Humanity transformed
What changed, and for whom.
An invention is a beginning. This is where we follow it into homes, workplaces, cities and ideas, and compare life on either side of it.
No. 06 · 1878–1880
The Light Bulb
A thin filament inside a glass bulb glows when electricity passes through it. A vacuum, or inert gas, stops it from burning away.
Before and after
Before
By candle or oil lamp, dim and flickering.
After
By a steady electric lamp with no smoke.
On larger screens, drag the divider (or use the arrow keys) to give more room to the world before or after.
Transformation
- 01Working life. Factories could run shifts after dark. Offices, shops and theatres were able to keep later hours.
- 02Public safety. Electric street lighting reduced fire risk compared with gas and made streets easier to move through at night.
- 03Home. Electrification brought a cascade of new household technologies, from irons to refrigerators.
- 04Infrastructure. Power stations, grids and meters grew into one of the largest engineering systems in history.
Humanity transformed
Six ways the world was rebuilt
01
Communication
Gutenberg’s movable-type system made it possible to print one text in quantity, and the 42-line Bible was among its first results. Bell’s 1876 U.S. telephone patent, and the packet switching and TCP/IP protocols that followed, carried that reach from the printed page to the wire and the network.
02
Knowledge & education
Hooke’s Micrographia of 1665 and Leeuwenhoek’s reports to the Royal Society opened a small world of structures that had never been seen before. Hopper’s compilers, written so that programmers could work in human-readable language, and the World Wide Web later made technical knowledge far easier to share.
03
Movement & trade
Shen Kuo described the magnetised needle compass and magnetic declination in the Song dynasty. Newcomen’s 1712 piston engine and Watt’s separate condenser made steam power practical, and the Wright brothers’ controlled powered flight of 1903 extended movement into the air.
04
Energy & industry
Newcomen’s engine was first used to drain mines, and Watt later developed rotary motion for industrial work. Edison’s organised laboratory at Menlo Park and his commercial electric lighting system, alongside Swan’s carbon-filament lamp and Latimer’s improved filaments, brought electric lighting into commercial use.
05
Health & science
Hooke’s microscopy and Leeuwenhoek’s observations of single-celled organisms and bacteria made the cell and the microbe visible to science. The universal computing machine Turing described in 1936 is the idea behind the computers that later came to serve laboratories.
06
Everyday life
Electric light, the telephone and the computer changed the rhythm of the ordinary day, from the hours after dark to conversation across a distance. Lovelace’s 1843 notes on the Analytical Engine already speculated about what such machines might do beyond calculation.
Human progress
Nothing was invented alone.
Each invention stands on others. Select one to see what it drew from and what it made possible. Solid lines are documented lines of influence; dashed lines are looser or indirect.
MHI 008
The Computer
1936–1948
Drew from · documented
Experiments with lamp filaments led to the vacuum tube, which powered the first electronic computers.
Drew from · documented
Bell Laboratories, the telephone company’s research arm, invented the transistor in 1947.
Made possible · documented
The Internet began as a way to connect computers and share their resources.
Drew from · indirect
Microscopy is used to design and inspect the integrated circuits at the heart of every computer.