https://lastcodex.org/en/ New and revised plates of The Last Codex, in English. en © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. contact@lastcodex.org (Etienne Debost) Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/writing/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/writing/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Writing & Communication Writing records language with visible marks that another person can read back later, far away or long after the writer has died. It arose independently several times; among the earliest examples are tablets from southern Mesopotamia of around 3300 BCE, on which temple accountants pressed and drew signs while the clay was still damp. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/antisepsis/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/antisepsis/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Medicine & Hygiene Hygiene and antisepsis cut the routes that germs take from one person to the next: hands, instruments, dressings and water. Washing with soap, keeping water apart from sewage, chemicals that kill germs on wounds and heat that sterilises tools made childbirth and surgery far safer in the second half of the nineteenth century. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/computer/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/computer/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics A computer is a programmable calculating machine; the modern kind keeps its program in its own memory and works in binary, with switches that are either on or off. The first to run a program from electronic memory was the Manchester “Baby”, on 21 June 1948, and phones and laptops still follow its plan. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/irrigation/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/irrigation/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Agriculture & Livestock Irrigation brings water to crops that rain alone cannot feed, either by letting it run down gently sloping canals or by lifting it from a river or a well. The earliest known canals were dug on the dry plains of Mesopotamia about eight thousand years ago, and the same plains showed early on that a field watered without drainage can slowly turn salty. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/positional-numerals/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/positional-numerals/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Time & Measurement In a positional numeral system a few digits are enough to write any number, because each digit's value depends on the place it occupies. With a zero to mark an empty place, sums, products and divisions can be worked out in writing, column by column, instead of on a counting board. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/anaesthesia/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/anaesthesia/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Medicine & Hygiene Anaesthesia is the medical practice of taking away pain, and often awareness, so that an operation can be done. Since a public demonstration with ether in Boston in 1846, trained anaesthetists, monitoring and oxygen have made it routine, and together with antisepsis it turned surgery from a last resort into ordinary care. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/electric-motor/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/electric-motor/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics An electric motor turns current into rotation: a coil carrying current between magnet poles is pushed sideways, and a commutator or a rotating field keeps that push acting in one direction. Moritz Jacobi's motor of 1834 delivered far more power than any before it, and motor-driven systems now use about half the world's electricity. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/reinforced-concrete/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/reinforced-concrete/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Building & Cities Reinforced concrete is concrete with steel bars cast inside it, placed where the member will be stretched. The concrete takes the squeezing and the steel the pulling, so a flat beam or slab can span an opening where plain concrete or stone would crack. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steam-turbine/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steam-turbine/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Energy & Prime Movers A steam turbine lets steam expand through rows of fixed and moving blades, turning its pressure into speed and that speed into the rotation of a shaft. Charles Parsons coupled one to a dynamo in 1884; turbines of this kind now drive the generators that produce most of the world's electricity. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steel/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steel/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Steel is iron with a small, controlled share of carbon, usually between about 0.1 and 1.5%. It is forged hot; with enough carbon it can be hardened by heating and quenching, then tempered to make it tougher at some cost in hardness. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/crop-rotation/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/crop-rotation/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Agriculture & Livestock Crop rotation changes what grows on a field from one year to the next, and uses fallow, manure and legumes to give back what the harvests take away. It keeps the soil fertile and starves the pests of each crop; in Europe it led from a resting year every other year to rotations with no fallow at all. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/oral-rehydration/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/oral-rehydration/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Medicine & Hygiene Oral rehydration therapy replaces the water and salts lost in diarrhoea with a drink of clean water, salts and glucose in a fixed balance, which the gut keeps absorbing even during cholera. Proved in trials in Dhaka and Calcutta in 1968 and packed in standard sachets since the 1970s, it is credited with saving tens of millions of children. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/transformer/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/transformer/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics A transformer is two coils of wire on one iron core: an alternating current in the first induces a voltage in the second, higher or lower according to the ratio of their turns. It lets power travel at high voltage over long lines and arrive at the voltage appliances use, and it is the main reason alternating current became the standard for the world's grids. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/water-turbine/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/water-turbine/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Energy & Prime Movers A water turbine is a bladed runner that water under pressure drives at high speed, either inside a closed casing or from a jet. It takes energy from a fall of water, like the water wheel, but in a far smaller and faster machine, and since the 1880s it has driven the generators of hydroelectric plants. