Harnessing different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Everything from phone calls to wifi work because of radio waves, and the fact we can get things to vibrate just right. It’s also crazy that radio waves are everywhere and just don’t bother us
Wheels. I was well into my 20’s before I saw a suitcase with wheels on it. I watch my neighbours haul their groceries in from the car in fold-up wheeled wagons and it just makes so much sense. We used to buy plastic handles to slip our plastic groceries bags onto so that they wouldn’t cut into our hands while we strained our joints carrying them. Wheels! They’ve been there all along. Why weren’t we using them?
Language. The fact that a bunch of vibrating air, tiny pressure waves, can be shaped by our mouths into symbols that not only convey basic needs (food, danger, come here) but abstract ideas like “justice,” “love,” “eternity,” and “quantum mechanics”, and that these sounds can travel across time when written down is insane when you really think about it. Language took invisible thoughts, made them portable, and allowed humans to build everything else we now take for granted
Aircraft. We take lumps of metal, stuff them full of heavy things like luggage and people, then send it a mile in the air to travel across vast oceans. Completing journeys that took our ancestors generations in a matter of hours.
I studied aerospace engineering. The more I learnt about the physics, the more preposterous the sheer arrogance of humanity doing this seemed. Sure, it’s obeying the laws of physics but if it was in a fantasy setting it would be criticised for having such contrived laws of physics to just barely allow flight.
Transistor. Not only is it a brilliant solution to a problem, but even recognizing that it was a problem and that solving it would be beneficial was brilliant.
Cell phones. I’m literally sitting here typing on something that can access nearly all of humanity’s knowledge. (Correct and incorrect knowledge)
It can show me my grandmother live from across the world while we see and talk to each other. It can buy me products. It can take pictures and videos. These things are insane and they’re such an every day object now.
How soap was discovered and then perfected through experimentation over 2,000 years ago is just amazing to me.
Glass is another big one for me. It’s got such a long history, and the fact that we wouldn’t have phones, tvs, or the internet without is just wild to me.
The combo of infrastructure and technology allows me to have pressurized hot water in my house for baths and showers. Like how rare of a thing was that 300 years ago? Only nobility and people near hot springs had that, and it took servants for baths, let alone a shower
Cement. Do you know the super high temperatures, weird materials, like volvanic ash, recipes, precice cooking timing involved in the making of cement. And the romans figured it out over 2000 years ago
For me, it’s urban cities. Like, how do we manage to cram buildings, pipes, streets, electricity, and so much more into one space—and somehow it all works in sync?
Radio… people just figured out how to put things into the air?! And then television stepped it up, the picture and sound travelled to antennaes and then it just stepped up to cable… insane
Healthcare. I remember watching a video of someone talking about finding human remains with a healed femur being evidence of early community/society. They could have let them die but chose to care and nurture them instead.
Microbolometer. There’s no way that can work. On the other hand, I put my hand on a wall for 10 seconds, then went 10 yards away and used the microbolometer and could clearly see my hand print. In detail. Used in things like ENVG-B night vision goggles. They work by measuring the temperature difference between a tiny wire which the infra red energy from the outside is focused on, and a wire which is masked from the IR energy. So the heat of a body 500 yards away warms a wire in a sensor and you can use the change in resistance of the wire to measure the temperature change and convert that to a visible image.
I understand how it works from a molecular level and it is actually incredibly simple at its root. What amazes me is how much data is pushed thru given how it actually works.
GPS is like magic. There is no way that should work. But it does. There is no way it should be accessible. But it is. There is no way it should be so easy that my 85 year old mother can use it. But she does.
Coffee.. you’ll be amazed to see how it’s made. It cannot be progressive invention as machines or other things which got better with technology and money. Someone spent real good effort to invent the coffee that we drink.
The AIDS/HIV treatment. We went from millions of people dying in the 80s and 90s to people being able to live long lives with it. In less than 20 years.
Smartphones. I know it’s a combination of previous existing tech, but many inventions are.
But the computing power I have in my pocket, the amount of knowledge I have instant access to, the communications, and the ability to capture great pics and videos.
Locks. I’ll never forget being at the Canal and looking at ships above you and thinking how the fuck did we pull this off. Even now, every time I think of that experience I still get that WTF feeling.
