World-changing Gadgets

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World-changing Gadgets

Margaret Maron

Flipping channels the other night, I landed on the History Channel when they were airing "101 Gadgets That Changed the World." I came in on #12 (the typewriter) and #11 (transistor radio), so I have no idea what the first 90 were, but I was muttering, "No, no, no!" to most of the last 10. Here they are:

#10 – the light bulb

#9 – alarm clock

#8 – phonograph

#7 – rotary telephones

#6 – unit air conditioners

#5 – personal computers & the Internet

#4 – hypodermic syringe

#3 - television

#2 – radio

#1 – Smart phone

Are they serious?

The light bulb definitely deserves a place in the top ten, but the others?

Okay, air conditioning units may have made the South more livable, but "changed the whole world"? Get real. And yes, rotary telephones put a lot of operators out of business, and the alarm clock helped get people out of bed in the morning, but world-changing? I don't think so. Surely the telegraph changed more than the telephone ever did.

The Gutenberg press still deserves a place in the top ten. It really did change the whole world, not just our little part of it. Ditto the personal automobile, which killed the trains, allowed people to live miles from their work, and is responsible for so much of the earth's surface being paved over. It also changed the balance of power for the Middle East by its dependence on oil.

Why isn't the airplane in the top ten? Didn't it shrink the world and make it possible to bomb your enemies back to the stone age without ever seeing their faces? And what about the microchip? If you listed it in the top ten, you could mark off computers and the Smart phone.

Yes, the latter affects the way we communicate, but it wasn't that huge a change from regular phones. Merely faster. And without the microchip it would be the size of a refrigerator. (And where is the refrigerator, by the way?)

The hypodermic could actually change the world by eradicating so many diseases that stem from poverty and ignorance, but only if rich nations help bring the needles and the chemistry to the poorer ones. So far, it doesn't seem that much of a world-changer to me.

Where's the photovoltaic cell? Doesn't it have potential to change the world by lessening the importance of fossil fuels? You can bet that a bunch of high-living, dictatorial emirs would consider it world-changing if we ever get serious about developing it on a large scale.