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/portland-cement/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/portland-cement/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Building & Cities Portland cement is limestone and clay burnt together at about 1,450 °C into hard nodules called clinker, then ground with a little gypsum. With water it hardens by a chemical reaction, even under water, and bound with sand and gravel it makes concrete, the most used building material in the world. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/wind-turbine/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/wind-turbine/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Energy & Prime Movers A wind turbine is a rotor of long, wing-shaped blades that the wind turns, driving an electric generator at the top of a tower. Small ones charge batteries; large ones, with rotors more than a hundred metres across, feed the grid through a transformer. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/arch/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/arch/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Building & Cities An arch spans an opening with wedge-shaped blocks that press on one another, so the whole curve works in compression and pushes outward on its supports. Drawn out in depth it becomes a vault, turned about its axis a dome: the forms that roofed tombs, bridges, aqueducts and cathedrals for over five thousand years. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/aluminium/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/aluminium/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Aluminium is the most common metal in the Earth's crust, but it is locked in oxides that fire and charcoal cannot break. Since 1886 it has been made by refining bauxite to alumina, dissolving the alumina in molten cryolite and splitting it with a large direct current. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/canning/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/canning/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Food & Preservation Canning seals food in a jar or tin and heats it enough to kill the microbes that would spoil it; the closed lid stops new ones getting in. Nicolas Appert published the method in 1810, Louis Pasteur explained it half a century later, and his gentler heat treatment, pasteurisation, made milk, wine and beer safer to drink. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/celestial-navigation/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/celestial-navigation/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Ships & Navigation Celestial navigation finds a ship's position from the height of the Sun, Moon and stars above the horizon. Latitude comes from the Pole Star, which Portuguese pilots measured with a quadrant around 1460, or from the noon Sun; longitude needs the time at a home meridian, which chronometers and lunar tables supplied from the 1760s. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/distillation/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/distillation/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Distillation separates the parts of a liquid by heating it until part of it turns to vapour, then cooling that vapour back into liquid in another vessel. Described in Roman Egypt around 300 CE, it has given pure water, perfumes and essential oils, alcohol for medicine and, since the nineteenth century, the fuels refined from crude oil. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/piston-pump/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/piston-pump/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Mechanics A piston pump moves water with a plug that slides up and down in a cylinder, between two valves that let the water pass one way only. Ctesibius of Alexandria is credited with the force pump, in the third century BCE; the suction pump, which draws water up from below, came into wide use in late medieval Europe and ended up on village wells all over the world. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/solar-cell/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/solar-cell/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics A solar cell is a thin slice of semiconductor in which light frees electrons and a built-in electric field drives them out as a current, with no moving parts and no fuel. Bell Labs showed the first practical silicon cell in 1954, and solar power supplied 8.7% of the world's electricity in 2025. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/horse-collar/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/horse-collar/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Agriculture & Livestock The horse collar is a stiff, padded ring that rests against a horse's shoulders, with the traces hooked to it near the shoulder joints. The horse can throw its weight into the load without pressing on its windpipe, and in medieval Europe it took over much of the ploughing and hauling once done by oxen. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lead-acid-battery/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lead-acid-battery/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics A lead-acid battery stores electricity in plates of lead and lead dioxide standing in dilute sulfuric acid, gives it back as current, and can be recharged hundreds of times. Gaston Planté built the first cell in 1859; with Camille Faure's pasted plates of 1881 it became an industrial product, and it still starts most of the world's cars. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/thermometer/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/thermometer/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Time & Measurement A thermometer shows temperature as the length of a liquid thread in a fine glass tube, read against a scale fixed by melting ice and boiling water. Its companion, the barometer, weighs the air by the height of the liquid column the atmosphere can hold up: about 760 mm of mercury at sea level. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/drinking-water/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/drinking-water/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Fire & Shelter Safe drinking water starts with a protected source, such as a lined and covered well dug uphill and well away from latrines and animal pens. When the water is doubtful, settling, slow sand filtration and boiling remove or kill most of the germs behind diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid, but none of them takes out dissolved chemicals. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/measures-and-standards/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/measures-and-standards/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Time & Measurement A measure is a length, weight or volume agreed in advance, and a standard is the object that holds it: a rod, a set of stones or a vessel, kept safe and copied. Egypt measured in cubits, palms and fingers, balance weights spread from Mesopotamia from about 3000 BCE, and the same work of keeping and copying references led to the metre and the kilogram. