I love these kinds of posts, just because they’re unique and they help to get my brain churning on different book ideas. Enjoy!

If you were asked to think of the world’s most important and essential inventions, you would probably come up with things like the computer, antibiotics, anesthetics, electricity … things like that.

But without the inventions listed below, many of those innovations would never have come to pass. Mankind has been inventing since the very dawn of man, and many of the things we take for granted today simply did not exist until some bright spark came up with an idea and made them into reality.

Coins

Before the invention of coins, the only way you could exchange something you had for something you wanted was to barter it.

Let’s say you had grain and wanted a pig. If you could not find someone with a pig who wanted grain, you would have to barter your grain for something they did want.

Apart from the time this would take, you would also need to transport the grain and worry about it spoiling before you had made your deal. The invention of coins cut away all of this difficulty and made it possible to save the proceeds of a sale for a future purchase.

Imagine heading down to a shop and trying to barter your crops for some remote control window shades and you will realize just how essential the concept of money is to your daily life!

Alcohol

Alcohol was not always just something that was drunk for fun. Before the development of modern sanitation, germ theory and medicine, drinking water was a dangerous proposition. While people might not have known that water was full of tiny germs, they did know that it made them sick. So, what did they do?

They brewed beer and drank it instead. The alcohol in the beer helped to kill of the bacteria and other microorganisms that made people sick when they drank water. In addition, brewing beer helped to get nutrients out of the grains, so that a drink of beer was almost a meal.

Without the invention of alcohol, a large number of people would have died from drinking dirty water.

Writing

In the western world today almost everyone can write. Indeed, literacy is one of the most important ways to measure how developed a country is. With reading and writing being taught from such an early age, it is hard for us to remember the concept of writing did not always exist – someone had to invent it.

More likely, it was several someone’s working together in communities all across humanity. With writing, messages do not need to be transmitted from person to person, with misunderstandings and confusion. The wisdom of your ancestors can live on after they have died, and you can leave messages for others.

Now that you know more about inventions, you might want to get more acquainted with today’s technology, like remote control window shades.

Post written by guest blogger Shane.