Here is the list of greatest inventions of all time that changed the world for good..since each one is enormously important, one should not put them in any order..according to me these are the inventions which hampered the world the most..
1. The Wheel, 3500BC
The wheel surely deserves a place near the top of any "greatest inventions" list; a post-industrial world without it is inconceivable. Its invention was perhaps inevitable, but it came later than it might have done; several civilisations, including the Incas and the Aztecs did pretty well without wheels. The earliest evidence of a wheel – a pictograph from Sumeria (modern day Iraq) – dates from 3500BC; the device rolled West soon after that.
2. Fire, 590,000BC
Fire, like air or water, is nothing new – but the ability to control it is. Well, quite new. Evidence suggests early man used fire more than a million years ago, but the earliest signs that we had learned to command it date from nearly 800,000 years ago. Archaeologists at a dig in Israel in 2004 discovered clusters of burnt flint tools, evidence of hearths or campfires. The ability to start fire in a flash only came with the invention of the match in 1827.
3. The Light Bulb, 1809
Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Alva Edison didn't "invent" the light bulb, but rather he improved upon a 50-year-old idea. In 1809, Humphry Davy, an English chemist, invented the first electric light. In 1878, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, an English physicist, was the first person to invent a practical and longer-lasting electic lightbulb (13.5 hours) with a carbon fiber filament. In 1879, Thomas Alva Edison invented a carbon filament that burned for forty hours.
4. Printing press, 1454
For the large part of modern civilisation, the written word reigned supreme as the only means of communication. The Chinese were the world's first printers – they practised block printing as early as 500 AD – but a German goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg was the first to construct a press that comprised moveable metal type, which, when laid over ink, could print repeatedly on to paper. In 1454 he used the revolutionary system to print 300 bibles, of which 48 copies survive, each worth millions of pounds.
5. The Telephone, 1875
The telephone is an instrument that converts voice and sound signals into electrical impulses for transmission by wire to a different location, where another telephone receives the electrical impulses and turns them back into recognizable sounds. In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell built the first telephone that transmitted electrically the human voice.
6. Television In 1884, Paul Nipkow sent images over wires using a rotating metal disk technology with 18 lines of resolution. Television then evolved along two paths, mechanical based on Nipkow's rotating disks, and electronic based on the cathode ray tube. American Charles Jenkins and Scotsman John Baird followed the mechanical model while Philo Farnsworth, working independently in San Francisco, and Russian émigré Vladimir Zworkin, working for Westinghouse and later RCA, advanced the electronic model.
7. PC(Personal Computer), 1977
The computers IBM were producing for businesses as early as the late 1950s cost about $100,000 (almost £500,000 today), so the idea of one in every home remained a dream. But that changed in the 1970s when a group of chip-wielding geeks based in California began tinkering in garages. One of the brightest techies operating in what is now dubbed Silicon Valley was Steve Jobs, whose Apple II, launched in 1977, was the first consumer PC to resemble the machines that went on to transform our lives.
8.The internet, 1969
The simplest way to illustrate the inestimable impact of the internet is to chart the growth in the number of people connected to it: from just four in 1969 to 50,000 in 1988; a million by 1991 and 500 million by 2001. And today - 1.2 billion, or 19 per cent of the world's population. Conceived by the US Department of Defense in the 1960s, the internet, together with the World Wide Web, invented in 1989 by Brit techie, Tim Berners-Lee, has shrunk the world like no other invention.
9. The Camera, 1814
In 1814, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first photographic image with a camera obscura, however, the image required eight hours of light exposure and later faded. Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre is considered the inventor of the first practical process of photography in 1837.
10. Condom, 1640
Egyptians donned them 3,000 years ago and the 16th-century Italian gynaecologist Gabriele Falloppio (he of the tubes) first advocated their use to prevent the spread of disease. The earliest remains of a condom, which date from 1640, were discovered in Dudley. In modern times, condoms, which until the 1960s were made from animal gut, have allowed generations of couples to avoid unwanted pregnancies and saved an inestimable number of lives by preventing the spread of diseases such as Aids.
11. The Bar code, 1949
These boring sets of black and white lines can now be found on almost every single item bought from a shop. At first glance, it seems hard to see how they possibly made any impact on the world, but they have fundamentally changed the way we shop. Norman Woodland first developed an early form of the bar code in 1949 by combining ideas from movie soundtracks and Morse code to help him speed up store checkouts. They now stores to instantly access product details, prices and stock levels with a sweep of a laser.
