1. Cave Paintings - circa 32,000 years ago - Chauvet cave in France (earlieist known found)
2. Hieroglyphics - circa 3,000 BC - Egypt
3. Invention of Paper - circa 104 AD - China
4. Invention of the Printing Press - circa 1450 AD - Germany
5. Invention of the Telephone - circa 1876 AD - USA
6. Invention of the Motion Picture Camera - circa 1889 AD - USA
7. Invention of the Television - circa 1927 AD - USA
8. Invention of the Internet - circa 1973 AD - USA
9. Invention of the Personal Computer - circa 1976 AD - USA
10. First Online Dating Network - circa 1986 AD - USA
Of these ten, I will elaborate on three of them...
1. Cave Paintings :
The Chauvet Cave or is located in the Ardèche département, southern France. It became famous in 1994 after a trio of speleologists found that its walls were richly decorated with Paleolithic artwork, that it contained the fossilized remains of many animals, including those that are now extinct, and that the floor preserved the footprints of animals and humans. The Chauvet Cave was soon regarded as one of the most significant pre-historic art sites in the world.
The cave is uncharacteristically large and the quality, quantity, and condition of the artwork found on its walls has been called spectacular. It appears to have been occupied by humans during two distinct periods: the Aurignacian and the Gravettian. Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, era (30,000 to 32,000 years ago). The later Gravettian occupation, which occurred 25,000 to 27,000 years ago, left little but a child's footprint, the charred remains of ancient hearths and carbon smoke stains from torches that lit the caves.
Source:http://www.oddee.com/item_93915.aspx
By the middle of the 15th century several print masters were on the verge of perfecting the techniques of printing with movable metal type. The first man to demonstrate the practicability of movable type was Johannes Gutenberg (c.1398-1468), the son of a noble family of Mainz, Germany. A former stonecutter and goldsmith, Gutenberg devised an alloy of lead, tin and antinomy that would melt at low temperature, cast well in the die, and be durable in the press. It was then possible to use and reuse the separate pieces of type, as long as the metal in which they were cast did not wear down, simply by arranging them in the desired order. The mirror image of each letter (rather than entire words or phrases), was carved in relief on a small block. Individual letters, easily movable, were put together to form words; words separated by blank spaces formed lines of type; and lines of type were brought together to make up a page. Since letters could be arranged into any format, an infinite variety of texts could be printed by reusing and resetting the type.
Source: http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/press.html
3. Television:
Earlier TV devices had been based on an 1884 invention called the scanning disk, patented by Paul Nipkow. Riddled with holes, the large disk spun in front of an object while a photoelectric cell recorded changes in light. Depending on the electricity transmitted by the photoelectric cell, an array of light bulbs would glow or remain dark. Though Nipkow's mechanical system could not scan and deliver a clear, live-action image, most would-be TV inventors still hoped to perfect it.
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