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/weaving/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/weaving/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Textiles & Everyday Life Weaving makes cloth by passing a thread, the weft, over and under a set of stretched threads, the warp, row after row. The loom keeps the warp taut and opens it so that the weft crosses in one pass; the warp-weighted loom drawn here goes back to the Neolithic and lasted in northern Europe into the Middle Ages; it survives in a few places. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lime-mortar/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lime-mortar/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Building & Cities Lime is limestone burnt in a kiln until it gives off carbon dioxide, then slaked with water into a white putty or powder. Mixed with sand, it has made mortar and plaster for thousands of years, and it sets by taking carbon dioxide back from the air and turning into stone again. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/charcoal/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/charcoal/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Charcoal is wood heated with so little air that it chars instead of burning, leaving a light, black fuel made mostly of carbon. Used by metalworkers since at least the fifth millennium BCE, and later made in earth-covered clamps and pits, it gave smiths the heat and the reducing gas they needed to win copper and iron from their ores. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/leather-tanning/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/leather-tanning/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Tanning turns a raw animal hide, which soon rots when wet and dries hard as wood, into leather that stays supple and resists decay far better. In the pit method the hide is cleared of hair and flesh, then left for months in water and crushed oak bark, whose tannins bind to the fibres of the skin. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/dyeing/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/dyeing/ Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Textiles & Everyday Life Dyeing makes colour part of a fibre: the dye enters the yarn or cloth and stays through washing. Most plant dyes, such as madder and weld, give stronger and faster colours with a mordant, usually alum, while indigo is made soluble in a vat and turns blue again in the air. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/iron-smelting/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/iron-smelting/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Iron smelting extracts metal from ore heated with charcoal in a small clay furnace supplied with air by bellows. This bloomery normally produces a solid, low-carbon lump called a bloom, which the smith consolidates and forges into wrought iron. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/penicillin/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/penicillin/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Medicine & Hygiene Penicillin is a substance made by Penicillium moulds that kills many kinds of bacteria by stopping them from building their cell walls. Alexander Fleming noticed it in 1928, and an Oxford team turned it into the first mould-derived antibiotic in wide medical use during the Second World War. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/vaccination/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/vaccination/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Medicine & Hygiene Vaccination trains the immune system with a weakened, killed or partial form of a germ, so the body can fight off the real disease later. Edward Jenner showed in 1796 that cowpox protects against smallpox, and two centuries later vaccination made smallpox the first human disease to be eradicated. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/gear/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/gear/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Mechanics A gear is a wheel with teeth that mesh with the teeth of another wheel, so one shaft can drive another without slipping. By choosing the number of teeth, a builder trades speed for force, changes the direction of motion or holds an exact ratio. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/water-wheel/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/water-wheel/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Energy & Prime Movers A water wheel turns the flow or fall of water into rotation, which gears then pass to millstones, hammers, bellows or pumps. From the third century BCE until the nineteenth century it was the main source of mechanical power after people and animals. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sail/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sail/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Ships & Navigation A sail is a sheet of cloth or matting raised on a mast to catch the wind and move a boat. Set at the right angle, it drives the boat with the wind behind or across it, and by zigzagging, even towards where the wind comes from. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steam-locomotive/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steam-locomotive/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Land Transport A steam locomotive is a steam engine on wheels that carries its own fuel and water and hauls trains along rails. Richard Trevithick ran the first one in Wales in 1804, and Robert Stephenson's Rocket of 1829 set the pattern that most later locomotives followed: a boiler full of fire tubes, a blast pipe under the chimney and cylinders driving the wheels directly. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bricks/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bricks/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Building & Cities A brick is a block of clay shaped to a set size, dried in the sun or fired in a kiln, so that walls can be built from identical, easily handled units. Shaped mud bricks were in use in the Near East before 7500 BCE; fired bricks came thousands of years later and went on to carry cities, aqueducts and factory chimneys. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bronze/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bronze/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Bronze is copper alloyed with a little tin, usually about a tenth. It is harder than copper, melts at a lower temperature and fills a mould well, and from the fourth millennium BCE it gave its name to an age of tools, weapons, vessels and statues. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/telephone/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/telephone/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Writing & Communication A telephone turns the vibrations of the voice into a varying electric current, sends it along a wire, and turns it back into sound at the other end. Alexander Graham Bell patented it in March 1876; within two years Bell's magnet telephones were in commercial use, and carbon microphones and exchanges soon made it a public service. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/glass/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/glass/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Glass is sand melted with a flux such as soda and a little lime, then cooled before it can crystallise, so that it sets into a hard solid that lets light through when it is pure. Made first as beads in Mesopotamia, it became an everyday material once glassblowers in the eastern Mediterranean learned to inflate it on a pipe in the first century BCE. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/mechanical-clock/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/mechanical-clock/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Time & Measurement A mechanical clock lets a falling weight turn a train of gears, and an escapement lets the train move forward only one small step at a time. The first ones were built in Europe at the end of the thirteenth century, large iron machines in church towers that struck the hours on a bell. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/microscope/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/microscope/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Optics & Imaging A microscope uses one or more lenses to show things too small for the eye to see. Compound instruments with two lenses in a tube appeared in the Netherlands around 1600, and in the 1670s Antoni van Leeuwenhoek's single tiny lenses showed bacteria and single-celled life for the first time. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/roman-concrete/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/roman-concrete/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Building & Cities Roman concrete is lime mortar packed around lumps of stone or broken brick; in its best-known form the mortar contains volcanic ash. The ash makes it set hard even under water, and it carried the vaults of Rome, its harbours and the unreinforced dome of the Pantheon, still the largest of its kind. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/salt-preservation/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/salt-preservation/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Food & Preservation Salting preserves meat, fish and vegetables by drawing water out of them and out of the microbes that would spoil them. People were boiling brine for salt in eastern Europe by the sixth millennium BCE, and salted pork, herring and cod fed armies, sailors and cities until refrigeration. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/soap/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/soap/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Medicine & Hygiene Soap is made by boiling or mixing fat with a strong alkali, which splits the fat into glycerol and the salts of fatty acids that lift grease and dirt into water. Recipes for soap-like cleaners go back to Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE; cheap industrial alkali made soap an everyday product in the nineteenth century. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/telegraph/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/telegraph/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Writing & Communication The electric telegraph sends messages along a wire as pulses of current from a battery, switched on and off with a key and read at the far end by an electromagnet. William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a needle telegraph in Britain in 1837, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail demonstrated their recording telegraph in 1838, and within thirty years cables linked continents. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/telescope/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/telescope/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Optics & Imaging A telescope gathers light from a distant object with a lens or a mirror and enlarges the image it forms. Spectacle makers in the Netherlands made the first ones in 1608, and Galileo's improved instruments showed mountains on the Moon in late 1609 and four moons circling Jupiter in January 1610. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/aqueduct/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/aqueduct/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Building & Cities An aqueduct brings water from a distant spring to a town in a channel that falls very slightly along its length, so that gravity alone keeps the water moving. The Romans built hundreds of them, in tunnels, in covered trenches and on arcades such as the Pont du Gard, and some carried tens of thousands of cubic metres a day. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/gunpowder/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/gunpowder/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Defence & Fortification Gunpowder, or black powder, is a mixture of saltpetre, charcoal and sulfur that burns extremely fast, giving off hot gas and a cloud of solid smoke. Chinese alchemists came across it in the ninth century, and over the following five hundred years it became the propellant of rockets, guns and cannon, then a tool for mining and building. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/x-ray/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/x-ray/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Medicine & Hygiene X-ray imaging sends invisible, penetrating rays through the body onto a plate or detector, so that bones and dense tissues cast shadows. Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the rays in Würzburg on 8 November 1895, and by early 1896, weeks after he announced them, doctors in Europe and America were using them to find fractures and bullets. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bow-and-arrow/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bow-and-arrow/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Defence & Fortification A bow stores the effort of the archer's arms in its bent limbs and releases it in a fraction of a second, sending an arrow much faster and farther than a hand could throw it. Small stone points from South Africa suggest that people were shooting arrows about 64,000 years ago, and the bow stayed a weapon of hunting and war until firearms replaced it. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/crane/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/crane/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Mechanics A crane lifts a load by trading distance for force: a rope runs through several pulleys and onto a drum turned by a winch or a treadwheel, so that a few people can raise a stone many times their own weight. Greek builders used cranes from the late sixth century BCE, and Roman and medieval builders used them to raise temples and cathedrals and to load ships. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/photography/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/photography/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Optics & Imaging Photography fixes the image formed by a lens on a surface that light changes chemically. Nicéphore Niépce made the oldest surviving camera photograph in 1826 or 1827, and the daguerreotype, made public in Paris in 1839, was the first process sold to the public, with cameras and plates on sale within weeks. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/refrigeration/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/refrigeration/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Textiles & Everyday Life Refrigeration keeps a space colder than its surroundings by making a liquid boil inside it, so that it soaks up heat, then carrying the vapour outside, compressing it and turning it back into liquid. Jacob Perkins patented the first closed vapour-compression machine in London in 1834; ammonia machines ran breweries and ships by the 1870s, and electric home refrigerators spread from the late 1920s. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bicycle/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bicycle/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Land Transport A bicycle is a two-wheeled machine that the rider balances by steering and drives with the legs, through pedals, a chain and a sprocket on the rear wheel. It grew from Karl Drais's wooden running machine of 1817 into the chain-driven safety bicycle of 1885, which, fitted with air-filled tyres, lets a person cover a given distance on a small fraction of the energy needed to walk it. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/cheese/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/cheese/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Food & Preservation Cheese is milk whose protein has been curdled, drained of its whey and often salted and ripened, so that it keeps far longer than fresh milk. Milk-fat residues in perforated Neolithic pots show that farmers in Europe were making it more than 7,000 years ago. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/eyeglasses/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/eyeglasses/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Optics & Imaging Eyeglasses are a pair of lenses held in a frame in front of the eyes to correct long sight, short sight or astigmatism. They appeared in Italy in the 1280s as reading aids for older people; lenses for short sight followed in the fifteenth century and side arms in the eighteenth. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/spinning-wheel/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/spinning-wheel/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Textiles & Everyday Life A spinning wheel twists loose fibre into yarn with a spindle driven by a large wheel, much faster than a hand spindle. The wheel with a flyer, known in Germany by about 1480, also winds the yarn onto a bobbin while it spins, so that spinning and winding no longer alternate. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/beer/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/beer/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Food & Preservation Beer is made by turning the starch of sprouted grain into sugar and letting yeast ferment that sugar into alcohol. Chemical traces of barley beer go back to the fourth millennium BCE in western Iran, and brewing has followed farming almost everywhere cereals were grown. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/potters-wheel/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/potters-wheel/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Tools & Making A potter's wheel is a heavy disc that spins on a vertical axis, so that clay set at its centre can be shaped evenly all round by the potter's hands. It began in the Near East as a slow turntable more than six thousand years ago; the fast wheel, which stores enough momentum to throw a pot from a lump of clay, followed. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/vulcanized-rubber/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/vulcanized-rubber/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Vulcanised rubber is rubber whose long molecules have been tied together, first by heating natural rubber with sulphur, so that it stays elastic in heat and cold instead of turning sticky or brittle. Charles Goodyear in the United States and Thomas Hancock in Britain worked out the process in the early 1840s, and it made rubber usable for tyres, hoses, seals and footwear. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/hot-air-balloon/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/hot-air-balloon/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Aeronautics A hot-air balloon rises because the heated air inside its envelope is lighter than the cooler air around it. The Montgolfier brothers, who had flown a small model indoors in 1782, first showed one in public in France in 1783, and on 21 November of that year their balloon carried two men over Paris, the first human flight in free air. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sewing-machine/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sewing-machine/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Textiles & Everyday Life A sewing machine joins cloth with stitches formed mechanically, most often by locking an upper thread, carried by a needle with its eye near the point, around a lower thread held in a shuttle or bobbin case. Barthélemy Thimonnier's chain-stitch machine of 1830 was the first put to work in a factory; Elias Howe's lockstitch patent of 1846 and Isaac Singer's machine of 1851 made it an industrial and household tool. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sundial/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/sundial/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Time & Measurement A sundial tells the time from the shadow that the Sun casts on a marked surface. The oldest surviving examples come from Egypt in the fifteenth century BCE, and until mechanical clocks spread in the late Middle Ages it was the main way to divide the day. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lock-and-key/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/lock-and-key/ Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Textiles & Everyday Life A lock holds a bolt in place until a key of the right shape releases it. Wooden pin locks were in use in the ancient Near East, and the same principle, refined in the nineteenth century, works in most door cylinders today. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/control-of-fire/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/control-of-fire/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Fire & Shelter Controlling fire means keeping a flame alive, moving it, and in the end lighting it at will. Human ancestors used fire at least a million years ago, and it gave them warmth, light, protection and cooked food. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/printing-press/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/printing-press/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Writing & Communication The printing press presses inked metal type onto damp paper with a wooden screw, so one page of text can be copied hundreds of times in a day. Gutenberg combined it with cast movable type and oil-based ink around 1440, and within fifty years printing had spread across Europe. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steam-engine/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steam-engine/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Energy & Prime Movers A steam engine turns the heat of a fire into movement by using steam to drive a piston. Thomas Newcomen's engine of 1712 pumped water out of mines, and James Watt's improvements from 1765 onwards made steam power cheap enough to drive the factories of the Industrial Revolution. