An invention is a novel device or technique.
Famous inventions include:
Significant ancient inventions
- agriculture
- the aqueduct
- the arch
- central heating
- the clock
- the compass
- gunpowder
- the inclined plane
- irrigation
- the lever
- paper
- the plow
- Pottery
- the pulley
- the screw
- the stirrup
- stone tools
- the wedge
- the wheel
- writing
Significant modern inventions, date as yet unknown or not noted
List in alphabetical order:
- Air conditioning
- the Bunsen burner
- the Diesel engine
- the Kinematograph
- the optical telegraph
- the Rifle
- Sonar
- please add more inventions to this alphabetical list...
- please add dates to inventions in this list and transfer them to the chronological list below...
Significant modern inventions, arranged in chronological order
Note: Dates for inventions are often controversial. Inventions are often invented by several inventors around the same time, or may be invented in an impractical form many years before another inventor improves the invention into a practical form. Where there is ambiguity, the date of the first practical, fielded, version of the invention should be used here.
- 1450s: Moveable type
- 1595: the microscope
- 1608: the refracting telescope
- 1769: the steam engine
- 1783: the Hot air balloon
- 1798: Vaccination
- 1826: Photography
- 1835: Morse code
- 1838: electric Telegraphy
- 1842: Anaesthesia
- 1858: the undersea telegraph cable
- 1866: Dynamite
- 1867: the typewriter
- 1873: Barbed wire
- 1873: the Refrigerator
- 1876: the Telephone
- 1877: the Phonograph
- 1879: the light bulb
- 1886: the automobile
- 1896: Radio
- 1903: Heavier than air flight
- 1904: the Thermionic valve
- 1917: the superheterodyne receiver
- 1919: the Theremin
- 1925: Television
- 1928: sliced bread
- 1929: Antibiotics
- 1930s: Radar
- 1931: the Radio telescope
- 1944: the digital computer
- 1945: Nuclear weapons (but note: chain reaction theory: 1933)
- 1947: the Transistor
- 1949: Atomic clocks
- 1958: the Integrated circuit
- 1960: the Laser
- 1962: Communications satellites
- 1960s: Packet switching
- 1969: the Internet
- 1970: Fiber optics
- 1971: the Microprocessor
- 1973: Ethernet
- 1977: the personal computer (dated from Commodore PET)
- 1979: the Walkman
- 1979: the cellular telephone (first commercially fielded version, NTT)
- 1989: the World Wide Web
In music, an invention is a a short composition for keyboard with two or three part counterpoint.
See also: