RunwayRiot is the fashion, style, and beauty site for women of all sizes. Shop the Riot for the hottest and latest trends! Lisa Lampanelli talked to the New York Times about her struggles with body image, and we can relate. During what was only her fifth standup. The 5. 0 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel. Jump straight to the list. Some questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts. Seven years ago, The Atlantic surveyed a group of eminent historians to create a ranked list of the 1. America. The panelists agreed easily on the top few names. Lewis and Clark, or Henry Ford? Thomas Edison, or Martin Luther King? The result was of course not scientific. But the exercise of asking, comparing, and choosing helped us understand more about what these historical figures had done and about the areas in which American society had proved most and least open to the changes wrought by talented, determined men and women. Now we turn to technology. The Atlantic recently assembled a panel of 1. This is the first time you have logged in with a social network. You have previously logged in with a different social network. To connect with your existing social network account: To connect with your existing account, click below: Try to fight a smile after viewing these incredible photos of New. The main rule for this exercise was that the innovations should have come after widespread use of the wheel began, perhaps 6,0. That ruled out fire, which our forebears began to employ several hundred thousand years earlier. We asked each panelist to make 2. No. 3. 0.) We also invited panelists to add explanations of their choices, and I followed up with several of them and with other experts in interviews. An Atlantic Special Report. Read More. One panelist ranked his choices not by importance but by date of invention, oldest (cement) to newest (GPS satellites). Resource for artists to display their work and network for creative jobs. Other spurious things The old version of this site. Discover a correlation: find new correlations. Go to the next page of charts, and keep clicking 'next' to get through all 30,000. View the sources of every statistic in the book. Or for something totally different, here is a. This website provides responsible criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report by senior military, intelligence and government officials. It provides experienced professional opinions about the terrorist attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon. Previews, excerpts and interactive content from Cracked Magazine. On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America’s largest food companies. Some emphasized the importance not of specific breakthroughs but of broad categories of achievement. For instance, Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern, nominated in his top 1. This enabled mass production and the Henry Ford. We have new sympathy for people attempting to manage universities and R& D labs. But in the end we had enough comparable and overlapping suggestions, from enough people, with enough spelled- out explanations, and enough force of experience and insight behind them, to be comfortable presenting The Atlantic. We converted all the responses into values we could enter on a spreadsheet; we weighted, as reasonably as we could, the intensity and breadth of support; we watched the combined rankings go up and down as each new response arrived; and we came up with the final ranking you see here. One aspect of the results will be evident as soon as you start looking through them: the debatability of the choices and rankings once you move beyond the first few. For instance, anesthesia (4. If I were doing the ranking, it would be in the top 1. In this case the test for me is: Which would I miss more if it didn? That is the diversity of views about the types of historical breakthroughs that matter, with a striking consensus on whether the long trail of innovation recorded here is now nearing its end. Innovation: A Taxonomy. The clearest example of consensus was the first item on the final compilation, the printing press. Ten of the 1. 2 people who submitted rankings had it at or near the top. To draw another parallel to our Influential Americans survey, the printing press was the counterpart to Abraham Lincoln as the clear consensus for the top choice. And just as that previous exercise revealed the major patterns through which historical figures had exerted influence. One of our panelists, Leslie Berlin, a historian of business at Stanford, organized her nominations not as an overall list but grouped into functional categories. Here is my adaptation of Berlin. This group includes the printing press (1) and also paper, (6) and now of course the Internet, (9) the personal computer, (1. Mann, the science writer and frequent Atlantic contributor, put writing third, behind fire and agricultural improvements, including the domestication of animals. Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin, ranked as his top three innovations items from this category: alphabetization, paper, and the printing press. Innovations that are integral to the physical and operating infrastructure of the modern world. George Dyson, the technology writer, said that cement, which in the end ranked 3. In our ranking, electricity was No. No. Through the past half century, air- conditioning (4. America. Air- conditioning is now having a similar effect in China, India, the Gulf states, and elsewhere. Our panelist Joi Ito, the head of the Media Lab at MIT, said that air- conditioning . These include the steam engine (1. A century ago, a comparable list would have had to include the use of coal, which does not appear here, although it is still the most widely used fuel for electric- power plants. Automobile travel sped up the journeys people had long made by other means, whereas the airplane made possible an unprecedented way of seeing and understanding the Earth. Innovations extending life, to use Leslie Berlin. This broad group includes the successive agricultural revolutions that now let the Earth support its billions of people: nitrogen fixation (1. Haber- Bosch process, about a century old, which made modern ammonia- based fertilizers possible and, by making more nitrogen available to plants, lifted a previously unbreakable limit on crop yields. This group also includes the advances in medical knowledge and treatment that predate our current genomics revolution: No. No. 8, vaccination (a few hundred years old); and No. One of our panelists suggested . A list made 5. 0 years from now, or maybe only five, would undoubtedly emphasize the revolutionary potential of genomics, but as yet it did not make our cut. The life- extending category also includes the public- health measures that have advanced in parallel with improved medical treatment: sanitation systems (1. After penicillin, the highest- ranked item from this category was optical lenses, at No. I am glad they were mentioned by several panelists, because their inclusion illustrates the underappreciated ripple effects of certain technologies. Before the advent of corrective lenses, people with imperfect vision could be vulnerable to enemies or predators in humanity. None of our panelists put it this way, but I have always believed that the adoption of corrective lenses amounted to the largest onetime IQ boost in human history, by expanding the pool of potentially literate people. It was also one of several puzzlingly . A similar puzzle, according to Joel Mokyr, involves the delayed appearance of the wheelbarrow. The Internet (9) obviously brings new scale and speed to communication, but the real leap beyond previous limitations occurred in the mid. As Joel Mokyr put it, before the telegraph, . Smoke signals, homing pigeons, and the semaphore telegraph all had very little bandwidth and were unreliable. The telegraph made it at least in principle possible for information to move at the speed of light, and thus vastly improved long- distance communications and hence command and control over much larger territories. Many years from now, perhaps people will regard the second half of the 2. TV could seem a dominant technology. With its obvious- in- retrospect limitations, like one- way information flow rather than interactivity, and dependence on heavy hardware for best display, maybe TV was bound to be a transition to some other system more tailored to individual tastes. Or maybe our panelists were embarrassed to vote for it. Innovations in the physical movement of people and goods. Through the past 1. With variations in propulsion systems (and later the emergence of jet- turbine engines), this same innovation made possible the airplane(1. Why is the airplane ahead of the car? Presumably because automobile travel sped up the land journeys people had long made by other means, whereas the airplane made possible an entirely new form of human movement. Until the first, tentative balloon flights in the late 1. In the age of 2. 0th- century powered flight, they could see for themselves the natural contours and man- made features they had approximated on maps. Starting in the 1. Even now railroads carry far more freight in the United States than do trucks, barges, or any other form of transport; they are the backbone of passenger- travel systems in Europe; and they account for more of China. But not everything could make the final cut! Also in this category are No. No. 2. 3 and the compass at No. Linda Sanford, a senior vice president for enterprise transformation at IBM, picked the Gregorian calendar (3. The importance of alphabetization (2. Chinese. Finally, and less prominently than we might have found in 1. The machine gun, which received only one nomination, would have dominated in this category 1. Nor did anyone bring up drones, or chemical or biological weapons, or terrorism or guerrilla warfare. But on reflection, our panelists probably got it right. Except for the atomic bomb, breakthroughs in weaponry matter less than the culture and temperament of human conflict. Any collection of 5. What about GPS systems, on which so many forms of movement now depend, and which two panelists recommended? What about the concept of the number zero, as suggested by Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology and strategy officer at Cisco? Or the discovery of the double- helix structure of DNA? Or the mathematics of calculus, on which space flight and so much else depended? The more questions and discussions our ranking provokes, the more successful the endeavor will have been. We notice that innovation may be less personalized than we assume. Our Influential Americans survey was all about specific people who made a difference, though in some cases. In this survey, it is remarkable how few world- changing breakthroughs can be tied directly to a single, heroic, Nobel Prize. Pasteurization (3. Gregorian calendaror Archimedes. Other people made other celebrated advances, from Johannes Gutenberg to Alexander Graham Bell, but overall these are the achievements of groups of people who built on one another.
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