Showing results for "Innovation Ltd" in Computers & Technology

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI.

Nikola Tesla was a bundle of contradictions - a consummate showman and a private recluse; a man of science addicted to self-promotion; a prolific inventor of technologies that made other people’s fortunes. Tesla made giant leaps in the technology of electrical supply, X-rays, radio remote control, and wireless electrical transmission. He embodied the aspirations and the contradictions of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Then as now, he attracted cranks and visionaries in equal number.

What are the ten contenders for the best invention of all time? Which single technological development has led to the human race taking a bigger leap that any other? Is it NASA’s Curiosity Rover, the end result of more than 60 years of space exploration, the summation of so many different technological strands? Or is it the internet as Redditors would no doubt suggest? Could it be the clock, counting down the days until our technological singularity?