Famous Inventions That Changed The World - Full Documentary

0:00 inventions. How far back can we trace their origins? Which inventions have had the biggest impact on our world? And what does the future hold for these amazing devices? Now, great inventions on modern marbles. [Applause] [Music] In today's world, technology and invention progress at an astonishing speed. We have instantaneous access to information and images from around the globe. Advances in modern medicine are working to vanquish even the most elusive and

0:46 deadly of diseases. We can travel great distances in a matter of hours and travel beyond Earth into space. All of this is possible because of humankind's desire and ability to invent. But many of our greatest modern inventions often had humble ancient origins. Key discoveries that led the way for great inventions to follow. But what makes a great invention? Great invention has a kind of elegance and a kind of projection. It doesn't solve one problem. It opens up the opportunity to be applied to a variety of problems and it opens up new opportunities.

1:33 One invention that has played a key role in many of society's greatest inventions is also one of history's oldest technological devices, the wheel. Though the exact origins of the wheel as we know it are unknown, it is believed that the combined use of wheel and axle as a device for transport was first seen around 3000 BC in the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia. What's really important is the wheel as used on farmers carts allows for the movement of crops from the farmlands into the cities. And the more efficient that you can move crops and food stuffs in from the farmlands into the cities, the bigger the population you can have. But the wheel had even more ancient uses. With the discovery of rotary motion as

2:19 early as 8,000 BC, enterprising inventors of times long past found the wheel to be an important and versatile tool. They began using forms of the wheel to aid in their everyday tasks. Flywheels and pulleys allowed for heavy stones and rock to be lifted, allowing cities to rise up quicker, higher, and more efficiently. Water wheels became a primary source for generating early forms of power. And rotating gears became the essential device in an endless variety of tools and machinery, helping to spark the industrial revolution. The wheel and rotary motion made the creation of another civilization changing invention possible, the steam

3:05 engine. The steam engine propelled the world into a new age of transportation. Popular legend has it that 18th century inventor James Watt discovered the power of steam when he observed the lifting lid of a kettle of boiling water. The truth is that man had been aware of the power of steam for countless centuries, long before Watt ever sat down for his first cup of tea. As early as 100 AD, ancient writings told of a rotating steam turbine wheel created by Hero of Alexandria. The device was described simply as a sphere of aololis, but Hero never realized the potential uses of his creation and dismissed it as nothing more than a simple toy to keep a drowsy

3:52 emperor awake. It would be nearly 2,000 years before a practical steam engine would be invented. The steam engine was originally conceived to pump water out of very deep mines. um and it soon be became applied to lots of other things uh especially for driving all sorts of mills. Most closely associated with the creation of the steam engine is 18th century English engineer and inventor Thomas Newcom. Newcomer designed and built one of the first practical atmospheric steam engines around 1712. The steam engine consisted of a series of steamdriven piston rods linked by chains that rose and fell in order to

4:37 lift water out of mines. For over 50 years, Newcome steam engine set the standard. But a Scottish instrument maker and engineer James Watt set out to improve on New Cummins creation. Initially, the rotative motion wasn't used with atmospheric engines because they weren't very evenly running engines. James Watt by applying steam to both sides of the piston in a cylinder and with the use of properly designed valves could impart a regular rocking motion to a beam and by means of a crank then rotate a wheel. This improved steam engine aided by the wheel provided a major advance in the way we traveled over water. By the late 1700s, the steam ship was man's first major development at traveling great distances since the

5:23 creation of the sail thousands of years before. The French were the steamship's earliest pioneers in the late 1700s. But it was an American Robert Fulton who first achieved commercial success when he gained worldwide attention for driving his steamship the Claremont between New York and Albany in 1807. With the success of steam travel on the waterways, inventors looked at the steam engine as a source of power for land transport. The steam engine led to another revolutionary invention that literally connected communities the world over, the railroad. The powerful steam locomotives created in the early 1800s represented an unprecedented leap over early forms of