Paracetamol (acetaminophen). Sold as Panadol or Tylenol. It was first synthesised in 1852. Look up the history of it, and tell me why anybody thought to do… things with chemicals and see what effect they would have on humans??
I don’t understand much about chemistry at all which makes these guys seem like wizards to me.
Anything to do with electronics, transmission of tv or radio waves and wifi. There is somehow invisible ahit flying all around us thay carries information and there are pieces of equipment that can send out and capture those invisible things and turn them into stuff we can see and hear.
MRI machines – specifically how they work. If you don’t already know, it’s not even close to what you’d probably guess. In a nutshell, it uses a strong magnetic field to force all the protons in your body’s water molecules to align the same way. Then they hit you with radio waves that disrupt this alignment briefly. When the protons return back to alignment, they release radio waves the machine detects and uses to calculate detailed images of the interior of your body.
Maybe for someone who’s an expert in this it’s no biggie, but as a bit of a nerdy layperson, this process completely blows my mind.
GPS. Everything about it is crazy. There’s a ton of science, math, engineering and Physics. The satellites, the speed of light, relativity and the math to account for it all so that your phone can tell you you missed your exit.
Inefficient (about 6%, maybe 9% on a good day, compared to ~30% for a modern gasoline car), and incredibly labor-intensive, the average locomotive spent 7 months of the year in service, and the rest in the maintenance bay. Had to stop every 120 miles for manual lubrication, and often swapped out every 400 miles for an inspection, with the train handed to a fresh engine. Usually kept steaming when idle by additional crews.
Yet, under these schedules, they were tough and reliable. The maintenance routines were expensive, but served to minimize the change of breakdowns.
They were the first means of moving loads of thousands of tons over distances which would have been inconceivable until then. They enabled a huge leap in living standards, making cities and industry possible in cities nowhere near a river or an ocean, for the first time in history.
The United States ran the WWII economy on railroads pulled by steam. If you get a chance, see the Union Pacific 4014 “Big Boy” locomotive. They run it all over the country, and it’s hard to miss if you’re within a mile of it, as it weighs more than a 747 – that’s the easiest way to visualize how a steam economy was possible.
Those giant Boeing aircraft ; 747, 777. I used to live where they would fly over. Even today I wonder how something the size of a NY building could fly
Man, everything. For instance where I’m sitting in looking at my cat’s autofeeder.
It’s cheapass plastic on the outside, except for the bowl which is immaculate stainless. Both of those materials are small miracles in their own ways. It’s got a quartz oscillation timepiece which would have been the most accurate clock in the world a hundred years ago. It’s probably got more processing power than the first moon landing. It’s plugged into the wall, which brings in he miracle of our electric grid. The indicator light is a white LED which won Shuji Nakamura a Nobel prize in 2014.
And all that because I’m too lazy to feed my cat a few times a day.
The Adam smasher. When I was a kid we took a field trip to the mile-long Adam Smasher. This long bif machine to smash something so tiny we can’t even see it.
Some of our medical techniques. Don’t have perfect eyesight? Here, let me just shine lasers in your eyes and fix them. Have cancer? Let me just use super strong magnets to take magic pictures of your insides without hurting you, and then I’ll just blast the cancer with radioactive stuff. Lost an arm? Here, let me just make you a new one that works by reading your mind. Need a new heart valve? Lemme just go in through a vein in your leg.
Transistors: Not only did we discover how to make and use them, we figured out how to put millions of them on a single silicon chip, and make them incredibly small, fast, and dense.
But the part that really blows me away is that the transistor is the single most manufactured thing humans have made.
Commercial airplanes, so many people take it for granted. But for me, I am still awed every time thinking about it – a machine the size of a big building, holding several hundred people inside, flying close to speed of sound, covering what Columbus took years to travel in 12 hours. It’s such a miracle yet it also becomes so affordable and so common. It just blows my mind.
Comments
television lol
Gravitational wave observatories
Yoga pants.
The Internet. It literaly connects the world. Like, you and I are talking now because of it. THATS INSANE!
Penicillin, the fact that it was an accidental found turned massive disease killer saved countless lives
Harnessing different frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Everything from phone calls to wifi work because of radio waves, and the fact we can get things to vibrate just right. It’s also crazy that radio waves are everywhere and just don’t bother us
Bluetooth
Shotgun
Well I like machines so my mind went to the Large Hadron Collider.
cocaine
The Rotary Wankle Engine
Computers.