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/stone-tools/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/stone-tools/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Tools & Making Most stone tools are pieces of rock broken in a controlled way to give a sharp edge for cutting, scraping or chopping. They are the oldest known technology: the earliest date back about 3.3 million years, and people still made some into the twentieth century. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/wheel/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/wheel/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Land Transport A wheel turning on an axle lets a load roll instead of scraping along the ground, so the rubbing moves to a small, greased bearing. Wheeled carts appeared in Mesopotamia and Europe around 3500 BCE, and the same idea later turned winches, mills and waterwheels. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/generator/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/generator/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics An electric generator turns mechanical motion into electric current by moving a magnet and a coil of wire past each other. Michael Faraday found the principle in 1831, and almost all the electricity used today still comes from machines built on it. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/plough/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/plough/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Agriculture & Livestock A plough is pulled through the ground to cut and loosen the soil before sowing. The first ards only scratched a furrow; the mouldboard plough, which turns the soil over, opened up the heavy, wet lands of northern Europe. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/windmill/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/windmill/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Energy & Prime Movers A windmill catches the wind with large sails and passes that energy, through a train of wooden and iron gears, to a millstone that grinds grain. From the twelfth century to the coming of steam it was, with the water wheel, the main source of mechanical power in Europe. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/airplane/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/airplane/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Aeronautics An aeroplane is a powered machine heavier than air that flies on fixed wings, with an engine to drive it forward and movable surfaces to steer it. Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first controlled, sustained powered flights at Kitty Hawk on 17 December 1903. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/combustion-engine/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/combustion-engine/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Energy & Prime Movers An internal combustion engine burns fuel inside a closed cylinder and lets the hot gas push a piston, which turns a crankshaft. Nicolaus Otto's four-stroke gas engine of 1876 set the pattern still used in most car, boat and generator engines. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/paper/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/paper/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Writing & Communication Paper is a thin mat of plant fibres, beaten in water, caught on a screen and dried until the fibres bond to one another. Lighter than bamboo slips and cheaper than silk or parchment, it carried writing and then print from Han China to the rest of the world. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/rope/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/rope/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Fire & Shelter Traditional rope is made of short fibres twisted into yarns, the yarns into strands and the strands into rope, giving a line far longer and stronger than any single fibre. Neanderthals were already twisting cord more than 40,000 years ago, and people have used rope ever since to tie, haul, lift and rig. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/transistor/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/transistor/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics A transistor is a small piece of semiconductor in which a weak current or voltage controls a much stronger current, so it can amplify a signal or act as a switch. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain made the first one at Bell Labs in December 1947, and chips now hold billions of them. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/battery/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/battery/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics A battery turns chemical reactions at two electrodes, separated by an electrolyte that conducts ions, into a steady electric current. Alessandro Volta's pile of zinc, copper and brine was the first in 1800, and every cell since, from the telegraph jar to the lithium phone battery, works on the same principle. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bread/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/bread/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Food & Preservation Bread is a dough of ground grain and water, often leavened, baked until it sets. Hunter-gatherers in Jordan were already baking flatbread about 14,400 years ago, before anyone farmed cereals. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/compass/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/compass/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Ships & Navigation A magnetic compass is a magnetized needle, free to turn, that lines itself up with the Earth's magnetic field and so shows north in any weather. Described in China in the eleventh century and at sea in Europe by about 1190, it let sailors hold a course out of sight of land and under cloud. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/light-bulb/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/light-bulb/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Electricity & Electronics An incandescent lamp makes light by passing current through a thin filament until it glows white-hot, inside a glass bulb emptied of air so that the filament does not burn. Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison made it practical in 1879, and it lit homes and streets for more than a century. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/pottery/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/pottery/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Materials & Chemistry Pottery is clay shaped while wet and then fired until it changes for good into a hard, stone-like material. Foragers in southern China were making clay pots, probably for cooking, about 20,000 years ago, long before farming. https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/radio/ https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/radio/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT Writing & Communication Radio sends signals through space as electromagnetic waves, made by a rapidly oscillating current in one wire and picked up by another wire far away. Guglielmo Marconi turned laboratory experiments into a working wireless telegraph in 1895, and broadcasting of speech and music followed in the early twentieth century.