The Timeline of Inventions
Did you know that shampoo was invented in 1759, a hundred years before the oil drill, and another hundred year before the laser? Take a look at Wikipedia’s Timeline of Invention, a collection of particularly important or significant inventions. Take notice, that the term “invention” is reduced to technology, ignoring cultural, social or scientific occurences. So you won’t find “pyschoanalysis”, “democracy”, “central perspective” or “binary numeral system” on that list.
When browsing through the items, I can’t help but reflect on the concept of invention. Like Bianca asked two days ago: What distinguishes invention from innovation? Not always easy to tell. Let me add another question: When should we rather talk about a discovery instead of an innovation? How about the “golden section”: Invention, innovation or discovery?
December 6th, 2007 at 9:37 am
[...] are plenty of innovation timelines on the web. This new one from Wired is nice, because it let’s you vote on the innovations. [...]