March 2012

There have been various compilations of the list of top inventions ever. The common ones making the cut across all lists have been – automobile, airplane, steam engine (Point A to B physical movement), telephone, television, (Point A to B movement of information). The camera, penicillin, razor, sewing machine, condom, flushing toilet form another interesting body of inventions, without which we may have literally been in a lot of mess.

However for me, Electricity is one of the most impactful inventions of all times. That the “invention of electricity” has been a phased-out process and not a “big bang, overnight” invention robs it of some amount of mystique. Static electricity was discovered by pre-historic man, lightning-to-electricity by Benjamin Franklin (1750s), “bottling of electricity” in a battery by Volta (1790s), electricity generation by Faraday (1830s), DC by Edison & Swan (1880s), and finally AC by Tesla (1890s).

While television, rocket and the atom bomb were the gifts of the first part of the 20^th century, the second half belonged to the cellphone, PC and email. The Internet (www) gave an idea of shape of things to come in the 21^st century. The collection of Internet-enabled inventions – www, email, Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Skype – to my mind, parallel Electricity as the most impactful. True flattening of the world is getting achieved.

As per a recent McKinsey article, the Internet accounted for 21 percent of the GDP growth in mature economies over the past 5 years. Email has increased the effectiveness of corporate communication and has probably made the world truly 24 hours a day – what with India and USA being 12 hours apart, and the onsite-offshore model increasing outputs dramatically. Google and Wikipedia have made all of us much more informed and hopefully, better persons in the bargain – no sword duels to settle an argument or no time wasted in getting data…life starts after getting the data…is not spent in getting the data. Facebook, Linkedin have done what others could not do – bring friends together in physical world after re-uniting them online. The number of get-togethers happening after 25 years has sky-rocketed…one cannot imagine the number of business deals and social deals struck as a result.

The sheer result of all of the above coming together could be mind-numbing !! Of course, I could be suffering from the phenomenon of giving recent happenings too much historical benefit of doubt (as compared to older events). But to be fair to me, I seem to have taken a 250-year perspective of inventions, as you can see from the above. What follows in the next 50 years is anyone’s guess…but till man flies or telekinesis becomes universal or tele-porting is invented, I have a hunch that we will be seeing innovations in the IE suite (Internet-enabled suite) as the big inventions of the first half of the 21^st century.