Fucking magnets……like how do THEY work?? 🙂
Magnetic tape
Wireless technology. This shits just all floating in the air?!
Squatty potty
Far as we know, we are the first species to make and use fire…. the beginning of human advancement in my opinion.
Bread. Who figured out grinding up grain and letting yeast have its way would be a good thing? Beer, too.
Helicopters
A phone
planes. like how does a giant hunk of metal somehow just float? dont know much about planes so it literally blows my mind
Wheels. I was well into my 20’s before I saw a suitcase with wheels on it. I watch my neighbours haul their groceries in from the car in fold-up wheeled wagons and it just makes so much sense. We used to buy plastic handles to slip our plastic groceries bags onto so that they wouldn’t cut into our hands while we strained our joints carrying them. Wheels! They’ve been there all along. Why weren’t we using them?
Radio
Language. The fact that a bunch of vibrating air, tiny pressure waves, can be shaped by our mouths into symbols that not only convey basic needs (food, danger, come here) but abstract ideas like “justice,” “love,” “eternity,” and “quantum mechanics”, and that these sounds can travel across time when written down is insane when you really think about it. Language took invisible thoughts, made them portable, and allowed humans to build everything else we now take for granted
A lot of human inventions were discovered by accident. That itself still shocks me.
Music
Aircraft. We take lumps of metal, stuff them full of heavy things like luggage and people, then send it a mile in the air to travel across vast oceans. Completing journeys that took our ancestors generations in a matter of hours.
I studied aerospace engineering. The more I learnt about the physics, the more preposterous the sheer arrogance of humanity doing this seemed. Sure, it’s obeying the laws of physics but if it was in a fantasy setting it would be criticised for having such contrived laws of physics to just barely allow flight.
Calculus. How the F did Newton create a whole new math?
Transistor. Not only is it a brilliant solution to a problem, but even recognizing that it was a problem and that solving it would be beneficial was brilliant.
Air conditioning
Fleshlight
Toilet- no power!!!
Cell phones. I’m literally sitting here typing on something that can access nearly all of humanity’s knowledge. (Correct and incorrect knowledge)
It can show me my grandmother live from across the world while we see and talk to each other. It can buy me products. It can take pictures and videos. These things are insane and they’re such an every day object now.
How soap was discovered and then perfected through experimentation over 2,000 years ago is just amazing to me.
Glass is another big one for me. It’s got such a long history, and the fact that we wouldn’t have phones, tvs, or the internet without is just wild to me.
Metal
Using fire and stone to bend the toughest material in the world to form something
The combo of infrastructure and technology allows me to have pressurized hot water in my house for baths and showers. Like how rare of a thing was that 300 years ago? Only nobility and people near hot springs had that, and it took servants for baths, let alone a shower
Written language and organization of ideas.
Cement. Do you know the super high temperatures, weird materials, like volvanic ash, recipes, precice cooking timing involved in the making of cement. And the romans figured it out over 2000 years ago
Electrical power.
For me, it’s urban cities. Like, how do we manage to cram buildings, pipes, streets, electricity, and so much more into one space—and somehow it all works in sync?
WiFi
Cheese.
Jazz, I mean, It’s a group of people just vibing with the fucking instrument.
Air conditioning
Audio speakers.
The sewing machine, full stop
Honestly, everything, and that’s not a cop-out/unserious answer. We’re just animals and yet look at how we live.
Freakin’ planes always blow my mind. I can look out the window the entire flight, completely mesmerized. It’s true magic to me.
Nukes. It’s a 23rd century weapon that we accidentally discovered in the 20th.
Toaster
microSD cards blow my mind. The fact that you can store 512GB on something the size of your fingernail feels liker proof we’re living in a simulation.
Cameras and video recording. I still can’t wrap my mind around it.
Microchips.
At their most fundamental level, it’s just a bunch of switches flipping on and off in a specific order, and the result is this post.
Smart phones
Smartphones! So much information just in our pockets!
It has to be the simple wheel.
The Pill. Freedom!
the steam engine: kick started the whole industrial revolution and allowed us to have electricity.
the concept is simple enough such that one wonder why it wasnt invented a lot earlier like during the roman times.
