricity is a bit more complex than the old story We've come accustomed to of Franklin flying his kite. It actually goes back more than 2,000 years 600 BC The ancient Greeks discover that rubbing fur on amber causes an attraction between the two and so what the Greeks Discovered was actually static electricity To further support the argument that Franklin hit on an idea that was already well in use long before him was the 1930s archaeological discovery of pots with sheets of copper inside Researchers were able to determine they were in fact ancient batteries and it's likely Persians were using them to produce light By the 17th century many other electricity related discoveries had been made such as the invention of an early electrostatic generator And with that the discovery of the differentiation between positive and negative currents and the classification of materials as conductors or insulators In the year 1600 English physician William Gilbert used the Latin word Electricus to describe the force that certain substances exert when rubbed against each other a few years later another English scientist Thomas Brown wrote several books and he used the word electricity to describe his investigations based on Gilbert's work In 1752 Ben Franklin conducted his famous experiment with a kite a key in a storm This simply proved that lightning and tiny electric sparks with the same thing all lamps aside Italian physicist Alessandro Volta discovered that particular chemical reactions could produce electricity and in 1800 he constructed the Voltaic pile which produced a steady electric current And so he was the first person to create a steady flow of electrical charge Volta also created the first transmission of electricity by linking positively charged and negatively charged connectors and driving an electrical charge or voltage through them His name is now our standard for measurement the volt in 1831 Electricity became viable for use in technology when Michael Faraday created the electric dynamo a crude power generator Which solved the problem of generating electric current in an ongoing and practical way Faraday's rather crude invention used a magnet that was moved inside a coil of copper wire creating a tiny electric current that flowed through the wire This opened the door to American Thomas Edison and British scientist Joseph Swan who each invented the incandescent filament light bulb in their respective countries in about 1878 Previously light bulbs had been invented by others But the incandescent light bulb was the first practical bulb that would light for hours on end In at four the wheel If there's any invention that automatically causes association to primitive caveman level technology It's unfairly the wheel Sure, we had round things for thousands of years But using those round things to advance humankind took a stroke of brilliance and that stroke happened Approximately 6,000 years ago the Bronze Age The tricky thing about the wheel was not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge It was how to use it and control it The stroke of brilliance was the wheel and axle concept The success of the whole structure was extremely sensitive to the size of the axle a thick axle would generate too much friction While a narrow one would reduce friction, but would also be too weak to support a load The sensitivity of the wheel and axle system to all these factors meant that it could not have been developed in phases Whoever invented it must have had access to wide slabs of wood from thick trunked trees in order to carve large round wheels They also needed metal tools to chisel fine fitted holes and axles and they must have had a need for hauling heavy burdens over land The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once in one place However from that place it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure Where it originated Number three on our list wireless technology in the early 1890s Nikola Tesla began research into high-frequency electricity During his visit to the Paris Exposition University in 1889 Tesla learned of Hertz's experiments with electromagnetic waves using coils and spark gaps and proceeded to duplicate those experiments Tesla came to the conclusion that Maxwell Lodge and Hertz were wrong in their findings that airborne Electromagnetic waves were being transmitted and instead attributed it to what he called electrostatic thrusts with the real signals being conducted by Earth's curds In 1891 he developed an apparatus that produced 15,000 cycles per second and developed his own very large air-gapped coil now known as a Tesla coil Tesla's primary interest in the wireless phenomena was as a power distribution system By 1892 he was delivering lectures on high-potential high-frequency alternate currents and went on to demonstrate wireless lighting in 1893 including lighting Geisler tubes wirelessly Tesla proposed this wireless technology could be developed into a system for the telecommunication of information Nikola like many scientists of that time thought even if radio waves existed They would probably only travel in straight lines making them useless for long-range transmission His lab work and later large-scale experiments at Colorado Springs Led him to the conclusion that a worldwide wireless system would have to use the earth itself as the means to conduct the signal to overcome this limitation He went on to try to implement his ideas of power transmission and wireless Telecommunication in his very large warden cliff tower project Tesla also developed a radio-controlled boat with secure communication between transmitter and receiver which he demonstrated in 1898 Tesla called his boat a tele-automation At two the jet engine There are a handful of moments that can truly be said to have changed not just the course of history But also the way we live One was when Alexander Graham Bell spoke down an electrified wire in 1876 and the telephone was born another was a day in 1825 when George Stephenson fired up his new steam locomotive and created the modern railway and A third was an early evening in the darkest days of World War two When a young RAF officer from Coventry watched as 12 years of hard work came to fruition and his aptly named pioneer thundered into the sky in The heavily guarded secrecy of a Lincolnshire air base Frank Whittle had just invented jet travel The history of modern flight falls into two phases The first began on the day the Wright brothers made the first controlled powered flight in 1903 and the second started in that Lincolnshire twilight on May 15th, 1941 Thanks to Frank Whittle the world shrunk. We are all travelers We are all the beneficiaries of this modest warwickshire genius who took on the aviation establishment and changed the world that day as Churchill noted at the time quote get me a thousand whittles and Number one on our list the internet on October 4th 1907 the Soviet Union launched the world's first man-made satellite into orbit a satellite called Sputnik it didn't do much except to travel the planet sending beeps from its radio transmitter while scaring the heck out of Americans in the process But it did spawn the great space race It was a time of cold war between two superpowers Both with itchy nuclear trigger fingers and both sides knowing the terrible vacuum of space would be the stage to which the Combatants would face off or hopefully never Certainly the ever oppressive idea of nuclear attack from above provided a series of horrific scenarios that would keep both Scientists and military experts awake and sweating in their respective beds or bunks One scenario was what might happen in the event of a Soviet attack on the nation's telephone system Just one missile they feared could destroy the whole network of lines and wires that made efficient long-distance communication possible in 1962 a scientist from MIT and ARPA named JCR Licklitter proposed a solution to this problem a galactic network of computers that could talk to one another Such a network would enable government leaders to communicate even if the Soviets destroyed the telephone system in 1965 another MIT scientists developed a way of sending information from one computer to another called packet switching Packet switching breaks data down into blocks or packets before sending it to its destination That way each packet can take its own route from place to place without ever being vulnerable to relying on one direct connection In 1969 ARPA net delivered its first message a node to node communication from one computer to another But it would take almost 10 years later for a computer scientist named Vincent surf to solve the main problem of how to get all Those network computers to actually connect and talk to each other The invention was transmission control protocol or TCP the non-technical term is the handshake that introduces distant and different computers to each other in a virtual space Surf's protocol transformed the internet into a worldwide network Throughout the 1980s researchers and scientists used it to send files and data from one computer to another But the internet that we all know didn't actually exist until 1991 That year a computer programmer in Switzerland named Tim Berners-Lee introduced the worldwide web an Internet that wasn't just about sending files from one place to another But was itself a web of information that anyone with access to the internet could retrieve and Those are our top five inventions that changed the world Thanks for watching and remember The ways by which we arrive at knowledge are hardly less wonderful in the discovery of these things themselves