12. Social Networking, 1997
Around the world, every day, more than three billion minutes are spent by computer users on Facebook. Along with other social networking sites such as MySpace and Twitter, it has completely changed the way we interact and who we interact with.
Millions of people now communicate tiny details of their professional and personal lives by poking, twittering and posting. Online social networking has allowed people to rekindle friendships with friends they lost touch with years ago.
Others chat online with complete strangers on the other side of the world.
In 1967 American psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the small world experiment to prove the strength of old fashioned social networks. In the digital age, his six degrees of separation have almost become redundant.
SixDegrees.com was the 1st social networking site started in 1997.
13. Text messages, 1992
Text messaging has created a new vocabulary and new grammar that is almost incomprehensible to those who do not use it. LOL and FYI have now passed into everyday English.
It has also changed the way people use their thumbs – the old QWERTY keyboard layout suddenly became redundant. Among 13-17 year olds, text messaging now outweighs old fashioned phone calls by seven to one.
14. The Sewing Machine, 1830
The first functional sewing machine was invented by the French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in 1830. In 1834, Walter Hunt built America's first (somewhat) successful sewing machine. Elias Howe patented the first lockstitch sewing machine in 1846. Isaac Singer invented the up-and-down motion mechanism. In 1857, James Gibbs patented the first chain-stitch single-thread sewing machine. Helen Augusta Blanchard patented the first zig-zag stitch machine in 1873.
15. The Steam Engine, 1698
Thomas Savery was an English military engineer and inventor who in 1698, patented the first crude steam engine. Thomas Newcomen invented the atmospheric steam engine in 1712. James Watt improved Newcomen's design and invented what is considered the first modern steam engine in 1765.
16. Pocket calculator, 1971
Even the legendary superbrain Isaac Newton was known to complain about the time it took to do simple sums on paper. He would have been delighted by the introduction in 1948 of the Curta calculator, a hand-cranked, barrel-shaped calculator small enough to fit in the pocket and capable of basic calculations. The first slimline digital pocket calculator was the Sinclair Executive, which cost about three times the average weekly wage but set the standard.
17. Thermometer, 1592
It is difficult to place the thermometer in the history of modern invention; it is one of those devices that would inevitably appear – the product of no single mind. Galileo Galilei is most commonly credited, but his clumsy air thermometer, in which a column of air trapped in water expanded when warmed, was the culmination of more than 100 years of improvement. The classic mercury-in-glass thermometer, still in use today, was conceived by Daniel Fahrenheit in the 1720s.
18. Toothbrush, 1498
For millennia people have used a fantastic array of implements to keep their pearly whites brilliant. Frayed twigs, chewing sticks, birds' feathers and porcupine quills; all have been discovered in the excavated remains of the earliest bathrooms. An unknown Chinese was the first, at the turn of the 15th century, to mount bristles at right angles to a handle – the spines were plucked from hogs and set into bamboo or bone. By the 17th century toothbrushes were widely used in Europe.
19.Microwaves
Not the ovens, but the electromagnetic waves. Microwaves – electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths ranging between 1 millimetre and one metre – are used by mobile phones, wireless broadband internet and satellite television.
Radar, which helped Britain win the Battle of Britain, also uses microwave radiation. They also gave us a new way of cooking food while the US military has developed a "less-than-lethal" weapon that can blast victims with a heatwave.
20. Dynamite, 1867
Few inventions, save perhaps the atomic bomb, can claim to have shaken the world in quite the same way as nitroglycerine. And few inventions can have claimed so many lives. The first to succumb to the explosive force of Dynamite was the inventor's brother; Alfred Nobel's youngest sibling perished when an early experiment to stabilise nitroglycerine by adding a chalky material called kieselguhr, went horribly wrong. In 1896, Nobel used his Dynamite fortune to endow the Nobel Prizes.
21. GPS, 1978
Determining your location used to require such cumbersome devices as a map, compass and ruler. Now a single press of a button (and up to 32 satellites) will pinpoint your precise position to within a couple of metres. Great for explorers, paramedics and pilots – not so good for unwitting Latvian lorry drivers sent on cross-country wild goose chases by budget sat-navs. Developed by the US military in the 1970s, the Global Positioning System has been globally available since 1994.
