The first inventions came before modern humans existed
Human ingenuity is older than humanity itself. Crude Oldowan stone tools date back roughly 2.9 million years, long before anatomically modern people appeared. Rafts and cooking also belong to that distant era. Today some inventions have no human author at all: in 2006 NASA flew an antenna whose shape was evolved by a computer.
An invention can be a new device, method, substance, idea or process, or a meaningful improvement that makes something work better or cheaper. The word inventor comes from the Latin invenire, to find. Inventors need not be engineers or scientists, and with advances in artificial intelligence the title no longer describes only human work. Genetic algorithms, which breed and select designs much like natural selection, have been used to create software and, since at least the 1990s, hardware.
Patents exist to reward inventors with a limited-term monopoly on ideas judged new, not obvious and useful. A patent lets its owner, who may not be the inventor, stop others making, selling or importing the invention, but only within the countries where it was granted. Rules differ from place to place, and securing one is often expensive. Engineers, architects and scientists frequently work in teams, which is why patents so often list co-inventors.
Early human inventions included bedding, clothing and hafting, the fixing of a blade to a handle. Prehistory also gave us agriculture, fish hooks, pottery and bricks, bread, flutes and tally sticks for counting. Later technological landmarks range from railways, flight and vaccination to antibiotics, holography, computing and the smartphone, and something as ordinary as the Walkman counts too.
Not all inventions are machines. Societies invent institutions, such as the Red Cross and the Olympic Games. Culture is full of them: writing systems like the Korean Hunminjeongeum alphabet, literary forms such as the sonnet and the novel, oil painting, jazz and the symphony orchestra. Shakespeare alone is credited with inventing about 1,700 words. Many of these feel as if they always existed, but most had inventors.
Source: Invention