6:09 railroads. The first railroads would not have been steam powered. would have been animal powered. Animals were used to pull strings off cars on rails, but those early developments with steam power made it more efficient to um pull heavier loads further distances. In the 1860s, America was literally tied together with the building of the transcontinental railroad from Nebraska to the golden yet isolated land of promise, California. The use of the steam engine helped steel wheeled railroads become an increasingly powerful force in the growth and development of cities around the world. Railways soon became the world's dominant mode of freight, shipping, and transportation. One of the things that

6:55 the railroad did was give people mobility that they'd never had before. Uh allowed them to travel long distances. By the late 1800s, steam power ruled transport, but inventors began looking for alternative, more efficient means of transportation. The result was one of the most pervasive and important inventions in history. An invention that would soon dominate the transportation industry, the automobile. The early automobiles originally used the steam engine as their main source of power, but they were slow, cumbersome, and fairly uncomfortable for the passengers forced to sit close to the steamy hot boiler.

7:43 The very first automobile is generally credited to 18th century French inventor Nicholas Joseph Kuno. His vehicle was financed by the French government and was originally designed as a steam-propelled three- wheeled artillery wagon. With a top speed of 2 mph, the vehicle ran out of control during a demonstration and crashed into a wall. But it is 1880s German inventor and automaker Carl Benz who is generally credited as the father of the automobile. Carl Benz and his contemporary Gotautle Daimler uh are important because they're really the first people to not only come up with in their case gasoline powered road vehicles but they persisted at it

8:28 and eventually developed vehicles that they sold for market. One man who perhaps more than any other would revolutionize the automobile industry with his gasoline powered automobiles was Detroit automaker Henry Ford. Ironically, it was an early steam engine that inspired the automotive pioneer. The first self-powered vehicle that Henry Ford ever saw as a boy was one of these steam traction engines. For Ford, uh, one of these uh, light bulb moments, he saw this thing coming down the road as a young boy and it affected him uh, profoundly. By the early 1900s, numerous companies were beginning to make automobiles, but it was Henry Ford who succeeded in bringing the auto to the

9:15 public. Ford's great contribution was to really see where the future of the market lay, which turned out to be in cheap cars for the masses. and he developed not only a cheap car but a very good car, his Model T Ford, and developed the assembly line process for producing it cheap. Ford's assembly line concept had been inspired by a somewhat more gruesome counterpart. The meat packing industries was often called a disassembly line where the carcass of an animal moved by on a conveyor and the various meat cutters took pieces out of the animal. The great accomplishment of Ford Motor Company was to take something that was enormously

10:01 complicated like an automobile and put it on this assembly line method which required interchangeable parts and required all these conveyors and carefully choreographed movement of all these parts and subasssemblies. Engines and transmissions and rear axles had to be on their own assembly lines before they could all come together for that chassis assembly line. But it did come together. With the assembly line in full force by the 1920s, the price of the Model T, or Tin Lizzy as it was known, had dropped from $850, a staggering figure for the day, to only $260. By the time the Model T stopped production in 1927, $17 million had rolled off the line. The automobile is

10:48 probably the most influential invention of the first half of the 20th century. It had such huge ramifications. It reshapes the landscape. You end up with things like interstate highway system. It results in not the death but the decline of the railroads which were the great 19th century industry. The enormous popularity of the automobile would forever alter transportation. And perhaps more than any other device, it is the wheel that helped facilitate the transportation and industrial revolution. There are nearly 300 million cars in the US alone, over 40% of the world's automobile population. Great inventions

11:35 will return on Modern Marvels. Many key inventions such as the wheel were a product of discovery, often accidental, by practical beings looking for solutions to everyday problems. By contrast, the study and harnessing of electricity was a direct result of scientific research. Scientists in ancient Greece learned that if you rubbed amber or electron in the Greek language, it created a magnetic force that would attract light objects such as feathers. Viewed as a mere amusement, these ancient Greeks had no idea how to harness this force. It was not until roughly 200 years ago that scientists

12:20 finally began to discover viable methods of harnessing electricity. Perhaps most famous was Benjamin Franklin who in 1752 flew a kite in the midst of an electrical storm. He first noticed that strands of thread stood on end as if suspended on a common conductor. When Franklin touched the attached metal key, he received quite an electrical shock. With this jolt, Franklin had proven that electricity was manifested in the clouds in the form of lightning. Franklin wrote in his own publication, Poor Richard's Almanac, that his invention of the lightning rod could secure houses from lightning blasts by directing the powerful bolt of electricity into the grounded metal rod instead of the structure itself. As

