What are the most important inventions since flint tools and why?

The telescope has come up at least twice and I made a big fuss about glass and polished lenses being the thing that moved the centre of innovation from China to the West.
You're right though, I have been a bit of a hard taskmaster. I upset one person by rejecting the coffee maker and he's not been back since.

 

Ha. You must have caught them before they had their morning cuppa

 

No. I knew you hadn't read it through properly but it was a compliment that you still managed to bring up some major inventions the rest of us had missed.

 

You could be right. As a non-coffee drinker I forget what people can be like before they've had their caffeine fix.

 

Brewed tea.

It was Britain stealing tea from China to grow in Ceylon, India that gave Britain the Industrial Revolution 60 to 100 years before intoxicated European rivals because the water was dirty back then and Germans needed beer and France needed wine but boiling water for tea helped clean the dirty water and adding milk and sugar allowed Brits to consume calories without getting drunk which allowed England to leap past other countries in Europe; so, the invention of drinking tea.
https://teaandprogress.weebly.com/industrial-revolution.html#:~:text=Tea played an integral role,continuation of the Industrial Revolution.&text=Soon tea was an everyday,long shifts of factory work.

It was a Scotsman named Robert Fortune who went into the Forbidden City and beyond and went around China dressed as a local passing himself off as Chinese who stole the tea for us/Britain.
It was his mission, to get the secret of tea and bring it to Ceylon for the British.

 

We did have 'small beer' previous to tea. Made from a second flush of the malted barley it was low in alcohol yet safe to drink. It was drunk from at least medieval times and you'd have trouble getting drunk on it. Even children would have been given it to drink.

 

I'm aware; however, tea gave the British the Industrial Revolution 60 to 100 years before others in Europe because we switched to tea while our rivals were still drinking beer and wine for calories.
Drinking tea rather than booze literally gave us the Industrial Revolution.

 

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the mighty and humble ziptie.


You laugh, but trust me, if all the zipties were to suddenly disappear, planes would be dropping out of the sky, and the world would about fall apart before your eyes.

 

I think it's probably more accurate to say the industrial revolution gave us tea.
It was the great innovations like steam power, large scale foundries and advances in engineering that gave Britain the advantage.
Tea became a necessity when people moved to the cities to work in the new factories and mills and the concentration of people combined with poor hygiene standards made water born diseases more common.
The fortunate coincidence being that our new territories in India which were perfect for growing the tea we stole from china made it cheap enough for the masses to drink around the same time as the movement of people from agriculture to industry.
Previous to that tea was ruinously expensive. Tea caddies from the early Georgian era had locks on them it was so valuable.

 

Drinking tea in England predates the Industrial Revolution, so the Industrual Revolution couldn't have given us tea, however tea gave us the Industrial Revolution.

 

We managed perfectly well with string before zipties came along.
Bloody things, you have no idea how many of the horrid little plastic things you find after festivals and other events where people just cut them and let them drop to the floor.
At least string is reusable if you tie a sensible knot.
They are great for the job they were intended ie bundling cables together permanently etc but for temporary use they are an abomination.

 

Workers in factories and mills could not afford to drink tea until the industrial revolution was well under way. It was the wealth created by the industrial revolution which gave us the money to set up the tea plantations in India which brought the prices down. Previous to that it had to be bought from China at very high prices. Only the very wealthy drank tea before the end of the 18th century.
Another factor in the lowering of the price of tea was the reduction of import taxes from 100% to 12.5% in 1784 after a poor grain harvest resulted in a rise in the price of ale. It was recognised that an affordable safe drink was needed for the workers of the industrial revolution and that marked the move from beer to tea.

 

Cooked food.

 

Good point.
Already covered though. http://www.politicalforum.com/index...t-tools-and-why.583998/page-2#post-1072387278

 

Didn't see that one. Thanks.

 

Hey, any bump is a good bump.

 

Judeo-Christian ethics and western culture...

 

Yeah we covered religion early on but culture is an interesting point.
However, it has to be pointed out that prior to the renaissance and the age of the scientific method many, if not most, inventions came out of China.
Also what we now call the middle east was a hotbed of innovation at a time when the west was fairly stagnant.

 

Democracy.

Democracy has to be defended, because it is right.

 

Hand-in-hand with both I would add/include the initial development of the modern Western concept of natural rights that began with the 12th and 13th Century decretists examining the different meanings of jus naturale (natural law). Up until this point, natural law was interpreted in a negative, prohibitive sense, but these jurists and canon lawyers began interpreting it in a new positive, permissive sense. What these Medieval canon lawyers realized was that the prohibitions of natural law were based on presumptions of natural rights. For example, the prohibition against murder presumed a right to life, just as the prohibition against theft presumed a right to property. Along with this, the prohibition against arbitrary imprisonment without trial presumed a right to liberty. When we think of the natural rights of "life, liberty and property" or "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", we think of John Locke and the authors of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but these ideas did not originate with the philosophers of the Enlightenment. They originated with a bunch of jurists at the University of Bologna in the 12th Century ruminating over the body of Roman civil law that had just been recovered in its entirety, and Gratian's compilation of Church decrees/law in the Concordia Discordantium Canonum, aka the Decretum.

As an aside, another group of men the West is deeply indebted to are the Medieval Franciscans. Little did they know it at the time, but it was the adoption of apostolic poverty by Francis of Assisi and his order that planted the seeds of the Protestant Reformation and led Franciscans such as William of Ockham to develop the concepts of social contract theory and the separation of Church and State (secularism). One might also credit William of Ockham with destroying the ancient corporate concept of society and replacing it with the new modern Western concept of society as an association of individuals.

 

LOL - I love your theory.

To think all this time I believed the Glorious Revolution made it possible for Britain to become the world's first Industrial power.

Brewed tea....who woulda thunk it?

 

Kevlar

Spoiler

and before someone says Armour to deny Kevlar, @Montegriffo , chain linked armour too, something the medievals had that the ancients did not; but Kevlar, something we have (that's lighter and can stop a bullet not coated in Teflon) that the medievals didn't.

 

You've got to move away from London if you think bullet proof vests are an important invention.

 

Maybe we have to consider right handedness?

 

No.

Eating meat however is more important.

We went from eating grass to eating meat; the only other thing on Earth to do what we did and to change our diet was the endangered panda bear of China whom went from eating meat to eating bamboo.