Book Description

When thinking about inventions I am reminded of the quote, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters". This book aims to list 100 greatest hits of humanity in terms of inventions to introduce and motivate future generations of inventors to the true range of human inventions. One of the books which made an impact on me as a child was The 100 by Princeton professor Michael Hart. This book takes a similar style and I hope will motivate a few future inventors. This is a book which ranks all the innovations we people invented and played a role in shaping humanity itself. This book ranks innovation based on impact to human cultural evolution irrespective whether it was purely positive. I have tried to give the rankings rational justification as much as possible, particularly by comparing an invention with its closest competitors and why it is ranked in a particular place relative to them. Think about the collective loss to humanity if Jonas Salk went to work on financial innovations for Goldman Sachs or advertising optimization for Google in the 1950s. How many of us know Robert Cochrane's work in India on leprosy (chapter on Antibiotic) or Maurice Hilleman's work who invented 40 vaccines including MMR (chapter on Vaccine) while we know all about the umpteenth billionaire selling a battery driven car or yet another useless form of social media. If humanity doesn't get our priorities right, the innovation that powered human productivity can slow down and human talent will be wasted away in serving advertisements a few more milliseconds faster or serving celebrities' thoughts in the toilet in one sentence bites or trading stocks using sophisticated neural networks. If the book helps few of the readers focus on fundamental inventions and human productivity this book will have done its job.