The Atlantic newsmagazine ran a story this month listing the “50 greatest breakthroughs since the wheel.” It’s not, of course, a scientific ranking, but it is interesting. They gathered a panel of 12 historians, engineers, scientists, economists, and entrepreneurs and asked them to list the innovations or inventions that have had the greatest social impact. The lists were compiled and ranked by the editors into the final list. Nine of the innovations that made the top 50, including the one considered to be the most influential, are communication technologies. That is, they are technologies that provided new means of either recording or transmitting messages.
The earlier innovations – including alphabetization, paper, and photography – were advancements that allowed information to be recorded and stored more efficiently. The printing press, which was rated as the most influential – allowed messages to be reproduced cheaply and quickly. This had far reaching effects because it allowed knowledge and information to be distributed much more freely. No one is going to lend a book that it took someone to years to write out by hand. Few individuals would be able to afford one. The information that was contained in these handwritten books, therefore, remained in the institution – the library or monastery – that owned them, accessible to only a few. Movable type printing presses allowed multiple copies of books and pamphlets to be created at a much lower cost. With more copies available at lower prices, the information contained in them was much more accessible. It could be shared and debated among a much wider range of individuals, who would have been able to expand upon it and develop new ideas in turn. In other words, it allowed information and knowledge to be shared much more widely than had been possible before. Many of the later technologies took this further by making yet easier to share messages over space and time. These innovations included the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet.
In suggesting the communication technology has significant impact on the societies in which we live, the article has something in common with several communication theorists that are covered in UMSL’s undergraduate and graduate classes, such has Harold Innis and Marshal McLuhan. Both of these scholars argued that human societies of different eras could be categorized according to the communication technologies that were influential within them. (Oral societies, for example, were argued to be different from those where at least the elite were literate, which were different from those that developed after the printing press became prevalent.)
What technologies would be on the list if it were to be made 50 years from now? It’s impossible to know, of course. However, I would argue that the likely contenders include smart phones, tablets, and the wireless technologies that make them work. These devices combine the capabilities of many of the previous innovations and make them portable and personal. The implications they will have for how we relate to each other and to the world is yet to be fully realized, but it seems profound and far-reaching.
Here are the communication-related inventions from The Atlantic’s list, from the earliest to the most recent. What do you see as the next likely entry on the list?
- Alphabetization (#25): first millennium B.C.
- Paper (#6): 2nd century
- Printing Press (#1): 1430s
- Photography (#29): nearly 19th century
- Telegraph (#26): 1837
- Telephone (#24): 1876
- Radio (#28): 1906
- Television (#45): early 20th century
- The Internet (#9): 1960s
