Here's one for you: What do you consider the most important invention of all time? This is a hard question, I know. I'm going to sleep on this one before I venture an answer. Maybe the best we can come up with is a top 10 or top 25 list.
I think munitions is one of the most important inventions. I'm not sure it's the top but it is one of the most important. Without it many wars would have been lost and things could have turned out quite differently.
Medicine - to go from bloodletting and leeches to someone thinking of injections is fascinating to me.
That reminds me, I once visited a reconstruction of a colonial doctor's office. There was the jar where he kept the leeches, and, of course, there were the trepanning tools (shudder!) and other hideous surgical instruments. I think I would have stayed sick and risked death rather than go to the doctor back then. For this and a few other reasons I'm not at all nostalgic for earlier times. I prefer the eternal present to either the past or the (uncertain) future.
I've slept on it and come up with my answer, although it's in a different vein. Man's greatest invention has to be language. The ability to make utterances and attach meaning that can be understood by others is nothing short of miraculous. What's cool about this is that men from all cultures and backgrounds can lay claim to it, and are laying claim to it every day. What new word have you "invented" today?
I don't think I could point to just one invention as the most important, although I must agree, OracleLady - language is a big one. I would imagine, though, that the spoken word has always been there. The written language made it possible to preserve history.
I would think that body language would predate the spoken word. Oral communication would develop later as a means to articulate more in depth of what is trying to be said. Then, of course, drawings and finally the written word.