13:07 Franklin's lightning rods appeared on homes across America, an outraged clergy remained vehemently opposed to the invention. They believed that lightning expressed the wrath of God and should not be tampered with. As knowledge of electricity grew, inventors saw that this awesome force could be stored for later use, they developed a groundbreaking energy storage device that would ultimately fuel the communications industry, the battery. The battery has really an interesting sort of impact on the development of electricity. On one hand, it provides that basic building block that allows for experimentation in telegraphy, in telefifany, and and even in in early

13:53 wireless telegraph. But the search for a usable battery was not a new one. There is speculation that a crude form of electrical battery may have appeared in the 1st century AD. In 1938, an Austrian scientist working in Baghdad uncovered a small pottery jar with a copper tube and iron rod running down its middle. Testing showed that the battery did emit small electrical charges, but not enough to provide any real source of power. since it was discovered in what was clearly the house of a magician and medicine man. However, many others dismiss it as nothing more than a simple magic trick used to instill awe, perhaps even fear in all who sought it. The

14:38 first authentic battery, as we know, it does not appear until the early 1800s when Italian inventor Alesandro Vulta created the first viable energy storage device. What it consists of is a a pile of plates. And in fact, it's sometimes called a voltage pile because it's literally a pile of metal plates uh alternating copper and nickel or copper and silver uh with an acid uh in between uh copper and zinc. Another pile um and the bigger pile you make uh the more current you can get out of your battery. Volta's invention of the battery was truly groundbreaking. For the first time in history, the powerful force of electricity could actually be stored and

15:24 used as a source of energy. In the middle of the 19th century, minor improvements were made to the battery, now known as wet cells. They basically consisted of a jar of acid with metal electrodes stuck inside. The acid caused a chemical reaction that produced electrons which flowed through the metal electrodes to provide power to the attached device. Continual [Music] improvements were made to the battery. Inventors soon found it to be an indispensable device in their latest life-changing creations. The simple battery became a key element that ultimately fueled major advances in instantaneous communication. Less than 150 years ago, communications

16:11 were mostly limited to messages delivered in person. As the scientific knowledge grew that electricity could be transferred from one place to another, inventors began to experiment with the possibility that the same principle might apply to communication. The result was a great invention that took the first steps toward bringing the world closer together. Instantaneous communication was now possible for the first time in history with the telegraph. The telegraph is based on the battery and the electromagnet, both of which are inventions of the very early 19th century. All you have to do to make a telegraph is simply string a wire over resistance, have an electromagnet attached to one end and have an onoff

16:56 switch at the other end and that allows you to send a message. And then when you apply a code dots and dashes for example so that you can represent numbers letters of the alphabet and that sort of thing then in fact you can send any message you want over any distance you want that you have the wire strung using his coding system of dots and dashes. American inventor Samuel Morris was the first to successfully send a telegraph message in 1844 with a demonstration line set up between Washington DC and Baltimore. The message that Moore sent was a simple but powerful one. What hath God wrote? The growth of the electromagnetic telegraph was truly dramatic. Uh, in

17:42 only 20 years after Morris had laid his first line between Washington and Baltimore in the mid 1840s, we had people putting in undersea Atlantic cable to transmit messages between the continents. The batterypowered telegraph gave rise to a whole host of electrical inventions. If the telegraph sent the message that a communications renaissance was on the horizon, then it was one of history's greatest and most influential inventions that actually put it into words. The telephone called it in fact a speaking telegraph initially because that's what it was. It was a telegraph line in which you had put a microphone and a speaker in a sense uh at eand uh so that in fact it

