For me its got to be the Mesopotamians(Sumerians, Akkadiand, Assyrians, Babylonians & Arameans), or the British.
The Mesopotamians invented: the wheel, writing, mathematics, astronomy, chronology(breaking time into days, weeks, momths and years),the battery, first empires, minted coinage, organised military, organised civil service, first legal codes,Sun Dial, first large cities, medical texts and codes, aqueducts, advanced irrigation etc.
The British invented; Television, Radar, Vertical Take off Aircraft, Jet Ention, Steam Engine, Trains, Battle Tanks, Vaccinations, Hovercraft, Radio, Electrical Conductors, Smallpox Cure, Penicillin, Test tube babies, World Wide Web, Calculating Machine, Computer, Computer Memory Bank, Telephone (Bell was a Scotsman), Supersonic Airliner, Spinning Loom, Sewing Machine, Underground/Subway Railways,Camera, Photography, Football, Cricket, Baseball,golf,The Industrial revolution that heralded the start of the modern age etc..and many more Actually penicillin was discovered by Flemming in 1929, and Baird the inventor of TV was a Scotsman The British. Even the USA evolved from them. Aliens landing at Roswell. I've always thought that the Romans and the Greeks contributed the most to the advancement of humankind. They started off from almost nothing and developped philosophy, literature, technology and so forth. Hadn't it been for those bloody barbarians and, after them, the Church's narrow-mindedness and fanatism, Europe would've progressed so much faster. Mesopotamians: "...aqueducts, advanced irrigation etc.
No, the Roman Empire's invented the aqueducts & reservoirs
"The British invented; Television, Radar, Vertical Take off Aircraft, Jet Ention, Steam Engine, Trains, Battle Tanks, Vaccinations, Hovercraft, Radio, Electrical Conductors, Smallpox Cure, Penicillin, Test tube babies, World Wide Web"
Television was invented by John Logie Baird, an Australian!
Electrical conductivity - mmm, this is a deeply murky field, as there were some people before Faraday, including 2 non-British guys, who knew of some parts of the electrical conductivity, as do M. Faraday. Faraday introduced the electrical field & maybe electromagnetism (maybe the same thing?). Check out the very long answers.com article below.
Penicillin? You've got to be kidding! The very first form of penicillin was invented by the one & only great Australian doctor Andrew Flower. Some stupid old English coot (a scientist/doctor, of course) with obviously a problematic ego & prone to jealousy or self-power/greed, whatever, was invited (probably) to see what Andrew has created, but thereafter the British deadbeat tried to promote it as his own invention/creation. Bad, bad BAD, evil to him!
OK, as for the modern times, I like both Italy for their fantastic, well-deserved reputation for absolutely stunning, terrific, & timeless designs (cars, fashion, you name it); and German, my favourite country for the highest-quality produce possible (rubbers, cars, the Far Cry & Crysis games by Crytek, thousands of annual inventions by the employees at Siemens, etc!). And the best thing is... they don't stoop down to the cheap & cutting-corner methods that many foreign companies utilise. To answer this question, you have to assume that we're headed in the right direction. Perhaps the greatest contribution will be to remove human beings from this planet before we destroy it utterly? So, who have done the most to cause climate change / strip resources / cause political unrest etc, and continue to do so with their heads in the sand?
(Do I hear the American national anthem?)
Who started the ball rolling with massive consumption of energy from burning coal, built an empire spanning half the globe taking their fantastic ideas with them?
(Hang on - is that God Save the Queen?)
And don't think anybody else gets away with it! I think you'll find that most countries in the world aspire to the dominant nation at the time, which invariably is the most ecologically reckless... |
