• Question: what do you think was the best invention?

    Asked by to Bethany, Hannah, Keith, Peter, Ramya on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Peter Elliott

      Peter Elliott answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      A real tough question (just like trying to get me to pick my favourite film) but I think I’d have to go for a very modern one which is the internet. Firstly without it you would not have been able to ask me this question and I wouldn’t have been able to answer it either.

      The internet has opened up an enormous amount of learning for so many people. It can allow me to find papers to help with my research whilst also let me watch how to speak giraffe on YouTube. What ever your interest at a particular moment in time the internet will most likely be able to help you.

      But like most things it can be abused and the honesty in winning the local pub quiz has never quite been the same.

    • Photo: Bethany Dearlove

      Bethany Dearlove answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      This is a really great question, but a really tough one too! There have been so many great inventions throughout our history that have brought us to where we are today, so I found it hard to narrow it down to just one. For modern day inventions, I’m inclined to agree with Peter – the internet has really opened up the world, and impacts so many aspects of our lives, from how we learn, to how we buy things, and how we keep in contact. I’ve got lots of friends on the other side of the world, and it’s amazing to be able to see and hear them via video messaging and the internet.

      Keeping communication in mind, I think I’d choose the humble book as a good invention. And by book, I mean the idea of binding lots of pages together as we would recognise them today (the technical word for this is a ‘codex’). Before books, the long-term storage of the written word was on scrolls – one very long single piece of papyrus (paper) all rolled up. One of the problems with scrolls is the difficulty of finding things that are written in different places. If you’ve got an e-reader, you might have found the same problem – it’s a real pain scanning backwards and forwards through all the rest of the text to find a particular quote or map you saw earlier, and not being able to just jump there. Imagine doing that on one very long curly piece of paper! Not only is it easier to flick through and find things in a book, but it also takes up a lot less space – they fit far more conveniently on shelves, are much easier to hold for reading, and perhaps most noticeably, scrolls only had text on one side. The book represents one of numerous inventions that has transformed how we store knowledge. As an avid reader I definitely appreciate how a book can rapidly transport me to a different land – and that I can easily take it with me too!

    • Photo: Hannah Tanner

      Hannah Tanner answered on 18 Jun 2014:

      I’m going to pick two inventions I like.
      No1 is writing. Writing is what first allowed humans to communicate thoughts and ideas beyond the people they could easily speak to. Sharing knowledge and educating people gives them power to make good choices and build on what is already there. Without writing most other discoveries and inventions would have taken much longer to spread round the world and longer to be improved on.
      No2 is the microscope. This opened up a whole new world of cell biology and microbiology. It meant we began to understand that there is a whole world of living things that are too small for us to see with our naked eyes. I also love using a microscope in diagnostic microbiology. It’s always satisfying to be able to see the bugs you are working on.

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