18:28 would send the spoken voice rather than doin dashes. Alexander Graham Bell had discovered that electrical currents could exactly duplicate sound waves transmitting multiple sounds by vibrating in the air in a series of frequencies. Bel was a teacher for the deaf and he had spent a great deal of time researching sound waves and the principles of acoustics. Working with his assistant Thomas Watson, Bill realized that you could not only send several different sound tones over the wire, but that you could actually send one complex sound wave, namely the human voice. He realizes it in March of 1876 and he sends the first human message, human voice message over telegraph wire when he says to Watson, "Come here, I want

19:15 you." And he simply wanted to show Watson that the transmitter was actually working. And Watson heard it on the receiver and they were very excited. Ironically, the telephone did not catch on right away. In fact, the leading telecommunications giant at the time, Western Union, refused Bell's offer to sell them the telephone patent for $100,000. Little by little, however, the public began to gravitate to the phone. By 1877, Western Union began to rethink their decision and offered to buy the telephone from Bell and his Bell Telephone Company, but Bell refused. He knew at that point that he had a good thing. Coming up, electricity lights the way for an entertainment and information

20:01 renaissance. With the invention of the battery, scientists had learned how to harness small amounts of electrical energy. But stronger, more powerful currents of electricity would lead to more great inventions. The advances in electrical power now depended on the development of mechanical methods of generating electricity. Inventors were continually finding new ways to harness this powerful force of nature. One key invention literally ushered the world out of the dark ages, turning night into day and affecting virtually every aspect of our daily lives. That simple but life-changing device, the light bulb. The search for a usable

20:49 light dates back to the 1830s as an alternative to the smoky, dangerous gas and oil lamps that had been used until that time. The principle for the electric light was simple. If you heat something, such as logs on a fire, the particles will glow and emit light. The problem was figuring out how to control it. By the early 1870s, extremely bright lights that produced an electrical arc between two carbon poles were being used as street lamps. But there was no way to control the luminosity. While there were many inventors around the world working to create a viable light bulb, it was American inventor Thomas Edison who finally succeeded. Edison is actually a late entrance into

21:34 the contest for creating a successful light bulb. Edison was already worldrenowned for his initial inventions, contributions to the telegraph industry and the invention of the phongraph. He was already known as the wizard of Menllo Park. Edison had boasted that he would have his light bulb completed in only a few months. Edison, if nothing else, was full of confidence. It took him more like a year and 3 months, but he did indeed produce it. And again, carbon turned out to be the critical substance. And he found that if he had a thin piece of carbon, some trick in getting that thin piece of carbon, uh, and again put the electric current now through the carbon instead of between the carbon poles through the carbon, you heat that carbon up and it

22:20 glows and it glows bright but not too bright. I firmly believe that the machine age will favorably affect the lives of the workers. It is impossible, however, to forecast what electricity and invention will make of the world a 100 years hence. Thomas Edison was right. There was no way he could have predicted the impact that electricity or his own invention of the light bulb would have on history. The invention of the electric light bulb in 1879 profoundly changed society. The visionary inventor also saw beyond the light bulb and within a year Edison had laid the groundwork for a complete electric light and power distribution system.

23:07 I can't think of anything that changes the way in which we live domestically at work or in the community more than the light bulb. Lighting at work allowed for shift work, overnight work, increased the efficiency of of laborers. It also made transportation entirely different. The light bulb also changes entertainment. It changes the way in which we advertise materials. It literally changes work, play, and home life dramatically. With his creation of the light bulb, Edison had also in effect created the electronics industry. He had placed his carbon filament electric light inside of a vacuum-sealed airtight bulb. Over the next couple of decades, an Italian

23:53 inventor named Maronei took Edison's concept of an electrical property charged in an airtight ball and developed it into another great invention that would help usher in mass communications, the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube turns out to be an efficient way of both detecting and producing radio waves. One of history's most influential and enjoyable inventions would for the first time ever bring a world of information and entertainment into the home. Radio. When the new concept of radio was introduced early in the 20th century, it created a revolution. Key element of radio was first an understanding that there were radio

24:39 waves. Uh this is James Clark Maxwell in the 1860s and he describes the the elements of nonoptical radiation and that this should be available. Hinrich Herz in the 1880s produces radio waves and then it's a bunch of people in the 1890s Maronei of course Nicola Tesla and others who were experimenting in various ways to make this a practical uh device where you can send a radio wave from here and receive it over here efficiently. Gulmo Maronei did exhaustive tests to demonstrate that radio waves would in fact travel through the air. Once a signal such as Morse code or voice transmissions were added, it was discovered that this wireless signal