This one scientist at the university near me PRINTS BRAIN TISSUE. My mind has been blown for like a year since I read about that.
Air conditioning! Looooooooove it!
Writing is pretty cool.
Cameras. How the hell can a contraption capture a scene and freeze it in a miniature version for me to look upon later
Elevators are pretty neat
Idk why the cámara!
Air conditioning/ heater. Can you imagine living in Florida or Boston without one. What a sad rough life!
Printers and actually all types of specialized manufacturing machines.
It has to be yoga pants
Music.
Sewing machines
Old CRT tv’s
Old Hard Disk drives
Optical drives
The sheer unmitigated audacity of the synchronization required for these!
Waste management. So much trash.
Radio… people just figured out how to put things into the air?! And then television stepped it up, the picture and sound travelled to antennaes and then it just stepped up to cable… insane
Flight
Healthcare. I remember watching a video of someone talking about finding human remains with a healed femur being evidence of early community/society. They could have let them die but chose to care and nurture them instead.
That Alan Turing german enigma decryption machine is seriously some friggin magic.
The book is an amazing technology. You can carry stories with you! And put a bunch on a shelf.
Definitely the internet
Microbolometer. There’s no way that can work. On the other hand, I put my hand on a wall for 10 seconds, then went 10 yards away and used the microbolometer and could clearly see my hand print. In detail. Used in things like ENVG-B night vision goggles. They work by measuring the temperature difference between a tiny wire which the infra red energy from the outside is focused on, and a wire which is masked from the IR energy. So the heat of a body 500 yards away warms a wire in a sensor and you can use the change in resistance of the wire to measure the temperature change and convert that to a visible image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbolometer
CRISPR
The internet.
I understand how it works from a molecular level and it is actually incredibly simple at its root. What amazes me is how much data is pushed thru given how it actually works.
GPS is like magic. There is no way that should work. But it does. There is no way it should be accessible. But it is. There is no way it should be so easy that my 85 year old mother can use it. But she does.
Coffee.. you’ll be amazed to see how it’s made. It cannot be progressive invention as machines or other things which got better with technology and money. Someone spent real good effort to invent the coffee that we drink.
Computers, medicine, chemicals
Space ships, at the beginning of the second millennium we didn’t know where the Americas were and by the end of it, we’re on the moon.
The AIDS/HIV treatment. We went from millions of people dying in the 80s and 90s to people being able to live long lives with it. In less than 20 years.
The way a flame can cause a refrigerator to get cold.
Rail Gun
The modern toilet. You do your business, flush it and it’s gone. Nobody can explain that.
Smartphones. I know it’s a combination of previous existing tech, but many inventions are.
But the computing power I have in my pocket, the amount of knowledge I have instant access to, the communications, and the ability to capture great pics and videos.
Still kinda blows me away sometimes.
The 3 sea shells…I haven’t used the paper since 1993
Cell phone
✈️
The Internal Combustion Engine
Mechanical recording/play back.
Locks. I’ll never forget being at the Canal and looking at ships above you and thinking how the fuck did we pull this off. Even now, every time I think of that experience I still get that WTF feeling.
Music
Hands down, AI.
I think LLMs are the most extraordinary piece of technology since the invention of the printing press.
Paracetamol (acetaminophen). Sold as Panadol or Tylenol. It was first synthesised in 1852. Look up the history of it, and tell me why anybody thought to do… things with chemicals and see what effect they would have on humans??
I don’t understand much about chemistry at all which makes these guys seem like wizards to me.
Anything to do with electronics, transmission of tv or radio waves and wifi. There is somehow invisible ahit flying all around us thay carries information and there are pieces of equipment that can send out and capture those invisible things and turn them into stuff we can see and hear.
MRI machines – specifically how they work. If you don’t already know, it’s not even close to what you’d probably guess. In a nutshell, it uses a strong magnetic field to force all the protons in your body’s water molecules to align the same way. Then they hit you with radio waves that disrupt this alignment briefly. When the protons return back to alignment, they release radio waves the machine detects and uses to calculate detailed images of the interior of your body.
Maybe for someone who’s an expert in this it’s no biggie, but as a bit of a nerdy layperson, this process completely blows my mind.
