What are the great innovations of the past six millennia?

The printing press is the greatest invention of the past 6,000 years, according to an article in The Atlantic titled “The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel” and published October 23.

In a lengthy and informative introduction to the top 50 list, national correspondent James Fallows explains that the magazine assembled a panel of 12 scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, historians of technology, and others to assess the innovations that have done the most to shape modern life. “The main rule for this exercise was that the innovations should have come after widespread use of the wheel began, perhaps 6,000 years ago,” he writes. “That ruled out fire, which our forebears began to employ several hundred thousand years earlier.”

Fallows notes the inherent difficulty of fairly comparing innovations like nuclear fission and the moldboard plow, but nevertheless the panelists plowed ahead, deciding that the plow, at number 30, underperformed fission, at rank 21.

Fallows presents a taxonomy of innovations:

First are those that expand human intellect, such as the printing press, paper, the Internet, and the personal computer. A related subcategory includes the underlying technologies—including semiconductor electronics and photography—that enable the innovations that expand human intellect.
Second are innovations that enable the physical and operating infrastructure of the modern world, including cement, electricity, sanitation, and air conditioning.
Third are innovations that enabled the industrial revolution and subsequent waves of material output, including the steam engine, industrial steelmaking, and innovations leading to oil drilling and refining.
Fourth are innovations extending life, including nitrogen fixation, the green revolution, the aforementioned plow, Archimedes' screw, penicillin, vaccination, and refrigeration.
Fifth come innovations that allowed real-time communication beyond the range of a single human voice—including the Internet, telegraph, radio, telephone, and television. (He notes that smoke signals and semaphores offered limited bandwidth and reliability.)
Sixth are innovations that speed the physical movement of people and goods, such as the sailboat, internal combustion engine, automobile, airplane, and rocketry.
Seventh are innovations in organization that enable people to work together, including the Gregorian calendar and alphabetization.
And finally and unfortunately come innovations in ways of killing people, including gunpowder and nuclear fission.

Fallows notes that any list of 50 innovations must exclude 50,000 more. He asks about GPS, or the concept of the number zero, neither of which made the top 50.

He also presents an interesting way of ranking innovations: which would you rather do without—your personal computer (16th on the list) or anesthesia (46th on the list)?

Despite the inherent shortcomings, the list is great food for thought. As Fallows puts it, “The more questions and discussions our ranking provokes, the more successful the endeavor will have been.”

Read the complete list and Fallows's analysis here.