Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Fire could be seen as just a harnessed natural phenomenon, not much of an invention until you get to matches and lighters. (Is it discovery? Hm. Is air?)
Printing press is definitely up there for invention. If fire counts for discovery, then we can count math as well.
the alphabet
not much of an invention
Learning how to produce it on demand and what to do with it were the inventions pertaining to fire.
yeah that’s why I allowed for things like matches and lighters. but then if you want to go that broad like I said then we have math or the alphabet per Bob’s suggestion. By that point we may as well say, “logical reasoning deducing cause and effect” is the greatest of all because without it we wouldn’t have even mastered fire.
(I once heard the theory that the cooking of meat helped our bodies process it, thus enabling our calorie-demanding brains to develop into the powerhouses they are today. Though it then sounds like a chicken and egg thing that makes you wonder how we mastered fire to cook in the first place if we didn’t have the power necessary for the brains to master fire to cook… And then is when you start to realize why our ancestors just claimed the gods delivered it all to us.)
I think it’s got to be fire or farming. OK, I just looked around online and some people also listed the wheel, so I’m going to include that for the big three.
arabic numerals
Fire made it possible for humans to see even when the sun was down and the sky was overcast. Fire is a portable light source that makes it possible to read the printed word anytime, anywhere. Light and fire have great symbolism in the Jewish and Catholic faiths.
I would say the wheel also. It allowed man to form modes of travel and it is used in early manufacturing (in the form of belts and pulleys). Every item which moves from a to b, autonomously or manually, needs wheels or wheels as steers to move.
Modern teens would probably say the Apple iPhone. 😂
Early man’s mastodon traps were highly effective, as evidenced by the complete lack of present-day mastodons.
I’d put “indoor plumbing” down for at least an honorable mention.
In that spirit, I’ll add “running water” and “refrigeration”. The first is probably something certain parts of the world still do not have access to (which would make life very difficult if they did not live near a body of water). And the latter, basically allowed man to extend the life of food. My mother who grew up in a non-western country in a village, told me that before they could afford a fridge her mother would preserve food for the winter, and the consumption of meats was rare (and only when meat could be bought and eaten the same day)- hence impacting lifestyle and diet.
The pocket fishermen by Ron Popeel.😎
The Sail. Whoever designed an apparatus to harness the wind via the use of mast / pole, must be considered in the top 10, imho, of this query. Transatlantic travel, Trade Routes, exploration thereof. The mighty sail.
Let’s all be honest and admit that the older we get, the more magnificent aspirin becomes.
Bufferin PM!
The number zero, essential to higher mathematics and science. The Romans didn’t have that lowly number, and without zero they could only get so far.
Electricity…