TEXT 3. The greatest developments of mankind
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Methods for keeping approximate track of time date from antiquity. Sundials, for example, were used by the ancient Egyptians. In the cloudier climates of Europe, however, sundials proved inadequate. The achievement of artificial timekeeping has reverberated throughout civilization. It became an important part of navigation, as marines relied on accurate time measurement to calculate longitude. It was a boon to science, as scientific observations often require accurate measurements of time. Today, an increasingly industrialized world is highly structured by time: timekeeping governs when we work, play, eat and sleep.
Until the 15th century few people knew how to read and write. For thousands of years the dissemination of knowledge was limited to word of mouth and extremely costly manuscripts. It was the invention of movable type that proved the major breakthrough. Around 1440, a German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg combined several key printing technologies and invented the first printing press. The most important was a method of creating uniformly shaped pieces of metal, each with different letter of the alphabet on its face that could be endlessly rearranged to form new Bible.
Early-17th-century Holland was a hotbed of optics development. Here the microscope was invented, although a sole credit to this achievement is difficult to determine. It was also during the 1600s that Dutch naturalist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek built his own microscope and discovered what he called animalcules, which are now known as bacteria and protozoa. Much of our knowledge of disease and how to fight it, including the concept of immunization, has flowed from the use of the microscope.
It is tempting to think of a car or the airplane as among the most important inventions of the millennium. But these were merely evolutionary refinement of the first machine to convert burning fuel into mechanical energy on a large scale. This invention liberated people from the limitations of their own muscles and those of beasts of burden. It made possible the factories that drove the Industrial revolution. And it was at the heart of the first form of high-speed mechanized transportation: the locomotive.The innovation that made electricity available in large quantities for human use was the dynamo, a machine that converted mechanical motion into electric power. The dynamo is based on a discovery made by the British scientist Michael Faraday in 1831. He found that moving a coil of wire through a magnetic field produces an electric current in the wire. This allowed a straightforward conversion of steam, used to spin a rotor, into electricity. Once created, the electricity needed only a system of cables and transformers to carry it to the houses, factories, and office buildings that used it to power light bulbs and other electric appliances.
The principle of the telegraph is simple: pulses of electrical current are sent through a wire by manually taping on a key to operate a simple switch. At the receiving end, the pulses create a magnetic field that causes a needle to punch holes on a strip of paper or that creates an audible click as a contact closes. When relayed in a coded fashion, these pulses can transmit a message, potentially over great distances.
For most of human history, infectious diseases have killed people with brutal regularity. As recently as World War I more battlefield deaths came from infection than from the direct trauma or gunshot. Physicians had very few weapons to combat cholera, pneumonia, meningitis, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, or any of dozens of other diseases. In 1928, Scottish researcher Alexander Fleming noticed that the presence of a certain mould in Petri dishes stopped the growth of bacteria. He identified the mould as coming from the penicillium family and called it penicillin. The development of penicillin and the huge range of similar dru