Technology, Ranked (You Won't believe #44)

A listicle, Paleofuture at Gizmodo style:

The world is filled with amazing technologies, many that are so old we don’t even think of them as technologies at all.

Today, we present the definitive list of every important technology ever, ranked by their importance. These aren’t all necessarily good technologies, of course. There are plenty that have made the world a more miserable place for everybody. But they’re still on the list.

If you have any opinion about the fact that this list may be omitting an extremely vital technology, you would be wrong. This list is both correct and definitive and cannot be changed. And you’re wrong.

100. Cow milking machine
Are you one of those chumps still milking a cow by hand? An extremely primitive automated cow milker was invented around 1860, but the contraption would see many iterations through the 1920s and ‘60s as the rise of futuristic “factory farms” (not yet a dirty word) would become the norm.

99. Screw
The humble screw thread was invented sometime around 400 BC. And while we may only think of its applications in modern construction today, it radically changed everything from irrigation (the turning of large screws can raise water very efficiently) to food production (some of the first screws were used to press olive oils).

98. Video camera
Images from early video cameras looked like shit. But once they became mainstream and commercialized, the modern video camera changed the way that people captured the world around them, and eventually the way that we saw ourselves.

97. Scalpel
All things considered, the surgeon’s scalpel is a pretty important invention in the history of humankind. Maybe not as vital as anesthesia, which it should be noted was invented way later, but important nonetheless.

96. Flashlight
Sure, the flashlight is predated by thousands of years by the simple torch. But I’d rather not grab a torch after dropping my Apple TV remote behind the goddamn couch again. Why does that thing suck so much? The Apple TV remote, not the flashlight.

95. VCR
Some people are old enough to remember the various home video format wars of the 1980s (remember Betamax?) and the later ones involving Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. But the VHS tape was an entire new world for home movie watching.
As I wrote many years ago for the Atlantic, VHS was a medium that could wear out from too much love, as I did of a VHS tape of Michael Jackson in Captain EO when I was a kid. But for all its imperfections, it brought Hollywood blockbusters (to say nothing of porn) into our living rooms.

94. Electric guitar
There’s nothing that sounds cooler on this Earth than an electric guitar. That’s just science. Or, at least, the science of cool.
The electric guitar made rock and roll possible. And while it seems tremendously 20th century-centric to praise rock and roll, it really was one of the most important music movements of all time.
A distorted electric guitar still has the ability to sound fresh and unnerving after all these years. And I wonder if that feeling will ever go away.

93. Zippo lighter
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

92. Microphone
Much like the electric guitar, the microphone has transformed music in more ways than we can possibly imagine. But obviously it’s not just for music. You know who else stood in front of microphones besides David Bowie? Hitler.

91. Escalator
Escalators are just neat, okay? They’re not sexy, they’re not highly advanced, but when they were first invented in the 1890s, people would travel from far and wide to see them....