Humans are always inventing – and it’s a practice that’s been paying off for millennia.
Click start to play today’s Spell It to discover how ‘inventive’ people have changed the world for the better.
Here are five important inventions that revolutionised how humans live and interact with their world:
1. The wheel
Arguably one of the most significant inventions, the wheel was fashioned in 3500BC in lower Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). According to a report in US-based science news website LiveScience, the wheel itself wasn’t hard to invent – the difficult bit was figuring out the mechanism of connecting a non-moving platform to that rolling cylinder. The Sumerians had the brilliant idea of creating rotating axles and fitting it into blocks of circular wood – giving people the world over new ways to transport goods, travel long distances, and improve farming and commerce.
2. The nail
Dating back more than 2,000 years to the ancient Roman era, the invention of the nail only came about once humans were able to cast and shape metal. Until the early 1800s, hand-wrought nails were common – a blacksmith would heat a square iron rod and hammer it on four sides to create a point. Then, technology developed and nail-making machines were created in the 1790s, helping to propel a whole slew of related industries. Another version of the nail – the screw – is credited to Greek scholar Archimedes in the third century BC.
3. The compass
The stars were once the only guides for ancient mariners – but they were not reliable sources of navigation during the day or in cloudy nights. Enter the compass, which was first invented in China during the Han dynasty. Made of lodestone, it was used for navigation for the first time in the 11th century, during the Song dynasty. The compass changed the way people travelled, and opened up the entire world for exploration, eventually allowing global trade and the exchange of ideas.
4. The printing press
When German inventor Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1400s, he wasn’t the first to create a movable type made from metal. Inventors from China and Korea had done it, too. But Gutenberg was the first to create a mechanised process that transferred ink (made from linseed oil and soot) from the movable type to paper. What followed was an exponential increase in the speed of publication, and the widespread dissemination of knowledge.
What do you think of the significance of these inventions? Play today’s Spell It and tell us at games@gulfnews.com.