CPU’s and computers
GPS. Everything about it is crazy. There’s a ton of science, math, engineering and Physics. The satellites, the speed of light, relativity and the math to account for it all so that your phone can tell you you missed your exit.
Microprocessors and everything that functions as a result of their creation.
The thought processes that led to their creation is just like “how????” to me.
Chocolate, the steps between what grow in the trees and what I spread on my bread is so f…ING complex.
The blue LED, it makes modern displays and LED lighting possible, but how we got there is truly mind blowing.
Record players
Viagra
Automatic doors. Like the shit just opens for me.
crazy
Cathode ray tubes. It is mad how they work.
The steam locomotive.
Inefficient (about 6%, maybe 9% on a good day, compared to ~30% for a modern gasoline car), and incredibly labor-intensive, the average locomotive spent 7 months of the year in service, and the rest in the maintenance bay. Had to stop every 120 miles for manual lubrication, and often swapped out every 400 miles for an inspection, with the train handed to a fresh engine. Usually kept steaming when idle by additional crews.
Yet, under these schedules, they were tough and reliable. The maintenance routines were expensive, but served to minimize the change of breakdowns.
They were the first means of moving loads of thousands of tons over distances which would have been inconceivable until then. They enabled a huge leap in living standards, making cities and industry possible in cities nowhere near a river or an ocean, for the first time in history.
The United States ran the WWII economy on railroads pulled by steam. If you get a chance, see the Union Pacific 4014 “Big Boy” locomotive. They run it all over the country, and it’s hard to miss if you’re within a mile of it, as it weighs more than a 747 – that’s the easiest way to visualize how a steam economy was possible.
Google maps
Heavy aircraft
The computer. Turns out you can make rocks think by electrocuting them in just the right way.
The amount of data that we can fit on small hard drives these days.
The integrated microchip with solid state memory.
Those giant Boeing aircraft ; 747, 777. I used to live where they would fly over. Even today I wonder how something the size of a NY building could fly
Man, everything. For instance where I’m sitting in looking at my cat’s autofeeder.
It’s cheapass plastic on the outside, except for the bowl which is immaculate stainless. Both of those materials are small miracles in their own ways. It’s got a quartz oscillation timepiece which would have been the most accurate clock in the world a hundred years ago. It’s probably got more processing power than the first moon landing. It’s plugged into the wall, which brings in he miracle of our electric grid. The indicator light is a white LED which won Shuji Nakamura a Nobel prize in 2014.
And all that because I’m too lazy to feed my cat a few times a day.
Electricity
Telephones, television, radio, internet…. 😂
The hydrogen bomb, it’s like a bomb that has to be triggered by another atomic bomb, it’s nuts.
Audi’s Quattro AWD that mechanically coasts just like if the car was in neutral. Ingenious
Electricity … even more impressive when you see that they found a way to explain it with math
Computers. We took a bunch of minerals out of the ground, zapped electricity through them, and taught them how to speak to one another.
Medicine
MRI machines. The amount of science we had to understand and the engineering we had to be capable of the do MRI is truly insane.
I was gonna say bendy straws but the other comments make that feel out of place
Anesthesia. I don’t have to live in fear of ever getting appendicitis.
The clappee
Bridges. Especially big ones.
The Adam smasher. When I was a kid we took a field trip to the mile-long Adam Smasher. This long bif machine to smash something so tiny we can’t even see it.
Some of our medical techniques. Don’t have perfect eyesight? Here, let me just shine lasers in your eyes and fix them. Have cancer? Let me just use super strong magnets to take magic pictures of your insides without hurting you, and then I’ll just blast the cancer with radioactive stuff. Lost an arm? Here, let me just make you a new one that works by reading your mind. Need a new heart valve? Lemme just go in through a vein in your leg.
Transistors: Not only did we discover how to make and use them, we figured out how to put millions of them on a single silicon chip, and make them incredibly small, fast, and dense.
But the part that really blows me away is that the transistor is the single most manufactured thing humans have made.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/13-sextillion-counting-the-long-winding-road-to-the-most-frequently-manufactured-human-artifact-in-history/
Commercial airplanes, so many people take it for granted. But for me, I am still awed every time thinking about it – a machine the size of a big building, holding several hundred people inside, flying close to speed of sound, covering what Columbus took years to travel in 12 hours. It’s such a miracle yet it also becomes so affordable and so common. It just blows my mind.