In the dark days, and the long, dark evenings, before the internet, folk used to gather round the encampment fire as the chill evening closed in, and either play board games or hold philosophical discussions. Board games probably gave you a better insight into human nature: Warren Buffet, so they say, played, and won at, Monopoly as if his life depended on it, relishing every opponent he bankrupted, while Alexander the Great was more of a Risk man himself. Personally, I enjoyed Buccaneer, with its miniature pirate ships laden with gold bars, rum barrels, rubies and pearls.  Whether that had more to do with the accumulation of riches or the harsh chafe of leather jerkin against bare chest is for me to know and you to guess…

And, as the evening wore on, and the conversation started to droop a little, someone could always be relied on to ask: ‘So, tell us. What/Who do you think is the greatest….’ Depending on the particular slice of the population gathered round the fire, that might be greatest England forward line, or non-German-speaking composer, or Cadbury’s item of confectionery, or whatever.

For our present purposes, dear reader (in case you were wondering where I was going with this) the question is ‘What is (or, as I suddenly realise we now need to say, ‘What was) the greatest human invention or discovery?’ Interestingly, Google seems largely incapable of distinguishing between inventions and discoveries. Many of its lists of the greatest inventions include discoveries.

The Atlantic magazine, in a 2013 article, wrote about the greatest ‘technical breakthroughs’ since the invention of the wheel: ‘technical breakthroughs’ seems to me a neat bracket term for inventions/discoveries. The article is a very interesting read; this is partly because it discusses in detail the methodology used by the magazine to arrive at a top 50, and the variety of ways in which the experts canvassed interpreted the guidelines they were given. It also explores, in interesting ways, some individual breakthroughs that performed better, or worse, than you might have expected.

For instance: “Considering how often the modern era has been called the “television age” and how much time people now spend before a variety of screens, it is notable that television comes in only at No. 45. Many years from now, perhaps people will regard the second half of the 20th century as the brief moment when broadcast TV could seem a dominant technology. With its obvious-in-retrospect limitations, like one-way information flow rather than interactivity, and dependence on heavy hardware for best display, maybe TV was bound to be a transition to some other system more tailored to individual tastes.”

Optical lenses, on the other hand, made it to #5 on the list. I must admit they would not have been something I considered, probably because there is a sense in which they do not seem very dramatic, especially these days. However, the author argues that “the adoption of corrective lenses amounted to the largest one-time IQ boost in human history, by expanding the pool of potentially literate people”. That seems an argument that is hard to dismiss, even if John Milton managed to cope with late-onset blindness by dictating Paradise Lost to his daughter without writing any of it down himself. There are people the inside of whose heads is a land impossible to imagine.

One more interesting aside from this list (since my spyware tells me that hardly any of you click on my links). Having only fairly recently wielded a wheelbarrow in Portugal, I can attest to both its almost-elegant simplicity of design and its tremendous labour-saving potential. Why, then, was it invented only thousands of years after the wheel?

Turning to the pointed end of the list, my attention is drawn to #3. Since I’m sure you’re dying to know, #1 is the printing press – although I suspect that future digital generations may find it as limited and transient as the television. #2 is electricity.

And #3? Bernice reminded me this week that the answer is probably the one always given by our dear friend and family doctor in Wales, Louis Saville z”l. Louis grew up in the Glasgow of the 1920s, studied medicine, and practised as a family doctor for many decades, spanning the introduction into general medicine of what he always claimed was the single greatest discovery of the 20^th Century – penicillin. It was certainly not easy to argue with someone who had wrestled with the daily stark reality of family medicine before antibiotics, and lived to see their routine adoption as a first line of defence against infection, turning deadly diseases into minor unpleasantnesses.

When Bernice took herself to bed last Tuesday with a very sore throat and flu symptoms, we knew this was serious. Bernice, let me explain, is one of the world’s worst patients, since she has had so little practice at it. A veritable fusion of Edith Cavell and Florence Nightingale whenever anybody else takes ill (with, as she pointed out to me when she previewed this post, more than a dash of Matron Hattie Jacques, or possibly even Nurse Ratchet thrown in), she is incapable of judging the severity of her own symptoms. When her gall stones triggered a life-threatening infection a couple of years ago, it took me a day to drag her screaming to the emergency clinic, and even after she had been admitted to hospital and started on medication as a precursor to surgery, she was still protesting that she was over it now and could she please go home.

Having languished in bed for a day and a half, barely able to swab her own nostrils for the rapid flow tests that all came out glowingly negative, she finally agreed to allow me to make an appointment to see our family doctor, and a second appointment for a PCR test (since we all know that the rapid flow test is not worth the mucus it is written in). We saw the doctor that same afternoon. He was able to confirm that she had strep throat, and to start her on antibiotics – although he was very impressed that her own immune system was already doing a valiant job of fighting the infection.

Back home, Bernice started the course of tablets and cancelled her PCR. By the following morning, the sore throat was gone, and she felt well enough for a full story-time and conversation with Tao.

It is unfortunate for many of the most significant of human breakthroughs that, not long after they are achieved, they go almost unnoticed. Antibiotics are such a part of everyday life now that it is very difficult for those of us who do not remember life before them, in other words anybody under 90 years old, to appreciate how dramatic was the change they made. We can read about medicine before antibiotics, and understand intellectually their contribution to human well-being, but very few are still alive who can argue as passionately as Louis always did that they represented, unequivocally, the greatest human achievement of the 20^th Century.

Before I close, some other personal reflections on the list in The Atlantic. Weighing in at #11 is nitrogen fixation. Well, I don’t know about you, but to the best of my knowledge I have never heard of that one. It is, apparently, the heart of the ammonia-synthesis process, which was used to create a new class of fertilizers central to the green revolution. #37 is cement, the literal foundation of civilisation. Anaesthesia only made it to #46; as the author of the article pointed out, having had dental work before the NHS authorised the use of novocaine, he would swap his personal computer (#16) for anaesthesia in the blink of an eye.

Finally, and appropriately for my last post before Pesach, I started this week with sliced bread (since which all of the above were claimed to be the greatest thing). So let me finish with the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, who had neither wheelbarrows nor wheels (the Egyptians having not yet discovered them). Instead, they almost certainly relied heavily on #48 in The Atlantic‘s list, the lever.

Of course, no human achievement can come close to the everyday achievements of human life: a child’s smile, for example (even if (see right) wind-induced).