From 1000 AD to 1999 AD

Andro Man

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Great Britain obviously. The industrial revolution started there, the start of the modern era. From Britain through the colonies to the rest of the world
 

chico8

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It's hard to pick just one, but I think Martin Luther, his translation of the bible into german and the Protestant Reformation are at the top of the list.

Religion was then accessible to the people, not just the elite and the corrupt catholics were forced to reform. The Reformation unleashed over a century of bloodshed in Europe but by the end of the Thirty Years War, the concept of religious freedom was beginning to take shape.

As an aside, I think Islam is experiencing somewhat similar today. Too bad the process takes such a long time.
 

jason_els

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I've gotta go with movable type.

Without movable type education and literacy would still be limited to a relatively elite few. Books on calculus, scientific method, dissemination of ideas, Luther's bible, even public education itself, would be impossible. Books were, and still are, the foundation of education. Without it, all the other great minds inventing everything else would have had nothing to feed them. Books have been the repository of civilization since they were invented and where the burning of Alexandria's library once caused the single greatest damage to civilization, there are now enough libraries of such importance that no one library's loss would be nearly so disasterous. We're now experiencing a transition from books to bits and that leads me to...

My second choice would be the microproceesor because I suspect its impact may be longer lasting and no less drastic than that of books.
 

SteveHd

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My top choices have already been mentioned but a runner-up would be: radio. I mean a superset which includes TV, radar, cell phones, and many other things which transmit something through air.

I don't think could live without a microwave oven! [Which transmits energy through the air.]
 

LeeEJ

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I've gotta go with movable type.

Even though it predates 1000 AD by a long ways, I'll go with written language. Once that took hold, large-scale commerce appeared, taking villages out of isolation and creating larger civilizations. Plus, any knowledge gets written down and documented, creating accumulated knowledge, which made new inventions, sciences, and higher education possible.

The invention of machines that print movable type would not have been possible without written language.

Of the last thousand years,... hmm...

Gimbal-mounted clocks on ships are one thing. They allowed navigators to accurately track and map their courses, and enabled complete exploration of the whole planet for the first time ever.

Optics. Specifically, micro- and "macro"-optics, from microscopes to telescopes. They literally changed our perception of the universe. The tangible discovery and study of bacteria & viruses completely transformed medicine. The accurate mapping of the other planets and their moons, likewise, completely transformed our concept of the entire solar system, and by extension, the physical universe as a whole.

That now makes me think of Sir Isaac Newton's calculations that created modern physics. We wouldn't have gone to the Moon without that knowledge; we wouldn't have satellites for weather study or communication, either.

Anybody remember the documentary TV series "Connections"? James Burke explained the ties between all kinds of ideas & inventions in a truly enlightening way. I mentioned the gimbal-mounted clock because of one of his episodes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
 

jason_els

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Anybody remember the documentary TV series "Connections"? James Burke explained the ties between all kinds of ideas & inventions in a truly enlightening way. I mentioned the gimbal-mounted clock because of one of his episodes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

I am such a geek for that show. So brilliant and so entertaining while being informative. I couldn't help but imagine all the frequent flyer miles he must have racked-up. What fun it must have been to do Connections!