Innovation Cafe with Gary Shuster, patent litigator and prolific inventor.
Transcript
Hey there. I’m Gary Shuster, your friendly neighborhood inventor. And this is Innovation Cafe. Today we’re taking a look at the unsung heroes of innovation. We’re talking about the essential baseline inventions that humans use every day, but that don’t have a known inventor. So we can all name Edison. We can name Da Vinci. But there are some innovations that are so ancient and so foundational. We have no idea who came up with them, but those innovations laid the groundwork for modern civilization. So for all the inventors out there who don’t think that they’re getting the credit there, do.
Just know that a thousand years from now, people are unlikely to remember any names of inventors from our era, but those inventions will still be powering civilization. So we’ll start. Yeah. From the wheel to how we start fires. Let’s dive into the top ten inventions without a known inventor. The first one and a really important one. Starting fire with friction. It’s absolutely vital. Early humans discovered that rubbing two sticks together generates friction, which generates enough heat to ignite a flame. Imagine the power of that discovery. Being able to control the creation of warmth. Being able to make food more nutritious by cooking it, less unhealthy by cooking it, and being able to ward off predators.
fire is a key tool for survival, and has become a critical element in the development of all kinds of other things that humans do. Metallurgy. Chemistry without fire. Human civilization would look very, very different. So here’s the mystery. Who figured it out? We’re never going to know. It probably emerged in different parts of the world independently. It is such an important invention, and it’s game changing for humanity. It is hard to imagine that it didn’t arise independently in several places. Next up, we’ve got the wheel. I know there’s a saying don’t reinvent the wheel, but that’s nuts.
The wheel is one of the most valuable human inventions ever. You can reinvented a little bit better. Do it. But the wheel revolutionized transportation, revolutionized technology. The earliest wheels we know of date back to around 3500 BC. So around 5500 years ago in Mesopotamia. But who came up with this idea that is lost to history? And wheels aren’t just for transport. It’s used to make pottery. It’s essential in carts, machinery and gears. Essentially. Many, probably most of the inventions we have today wouldn’t be possible without the wheel. We’ll never know who decided to roll an object on a circular disc.
But this invention set human civilization on a fast track to progress. Now, there have been some scientists who’ve tried to figure out how the wheel would have been invented, and it may have taken the form of using logs and putting something on top of the logs and pushing it, and then you move the log that fell out from under it to the front. And so you’re using logs to roll something around on. And that would probably have given someone the idea to just cut off part of the log and attach it to the side of something.
And there you have wheels. But we can only speculate. But thank you, whoever it is that invented the wheel. Next up we have the Stone age. The use of rocks as tools. Now it seems fairly rudimentary, but it’s a key thing in the development of a species. There are several animal species that now use rocks as tools. So it’s an early development. There is zero chance that we’ll ever know the first human to use rocks as tools, but it was the dawn of technology. Imagine a primitive human picks up a sharp rock, maybe cuts himself or herself on it, and realize it can be used to cut to hunt sheep or other materials.
It’s amazing hunting, gathering, and crafting sophisticated tools all have the stone to think for their existence. Next up we have rope and cordage. Now, if you’ve watched Naked and Afraid or any of the other wilderness survival shows, you know that cordage is pretty key and it can be made out of just parts of plants. But the idea to take a plant and repurpose it to tie things together is huge. But somehow early humans figured out how to twist those plant fibers together and create something much stronger. Rope. Let humans build shelters. Hunt more effectively with traps they could fish.
They could even eventually sail across the oceans. So the simple act of twisting fibers together created the possibility for all kinds of complex structures and tools. We don’t know who first did it, but this humble invention became the backbone of construction, exploration, and transportation. Seriously, we all use this invention every day. Who invented it? It was an unknown. Next up, the invention of clothing. Now, this is one of humanity’s basic survival tools. It gets cold out there. It gets wet out there. And humans probably started wearing furs and maybe even plant fibers to protect themselves from the cold, the rain and the sun.
