In your view, what inventions or people changed the course of history?

Love em or hate em, the internal-combustion automobile definitely changed the course of history.

In 1826, Englishman Samuel Brown, 1826, road tested a hydrogen-fueled, internal-combustion powered vehicle. Siegfried Marcus developed and tested his prototype petrol-powered car in 1888.
 

MarkinPhx said:
The printing press
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^ This. Many years ago, I watched a 2 hour program on TV that ranked the 100 most influential people of the last 1000 years. They went through all the greats starting with the last on the list. Most were obvious, some questionable. They were chosen by a mixed group of various experts from a varied field of academics.

As the program got down to the last 10, I became glued to the program waiting to see who would be the most influential, and as the list shortened more time was devoted to who they deemed the most significant. I couldn't guess, because the all time greats seem to have been covered. But number 1 was Johannes Gutenberg, who had never crossed my mind, but was to me without question the most important person on the list.

What he had invented was a simple machine, but more than that, his machine revolutionized the spread of knowledge, so that further great persons would all have access to information they needed to make the next giant steps.
 
JustDave said:
^ This. Many years ago, I watched a 2 hour program on TV that ranked the 100 most influential people of the last 1000 years. They went through all the greats starting with the last on the list. Most were obvious, some questionable. They were chosen by a mixed group of various experts from a varied field of academics.

As the program got down to the last 10, I became glued to the program waiting to see who would be the most influential, and as the list shortened more time was devoted to who they deemed the most significant. I couldn't guess, because the all time greats seem to have been covered. But number 1 was Johannes Gutenberg, who had never crossed my mind, but was to me without question the most important person on the list.

What he had invented was a simple machine, but more than that, his machine revolutionized the spread of knowledge, so that further great persons would all have access to information they needed to make the next giant steps.
Click to expand...
I can agree about Gutenberg, who used the principle of movable type to produce a practical mechanical device. There was some (nameless to history?) Chinese guy who, centuries before, came up with a method of printing using re-suable blocks of Chinese characters.
 

JustDave said:
^ Johannes Gutenberg, who had never crossed my mind, but was to me without question the most important person on the list.
What he had invented was a simple machine, but more than that, his machine revolutionized the spread of knowledge, so that further great persons would all have access to information they needed to make the next giant steps.
Click to expand...

In high school I was blessed to have taken a course titled "Graphic Arts" in the "Industrial Arts" field.

In 1970, they would not let us "young ladies" take electives of wood shop or auto shop, which is really what I wanted to take; so instead I was allowed to "Graphic Arts".

Best classes ever!!
One large part of the course work was "Printing"! (Another was silk screening, linocut...oh gosh "Graphic Arts" class was great - as it also had photography the SECOND semester!).

On to printing presses:

I learned to used a quite large, motor driven printing press that I had to set type for, one letter at a time, in a frame. I had to learn where ALL the pieces of type were in an ENTIRE type setting drawer! Once I set my type, it went into a spot on the printing press and when the press was turned on it had this huge flywheel and pulley belts that opened and closed the paten that inked the type set base, and I would have to - with perfect rhythm, insert a sheet of paper, let it get pressed between the two moving parts, and then remove the paper, and insert another before the paten pressed again!

Kids today need this sort of thing...it is mechanical moving parts and it teaches so much combining of mind/thinking with physical doing.

Computers, cell phones, need to be used only by people 21 and older, IMHO. "Convenience" be damned?

Is a fascinating thing to learn! There are at least KINDS of type setting and printing. The last I worked at was Lithography printing.

Check out "Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum" They used to CARVE type fonts from wood!!
 
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