What are the five most important inventions of all time? Since this is such a broad and difficult question, we're going to need a couple of ground rules first:

• An invention must be a tangible, physical thing. The abacus was an invention, but positional notation was not.
• Only inventions after the birth of Christ will be considered. Otherwise we'd end up with a very boring and noncontroversial list (fire, the wheel, the stirrup, etc.)

With that out of the way, here are my five votes in order of importance:

1. The printing press. Is there any doubt about which invention gets the #1 spot? The most important single defining characteristic of the Renaissance was an explosive growth in the dissemination of knowledge, and this growth would have been impossible without a technology in place for the cheap mass production of books. Science was most likely the biggest beneficiary of this technology, since its practitioners, then as now, require a robust correspondence to keep the flame of progress lit, and it was cheap books in large quantities that made it possible for scientific discoveries to be widely disseminated to others for comment, criticism, and inspiration. It is perhaps fair to say that the Renaissance before Gutenberg was primarily a rebirth of art and culture, while the Renaissance after that was truly a rebirth of learning as well.
   
   Credit for the movable type printing press clearly belongs to Johann Gutenberg, and while the exact date and provenance is shrouded in lawsuits (Gutenberg was a litigious fellow) he most likely had his first press operating in Mainz by 1439. Some scholars give credit to the Chinese for the real invention of movable type, but Gutenberg was the first to perfect the precision casting of metal type in large quantities, and it was this that made large scale book printing truly practical. On the other hand, the invention of paper, which was equally critical to the mass production of books, was invented by the Chinese, most likely in AD 105 by Ts'ai Lun, and imported to the West by the Moslems around the 10th century or so.
   
   
2. The steam engine. It isn't often that an invention has an entire era named after it, but the steam engine is unquestionably the namesake of the Industrial Revolution. Water wheels and windmills will only get you just so far, and the portability and power of the steam engine marked the first time that the world was truly freed from the limitations of animal power. The steam engine was directly responsible for the invention of the railroad, the oceangoing steamship, large scale mining, the staggering expansion of the European textile trade, and, lest we forget, also responsible for a considerable rise in inhuman working conditions for both children and adults during the 19th century. It can truly be said to represent both the best and worst of mankind.
   
   Credit for the steam engine goes to Thomas Savery, who patented the first steam engine in 1698, and Thomas Newcomen, who conceived the idea independently in 1712. However, credit for making the steam engine truly practical must go to the redoubtable James Watt, who, through his invention of the separate condenser in 1765, was finally able to build steam engines that were not only small and powerful but cheap enough for widespread use as well.
   
   
3. The digital computer. If the steam engine was the embodiment of the Industrial Revolution, the digital computer is likewise the embodiment of the Information Age. The computer has been the driving force behind a vast number of modern technologies, from fast and cheap worldwide telecommunications to the sophisticated gene sequencings used in genetic engineering, and during the next 50 years it seems inevitable that computers will finally provide us with perhaps the most important invention of all time: true artificial intelligence. When (and if) that happens, the digital computer will deservedly move up two notches and take its place at the top of this list.
   
   Credit for the invention of the digital computer is currently a source of some controversy. John von Neumann is usually given credit for the idea of the stored program computer, but who gets credit for the first actual working device is probably more a matter of definition than anything else. Traditionally, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert have been given the primary credit due to their creation of the original ENIAC, a programmable electronic calculator built in 1945 for the US Army's Ballistics Research Lab (but finished too late to be of any help during World War II). Other contenders include: Konrad Zuse, who invented a mechanical programmable calculator in 1938; John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, inventors of the first vacuum tube calculator, a 16-bit adder, in 1939; and Max Newman, E. Wynn-Williams, and Tommy Flowers, who invented various specialized vacuum-tube-based devices for cipher breaking at Bletchley Park during World War II.
   
   
4. The lateen sail, the compass, and the stern-post rudder. The Age of Discovery, which runs roughly parallel with the Renaissance, could not have happened without the help of these three inventions that made it safe and efficient for ships to sail outside the sight of land. The lateen sail, a triangular sail mounted on a boom, replaced the square sail in Europe between the ninth and eleventh centuries and allowed ships to beat into the wind instead of mindlessly following it. The compass, which first appeared around Naples at the end of the first millennium, allowed traders to navigate accurately on the open seas. Finally, in the 13th century, the stern rudder wedded the first two inventions and made it possible for the first time for ships to be truly accurately navigated and piloted.
   
   It is impossible to give credit for these inventions. All three originated in Asia, probably in China, and were imported to the West via the Moslems. There are no known records either in the West or in China that single out any individuals as discoverors of these seminal maritime inventions.
   
   
5. Penicillin. The discovery of effective, nontoxic antibiotics during the 20th century ranks as possibly the most important medical invention of all time. Penicillin is responsible for saving more lives than any other single drug in history (or, indeed, any medical therapy of any kind), and it is no less important for its serendipitous discovery. It seems likely that gene sequencing will produce discoveries during the next century that dwarf the important of penicillin, but until then it's unlikely that it will have any serious contenders for the title of most important therapeutic drug of all time.
   
   Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 when he accidentally contaminated a culture plate in his lab. It was purified and concentrated in 1939 by Howard Florey at Oxford.

There are plenty of other contenders for this list: electricity, the automobile, the telephone, the moldboard plow, etc. However, all of the items on my list (except for the last) have one thing in common that the others don't share: they are inventions that defined an era. No one speaks of the "Age of Electricity," for example, but the Industrial Revolution is a byword.

Got a beef with this list? Let me know at kdrum@home.com.

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