Now, it’s really unclear whether we can count this even as an invention. Because animals wear furs all the time. It’s just their own that they grow on their bodies. So it’s just one little additional step that a modern patent examiner might find obvious. To take the skin and fur from an animal and use it on a different animal. Now, beyond survival, it also is a way to store heat. It allowed humans to move into colder climates. Eventually, it became a cultural and social symbol. So we can’t point to a single inventor of clothing, but without it, human civilization would have been very limited geographically.
Now the next invention is really a cool one. It’s the bow and arrow. The bow and arrow was a revolutionary leap in hunting, and unfortunately, warfare that allowed humans to hunt from a distance with greater accuracy and safety. It improved hunting efficiency wildly and became crucial in conflict between civilizations. Now the mystery. We don’t know who invented the bow and arrow. We know that there are some early bows dating back to maybe 10,000 years ago. But who first crafted them? Who first got the idea? That’s also lost to history. But thank you to whoever did it that changed how humans hunted and sadly fought.
The next invention is on the border between an invention and a shift in how humans live. And that is the shift from hunter gatherer to cultivator agriculture. It is one of the most transformative inventions imaginable. And it was unlikely to be the brainchild of a single person. It was around 12,000 years ago that humans are thought to have transitioned from hunting and gathering to growing their own food. But what did it allow? It let people settle in one place, build communities, develop societies. And because one person could make food for more than several other people, those other people had time to concentrate on other inventions like, I don’t know, the wheel.
It was key. Whoever thought I’m going to plant these seeds and grow crops was brilliant. We won’t know who did it first. We won’t even know the 100 people who did it first. But we owe them a great debt of thanks. Now the next one really helped supercharge the prior one. And that is the plow. Once humans began farming, they needed tools to make the work more efficient. Because after all, it’s better for one person to feed 100 people, and therefore the other 99 people can go and make other inventions and improve life in other ways.
And that’s where the plow comes in. Early plows were just simple wooden tools pulled by humans or animals, and they turned the soil. But the plow increased farming productivity substantially. It made it possible to cultivate larger areas and feed growing populations. It was crucial for the development of the complex societies we have today. And yet another person to thank whose name we will probably never know, almost certainly never know. The next up, I think, is is a beautiful invention. And that’s writing. So it moves beyond tools to something more cerebral. The earliest form of written communication was probably pictographs, and it appeared about 5000 years ago.
We don’t know who invented it, but it did allow humans to record knowledge, passed down that knowledge, and maintain complex systems of information. It is the basis of history of law, of science, of everything that requires more than a few generations that can retain knowledge via spoken word. It is truly a mystery. We know that the Sumerians, the Egyptians used writing, but the name of the first person who used language has been lost. However, we do know that they might not be human because Neanderthals engaged in creating pictures on cave walls, which is a pretty good indicator that they may also have used it for some form of written intergenerational communication.
And last, this is actually a kind of complicated one. It’s the calendar. Now, when you think about it, how if you didn’t have access to watches or any calendars today, if you’re just put on a desert island, how would you figure out how many days there are in a year? How would you figure out the necessity of having leap years or even that leap second? You probably would have a hard time doing it. So it is to a very advanced invention for early humans to have come up with. And it was critical. This way you could track time, you know, what seasons to plant.
It also enabled a lot of religious ceremonies, because those tend to be either based on the lunar or the solar calendar. But either way is a calendar. So it became a way for humans to have sort of a common reference point to different cultures independently. Did develop their own calendars. Ancient Egyptians, the Mayans. But the idea of a structured way to measure time, the inventor of that is lost to history. But thank you too. Now, these inventions may not have had a known inventor, but they’re foundational to the development of human civilization. They remind us that sometimes the greatest inventions are born from a single genius, but from the collective wisdom and necessity of early human societies.
Now, you know, from watching this channel, I’m not a big fan of necessity being the mother of invention, because it does lead to all kinds of shortcuts. Sometimes just sitting and thinking about a problem is really the mother of invention. But necessity in this case was unavoidable and it did lead to invention. Now, which of the inventions do you think had the biggest impact? Let me know in the comments if I missed one. Let me know in the comments! If you enjoyed the video, please make sure to like, subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don’t miss future episodes.
Thank you for watching! Keep on innovating.