Refrigeration 1850s

“Discovering how to make cold would change the way we eat—and live—almost as profoundly as discovering how to cook.” — George Dyson

Colben Mae L. Solomon

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#sthash.H3HjsaJ4.dpuf

Vaccination, 1796

The British doctor Edward Jenner used the cowpox virus to protect against smallpox in 1796, but it wasn’t until Louis Pasteur developed a rabies vaccine in 1885 that medicine—and government—began to accept the idea that making someone sick could prevent further sickness.

Colben Mae L. Solomon

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#sthash.H3HjsaJ4.dpuf

The nail, second millennium b.c.

“Extended lives by enabling people to have shelter.” — Leslie Berlin

Colben Mae L. Solomon

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#sthash.H3HjsaJ4.dpuf

Anesthesia, 1846

In response to the first public demonstration of ether, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wrote: “The fierce extremity of suffering has been steeped in the waters of forgetfulness, and the deepest furrow in the knotted brow of agony has been smoothed for ever.”

Colben Mae L. Solomon

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#sthash.H3HjsaJ4.dpuf

money, 11th century

The abstraction at the core of the modern economy

Colben Mae L. Solomon

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#sthash.H3HjsaJ4.dpuf

Rocketry, 1926

“Our only way off the planet—so far.” — George Dyson

Colben Mae L. Solomon

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#sthash.H3HjsaJ4.dpuf

Scientific plant breeding, 1920s

Humans have been manipulating plant species for nearly as long as we’ve grown them, but it wasn’t until early-20th-century scientists discovered a forgotten 1866 paper by the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel that we figured out how plant breeding—and, later on, human genetics—worked.

Colben Mae L. Solomon


http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/innovations-list/309536/#sthash.H3HjsaJ4.dpuf