25:24 frequency could be transmitted to a receiver. In the year 1898, Marone sent his first radio message across the English Channel, a distance of nearly 20 m. The implications of this wireless telegraph were enormous. Ships in the middle of the ocean could now send distress signals at the first sign of trouble, a feat previously impossible with the wired telegraph. By the 1920s, the signal sent had progressed from a series of clicks to voice transmissions, causing radio to become a cultural phenomenon. [Music] Around around she goes and is down and is beaten in one round. With radio,

26:10 sound could travel over great distances. But now scientists began to wonder if they might be able to send visual images as well. The result, a miraculous invention that would bring a world of images into our homes. An invention that would literally allow us to view history in the making. television. Television is one of those inventions that that again has had a profound impact. The addition of visuals to sound um really changes the way we not only the way we look at things but the way we think about things. Television technology continues to advance at an astonishing rate. But television of

26:55 today owes a debt of gratitude to scientists of long ago. In the 1500s, Leonardo da Vinci presented his findings on the persistence of vision and stated that the human eye continues to see an image for a fraction of a second after it has disappeared. This concept is applied to our modern television system which sends 30 complete pictures every second. And color television owes a debt of gratitude to Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1666 discovered the color spectrum, proving that a rainbow of colors are formed when white light is shown through a glass prism. In the early 1860s, Giovani Casselli created what many consider to be the first television

27:42 broadcast. In an experiment with early imaging, the Italian-born priest wrapped tinfoil around rotating cylinders and sent shadowy transmissions of handwritten messages and line drawings over a telegraph wire. The modern television as we know it was not the product of a single mind but numerous inventors from around the world who all had a hand in its creation. Principal inventors uh often cited uh for electronic television are um Vladimir Zvorin who was working um first Westinghouse and then RCA in the 1920s and30s and um and Phoeorth um who was pretty much a loan inventor at the beginning and then got involved uh with with Filco and and others. uh and uh the

28:31 the critical uh thing here is to take electricity and somehow to detect an image at one end and store this electrically in some form. In this case, it's within a vacuum tube and then take that information and convey it electrically to the other end where again uh some electrical device spews out electrons and uh as it turns out these electrons hit a phosphorous screen and produce an image. Television took the world by storm. For the first time ever, people were able to actually witness key historic events as they unfolded. By 1936, there were only about 2,000 television sets in use around the world. By 1955,

29:17 less than 20 years later, television really broke through with more than 30 million television sets in homes. as a communication medium. It's of course it's become profound. You get to see people land on the moon, which is amazing enough, but it's also had a I think a fairly significant downside. The television is there. You turned on, you watch it almost regardless of what's on it. And so I think in fact we're still working out the long-term implications of what television means to us. Next, a tiny device cuts years of inventions down to size and opens the door for the modern computer age. By the late 1940s, radio had captured the imagination of the world, and

30:03 television was a new medium just about to explode onto the scene. Of course, these great inventions relied on electricity and bulky, expensive, and unreliable vacuum tubes for their power. Then in 1948, an invention the size of an average finger was announced with very little fanfare, but it would leave an indelible mark on history and society. The transistor. The transistor was invented by three men at Bell Labs, uh, John Bardin, Walter Bertain, and William Shockley. And, uh, Bell Laboratories, again, this is part of the AT&T telephone company. they um they used a lot of um uh information circuits in their own machinery in the phone system. So that's

30:50 the motive for doing this. The three men introduced the transistor at a press conference at the Bell Labs headquarters in New York City, but no one paid much attention. Eventually, however, the creators of the transistor were awarded the Nobel Prize as this great invention became recognized as a device that would trigger one of the most sweeping technological revolutions in history. The basic principle of the transistor amplifying electrical signals is simple, but its impact was huge. By releasing a large surge of electrons through the transistor, the weak electrical signal was transformed into a much stronger copy of itself. Transistors increased those electrical signals in a fraction of the space,

