7 Gadgets That Changed the World
Companies like to call their new gadgets revolutionary. Amazon did it when it introduced its Kindle e-book reader in 2007, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs used the word often last week while unveiling his company's new iPad – a tablet computer that also doubles as an e-reader. Jobs even threw in a "magical" here and there when describing the device.
Corporations aren't the only ones predicting that the digitization of books will bring great change. Take author and journalist Steven Johnson, who's Kindle moved him to envision a paperless future:
"I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways," Johnson wrote in The Wall Street Journal in April 2009. "It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years."
Only time will tell if these devices will live up to the hype, but throughout history, the truly revolutionary innovations are those that so fundamentally changed how we work and play that it's hard to imagine modern life without them.
With all due respect to many other game-changing inventions and technologies, here are seven gadgets dating back to the 15th Century that sent transformative ripples throughout society and whose legacies still make waves today.
