Top revolutionary inventions of the 20th Century

Dr. Linda Ellis shares the top revolutionary inventions of the 20th century.

1. Top Revolutionary
Inventions of the
20th Century
Linda Ellis, PhD

2. Introduction
The 20th century seems so distant now that
today’s technology no longer resembles the
top technology of the 1990s. Here are ten of
the most memorable and powerful
innovations of last century.

3. 10. Nuclear Power
Nuclear power is the use of reactions within the nucleus of the atom that release
nuclear energy to generate heat, which can then be used in steam turbines to
produce electricity. In the 1930s, a rapid series of scientific discoveries were made
worldwide: Ernest Rutherford discovered that atoms could be “split” apart by
protons, James Chadwick discovered the neutron—a new atomic particle, Frédéric
and Irène Joliot-Curie discovered that induced radioactivity allowed the creation
of radioactive elements, and many scientists recognized that fission reactions
released additional neutrons that resulted in a self-sustaining nuclear chain
reaction. Electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor on
December 20, 1951, at an experimental station in Idaho.

4. 9. Submarines
The concept of underwater combat goes back 2,400 years. The
first submarine capable of independent underwater operation and
movement, and the first to use screws for propulsion, was the “Turtle”
invented by David Bushnell in 1775 as a means to attach explosives to
British ships in the American Revolutionary War. In the 19th century,
engineers throughout Europe and South America contributed
developments to submarine technology. However, it wasn’t until the turn
of the 20th century that Irish inventor John Philip Holland revolutionized
submarine technology, and created the modern submarine, by using the
internal combustion engine to power the submarine while on the surface
and using electric battery power while submerged.

5. 8. Rockets
Experiments in rocket propulsion go back 2,400 years in Europe and
China. In 1898, a Russian school teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
(1857-1935), proposed the idea of space exploration by rocket. In
1903, Tsiolkovsky published his research on using liquid propellants
for rockets in order to achieve greater range. Tsiolkovsky stated that
the speed and range of a rocket were limited only by the exhaust
velocity of escaping gases, making him the pioneer of modern
astronautics. His ideas resulted in practical experiments in rocketry by
American and German engineers.

6. 7. Antibiotics
Antibiotics have been used for millennia to treat infections—ancient
Egyptians applied moldy bread to infected wounds. However, no one
could actually see microscopic bacteria, and therefore people did not
know that bacteria were the cause of infections. Paul Ehrlich, a German
physician, observed certain chemical dyes coloring some bacterial cells
but not others. He came to the critical conclusion that it must be
possible to create chemicals that can kill harmful bacteria without
harming other cells. In 1909, Japanese bacteriologist Sahachiro Hata,
working in Ehrlich’s lab, discovered that a chemical called arsphenamine
was an effective treatment for syphilis, and this became the first modern
antibiotic. Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928,
ironically due to his careless laboratory practices.

7. 6. Radio
Following Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of the existence of radio waves
in 1886, the first practical, wireless radio communication system
was developed by the Italian engineer Guglielmo Marconi in 1894-5
(who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909). The first radio news
program was broadcast August 31, 1920, by a station (still
operating!) in Detroit, Michigan. After military use for
communication with planes and ships, radio became the first form
of household electronic media. First came AM, then the higher
quality sounding FM, allowing people to take music and talk with
them anywhere with battery-powered portable sets and in cars.

8. 5. Television
Engineers worldwide contributed many innovations in the
19th and 20th centuries that eventually lead to television. 
However, critical advances were made by two Scottish inventors:
Alexander Bain invented a facsimile machine for scanning images
in the 1840s, and in 1925, John Baird gave the first public
demonstration of televised images. After WWII interrupted the
development of television technology, by the 1950s TV was
becoming the leading form of mass media, with cable TV making
its debut a few decades later.

9. 4. Airplanes
In 1799, Sir George Cayley defined the forces of lift and drag and
presented the first scientific design for a fixed-wing aircraft. But it
took another century before the Wright Brothers would make the
first controlled, sustained, and powered flight on December 17,
1903 in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It has since become the fastest
form of transportation for civilian passengers. No longer would it
take months to travel around the world by ship.

10. 3. Automobiles
Karl Benz is generally credited for making the internal
combustion engine feasible for powering vehicles and thereby
inventing the modern car in 1885. In the U.S., the automobile
was first marketed to the masses by Henry Ford in the early
1900s, once he had established the assembly line. The Interstate
Highway Act of 1956 created 41,000 miles of coast-to-coast
highways and today, there are more than 250 million cars and
trucks in the United States.

11. 2. Computers
Concepts for early computing date back to the 19th century.  But
the computer was not developed for entertainment nor
communication, but out of a need to solve a serious number-crunching
crisis. By 1880, the U.S. population had grown so large that it took
more than seven years to tabulate the U.S. Census results. The
government needed a faster way to get the job done, and in 1890,
Herman Hollerith designed a punch card system to calculate the
census and established a company that would become IBM.

12. In 1936, Alan Turing (who speeded decipherment of German
Enigma codes) developed a universal machine, later called the
Turing machine, capable of computing anything that is
computable. Turing’s ideas became the central concept behind
the modern computer. In 1953, Admiral Grace Hopper (the “first
lady of software”) developed the first computer language, which
eventually became known as COBOL. In 1976 Steve Jobs and
Steve Wozniak started Apple Computers and introduced the
Apple I, the first computer with a single-circuit board.

13. The Internet1.
In the 1950s, the emerging discipline of computer science began to
consider time-sharing between computer users and eventually to
achieving this over wide area networks. Independently, American
engineer Paul Baran proposed a distributed network based on data
in message blocks in the early 1960s, and in 1965 Welsh computer
scientist Donald Davies developed the concept of packet switching—
today, the primary basis for data transmission worldwide. Packet
switching is a method of grouping data that is transmitted over a
digital network via data packets that are then directed by
networking hardware to their destination, where the data is
extracted and switched by application software.

14. The U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) created the first workable prototype of
the Internet and introduced its ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network) to universities in the late 1960s, which
by the 1990s had transformed into the Internet. Featuring various
networks of connected computers, the Internet became home to
the World Wide Web, which marked the beginning of online
commerce, online education, and millions of websites that put
deep information resources and multimedia capabilities in homes
across the world.

15. Thank you!
To read the blog, please visit drlindaellis.org.