31:36 which in turn scaled everything down to size. Transistors were much less expensive and far more reliable than bulky vacuum tubes. With improvements being made almost immediately, the device played a key role in a great invention that has had a global impact on virtually every aspect of our lives, the computer. The next significant thing that happened after the transistor uh was the integrated circuit or the chip. The single thing on your computer that really runs the whole thing, the the CPU chip, contains tens of millions of transistors on a single chip. So, you

32:21 can see the economies of scale. We went from 18,000 vacuum tubes to run a big computer down to several thousand transistors to run the first real business computer down to our desktop which has tens of millions of little transistors, microscopic transistors on a single chip. An extraordinary achievement when you consider that less than 50 years ago, a computer was a massive bank of machines that took up an entire room, held far less memory, and was infinitely slower than today's slowest computers. The earliest forms of computers were created by a mathematician named Blaz Pascal, who actually invented 50 machines in 1645 that would compute mathematical

33:07 equations. Thinking it to be a great invention, he believed that bookkeepers and accountants would clamor for his new device. Much to his surprise, however, the invention was rejected because the device threatened people who feared it would make their jobs obsolete. He abandoned work on the computers only to turn his fertile mind to other scientific endeavors. But others created early computing systems. By the mid 1800s, a French inventor named Joseph Marie Jakard created a predecessor to the punch card system called the Jakard loom which automatically manipulated a weaving loom. It is British mathematician Charles Babage however who is known as the father of computing for his work in

33:54 the 1830s and4s on a mechanical device most closely resembling today's computers. Babage is so significant during this time period is because he formulated what we now know today as the modern computer. There was an input, there was an output, there was a control unit, a processor. All these terms that today are incorporated into the modern computer. The next big advancement in computing came in 1890 by a young census worker named Herman Hollerith. He created a punchcard computing machine to aid in the seemingly impossible census count. We take a census every 10 years and it was taking more than 10 years or they they projected it would take more than 10 years to count the results. So

34:40 clearly that's absurd. The uh the 1880 census had taken 7 and 1/2 years. So it was already 7 and 1/2 years out of date when they finally got it. Hollerit's machine was a success and remained in use for several decades. The 1890 census was completed in only 2 and 1/2 years. In 1911, Hollerith's successful business machine company merged with another to form the computing tabulating recording company. In 1924, they changed the name to International Business Machines Corporation, better known as IBM. Computing made its next great leap in the 1940s. When you think of a modern computer, what you're really thinking of is an

35:26 automatic digital computer. And the first automatic digital computer was the Aniac. Uh the electronic numerical integrator and computer. The ENIAC project was funded by the US Army in 1943 as a method of calculating mathematical firing tables for weapons launched during World War II. Previously, with the men off in battle, the complex weapons took a core of a 100 female mathematicians more than a month to figure a single firing table. The ENIAC, I think, really put these massive machines into the public consciousness. Um, people called it a giant brain and there was this kind of first dawning outside the scientific community of what

36:11 a computer could really be. Aided by the creation of the simple transistor, what the computer turned out to be was an indispensable device that has forever changed the way we live and work. Everybody's using them. And I think that's a very significant thing that's happening in our culture today. In fact, in schools, we've got children teaching adults. I can't think of another time in history where something like that has been true. Whether editing a simple business letter or influencing the vast global economy, there is perhaps no other invention that has impacted the world as deeply as the computer. Next, 17th century astronomer Galileo is astounded by a device that even to this day continues to save millions of lives.

37:01 During an average workday, the human eye must refocus over 20,000 times to read the letters on a computer screen. Modern marvels will return in a moment. Perhaps the greatest advances in modern medicine can be attributed not to surgical techniques or the discovery of new drugs, but another great invention, the microscope. It was not until the invention of the microscope that scientists were able to detect and defeat deadly bacteria. While the practice of healthc care in one form or another is as old as civilization itself, early scientists were truly working in the dark until they began applying the principles of optics and lenses to their research.

