I have a list in my head of some neat (well, actually, big and important) inventions we have seen throughout history that people don’t always think about. I think they are seriously underappreciated.

But first off, let’s discard the wheel. It’s overrated. It’s not that innovative – it’s been invented by virtually every culture in history – and also not that practical unless there’s a bunch of infrastructure to support it. Many cultures have used wheels in toys, while serious business such as transport happens over water.

On to the good stuff.

• Rope is simple in the same sense that the wheel is, yet it is more immediately practical. It can be used for building, transport, weaponry, support, and with some sort of pulley1¹ Though this does take a wheel, I suppose. it can provide insane amounts of leverage. Flat ropes (belts) and ropes with holes (chains) are used to transfer power between spinning things. Rope is a fundamental building block of anything complicated.
• Writing makes it possible for ideas to outlive people and be transmitted indirectly. Writing even has the weird effect of making people think more abstract thoughts.2² See Gleick’s The Information for more on this. It’s surprising how literally everything is taken in non-writing cultures. A square is not a square but a table top. A circle is not a circle but the sun. One of the striking examples Gleick gives is that if you go up to someone pre-literate and say, “All polar bears are white. All bears in the north are polar bears. What colour do bears in the north have?” they might answer “I don’t know. I haven’t been that far north. Animals have different properties in different regions. I have only seen brown bears.” In the same spirit, it enables rigorous mathematics.
• Statistics has – perhaps surprisingly – only been invented once in the history of mankind. The fundamental idea of ignoring what sets unique things apart and treating them as “the same” for the purpose of analysis is not complicated, but highly counter-intuitive and powerful. It lets us draw conclusions that would otherwise be impossible, and we’re only starting to discover what can be done with it. Most people today, even in advanced societies, aren’t statistically literate, so we have not even seen the start of it.
• The world wide web takes the idea of writing and turns it up to 11. Suddenly, everything everyone ever has known can become a part of an open, interlinked network of knowledge available for free3³ As in speech, not beer, although nearly free as in beer also. to every human alive. It’s a force multiplier that’s changing the world so quickly I barely remember what it was like before it. But most people at this point seem to just take “the Internet” for granted and don’t realise how conceptually different the world wide web is from everything that came before and after it.

What sets these apart is that – unlike e.g. the semiconductor transistor, which merely improved on the vacuum tube by several orders of magnitude – these four represent conceptual leaps. They allow us to do things we could not do before; they expand the human experience to places it would not have been able to go otherwise, even if given infinite time and resources.

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I have not forgot about controlled fire and vaccines. Controlled fire belongs on the list but it is neither overrated nor underappreciated, so it’s just not interesting to write about. Vaccines aren’t an invention as much as they are a discovery (people exposed to pathogens become more resistant) and several inventions (all the different shapes vaccines take in practice), so I’m not sure they belong on the same list.

That said, I’m sure I’ve been unfair to some other inventions that also deserve a place on the list. I’d love to hear your strongest contenders!