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In your opinion, which invention has had the greatest impact on society in the last 100 years?
Modern water supply/sanitation/plumbing, with modern agriculture (the green revolution) as a close second.
It’s not as modern as computers or cell phones, but plumbing and hand washing and safe water and safe food (the group of technologies I group as modern sanitation) allow us to live in cities and not get cholera any more. 100 years ago, in 1918, life expectancy at birth in the USA was 37 for men and 42 for women. That was kind of a blip year because of the influenza epidemic, but in most previous years the life expectancy at birth for men was late 40s to very early 50s—still very low compared to today with life expectancy in the 70s to 80s. The difference is primarily public health. Sure, we can medically treat cholera and typhus and hepatitis A today, but the big advance in health is that most of the time we don’t need to. It’s not the doctors treating individual patients who have saved the most lives, it’s the doctors at the FDA certifying food and drink as safe who have doubled life expectancy from 1918 to 2018.
The difference today between a developed area and an undeveloped area is the primarily the availability of clean, safe water. Some people define a third world country as a place where you can’t drink the water straight from the tap. To me, the greatest change in the last 100 years is the ability for people to conjure up safe, clean water in any floor of their home with just the turn of a knob. The piping within each house, connected to a water main shared with a million other houses, running a hundred miles to a reservoir and a water treatment plant, through pumping substations, that is one of the greatest feats of modern engineering. Computer chips are cool, but water is life. Modern societies have tamed water, trained it, and brought it into our houses.
When you turn on a faucet, you unleash centuries of knowledge of biology, chemistry and physics. Biology to know about the germ theory of disease and moss growth, chemistry to add chlorine or chloramines to the water while maintaining the right pH and hardness, physics to push with right pressure and fulfill the biologists’ mad requirement that pipes always be full with no air. Add in some metallurgy to make the pipes and civil engineering to bury them, and you start to approach the marvel of modern plumbing.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, we knew it was set in the future because Captain Picard could ask the replicator for “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” In the same way, a time traveller from centuries past would know he was in a magical world if he could turn a knob in almost any home and magically get “Water. Safe to drink. Cold.”
A related technology is the Green Revolution in modern farming, based on the work of people like Norman Borlaug and Nazareno Strampelli. One of the hallmarks of most modern agriculture is artificial irrigation: again, moving water where it needs to go, not relying so much on the rains or vagaries of weather.
Some may argue that cars, or computers or cell phones or the internet have changed our lives. And they are right; those things have changed our lives. The technology to manage clean, safe, cheap water, on the other hand, has saved our lives. The Bible talks of Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Pestilence, War, Famine and Death. While the internet gives us cat pictures, modern water supplies just did away with Pestilence and Famine, tossing two horsemen of the Apocalypse onto the trash heap of history.
1 electronic dictionary 5 microwave oven
2 vending machine 6 digital camera
3 washing machine 7 mobile phone
4 industrial robot 8 thumb drive 9 MP3-player
My invention.
Description.
Well, if I had a chance to create modern technology to the society, I would have start with Home Furniture technologies. “iScreen” which can make us more happier when we enter to our home. Let’s say you are tired from work and coming to your home on your way. Firstly, you open “iScreen” app. Then push the button START to make your bed automatically comfortable and watch the Screen which shows you beautiful pictures of nature with calm music . This can be very crucial app, who have iPhone Apple phones. Directly commanding such kind of system to your home from work is likely happens in the future but here appears question like what is the advantages of this invention and how much will be if they produce it? Now it’s time to say more information about “iScreen”. Person should have a rest after hard day of work. So, they must threw themselves on the bed and sleep or have rest around 15 or 30 minutes. Most of the people prefer to sleep when they are tired. But what if you don’t have time or you are so important person and your phone is always firing from phone calls. This Technology will help you to escape from that moment and gives you pleasure, enjoy. Turning the point to the Room, the room should be Black covered and no voice inside it. This kind of design will help to our clients adapting to the quiet atmosphere. Only comfortable and modern sofa or bed in front of the iScreen which firstly listens you and this artificial intellect make automatically bed convenient to you then turn the screen voice of piano or such a classic music which is balanced to your blood pressure and heartbeat. However, it costs no so much, but seems an average cost of two or three new high-tech TV. By the ways these are not the only aspects of this technology, it will be renovated or moreover will add more functions on it. I would love to show you this “iScreen” to the whole world and get investment to it.
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