37:48 In6009, an optician's apprentice discovered that if spectacle lenses were placed in certain positions, objects seen through them appeared to be much closer. Famed inventor and scientist Galileo vastly improved the invention, prompted by this discovery, the telescope. By creating a device that could magnify objects 30 times their normal size, Galileo used the telescope to make numerous important discoveries about our solar system. He soon gazed inward instead of outward with another recently invented optical device that he said made flies look as big as a lamb. That device was the microscope. As man's understanding of optics continued to progress, microscopes

38:34 became increasingly powerful. Aided by the microscope, scientists would uncover life-saving discoveries that would impact healthcare more deeply than at any time in history. They would wage a war with disease, armed with a powerful new weapon, vaccines. It is only because of the microscope that scientists were ultimately able to save millions of lives with the creation of vaccines. I mean, a big step forward as far as other vaccines was the microscope um and the ability to identify bacteria that were causing diseases. For example, dtheria. people were able to see specific organisms and then they were able to take them and put them into animals and reproduce diseases

39:21 and show the same organisms. So the microscope played a major role in the subsequent development of many vaccines. The earliest recorded attempts to vaccinate against disease dates back to India in 700 AD. Buddhist monks routinely ingested snake venom in the belief that if they were bitten, their bodies would have to build up immunity to the poison. No one knows for certain if that radical attempt at early vaccination was effective, but they did have the right idea. But it was not until the end of the 19th century with the help of the microscope that the link between germs, bacteria, and disease was discovered. Scientists began to create appropriate vaccines. Vaccines are designed to introduce a bit

40:07 of the disease into the body without actually passing on the disease itself. The body then produces an antibbody that creates immunity to the disease in question. Edward Jenner created the first successful immunization in England in 1796. And while he was certainly using an early form of the microscope, his discovery was the result of a keen observation. Smallox was an epidemic disease that had plagued the world for more than 2,000 years. With a mortality rate of over 40%, scientists were frantically searching for a vaccine to eradicate the deadly disease. Jenner had observed that if milkmaids on farms got an infection from an illness in cows called cowpox, they somehow seem to be

40:53 immune to smallpox. What Jenner did was take the material from the lesion of a milkmaid and inoculated that into the arm of a boy, James Fipps, and that this boy was subsequently exposed on purpose to smallox and he was protected. In time, the once deadly disease smallox was eradicated completely. And then in the late 1800s, French scientist Louisie Pastor made more great strides in vaccine research. Pastor is known to history, I think primarily because of the nature of the development of his rabies vaccine and that used the attenuated matter to

41:39 produce a way of treating rabies which up until that time no one had been able to treat. The next big advancement in medicine was antibiotics. In the early part of the 20th century, one of the most important antibiotics in history came close to being shelved forever. In 1928, penicellin was discovered by Alexander Fleming, who noticed with the help of microscopes that mold growing on a jelly sample in his lab completely destroyed bacteria that he had been cultivating. Ironically, Fleming lost interest in the penicellin discovery. And it was 10 years before another group of scientists uncovered his notes and realizing its potential created a form of pure penicellin. With penicellin great strides were being made in the war on bacteria. But

42:25 scientists now needed a way to battle viruses. Viruses unlike bacteria are a substance much too small to be seen by even the strongest conventional microscopes. Scientists once again harnessed the power of electricity and created the electron microscope, a device that finally allowed the magnification of viruses. America pumped billions of dollars of research money into the development and creation of new vaccines. Jonas Sulk's research led to the creation of a vaccine that virtually eradicated the crippling and deadly disease polio. and a host of other vaccines were created to battle diseases ranging from measles, mumps, rebella, hepatitis, and many others. These vaccines help us live

43:10 longer than at any other time in history. History's key inventions have affected and influenced every aspect of our lives, how we live, work, play, and travel. And while these great inventions certainly stand on their own, they are in many ways inextricably connected. I think what we're seeing in the last 20 or 30 years, the latter part of this decade, is the amount of technologies that are kind of coming together and being utilized together, integrated if you will, is so dramatic that we are seeing advancements unparalleled in any part of history. The human race has witnessed an incredible wave of important inventions.

43:58 As long as man continues to think, he will continue to invent. And the result will be more great inventions that will undoubtedly change the course of history. [Music]