Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy

the world consumes absolutely vast quantities of concrete: five tons per person, per year.

The moldboard plow cuts a long, thick ribbon of soil and turns it upside down.8 In dry ground, that’s a counterproductive exercise, squandering precious moisture. But in the fertile wet clays of Northern Europe, the moldboard plow was vastly superior, improving drainage and killing deep-rooted weeds, turning them from competition into compost.

In middle age, afflicted by polio, Midgley applied his inventor’s mind to lifting his weakened body out of bed. He devised an ingenious system of pulleys and strings. One day they tangled around his neck and killed him.

farmers were five or six times more productive than the foragers they had replaced.

These fertile but geographically limited river valleys changed the way people got enough to eat:

It becomes possible for a fifth of a society’s population to grow enough food to feed everyone.

Archaeological evidence also suggests that the early farmers had far worse health than their immediate hunter-gatherer forebears. With their diets of rice and grain, our ancestors were starved of vitamins, iron, and protein.

many more people currently own a mobile phone than a flushing toilet.9

First of all, you need natural gas as a source of hydrogen, the element to which nitrogen binds to form ammonia. Then you need energy to generate extreme heat and pressure; Haber discovered that was necessary, with a catalyst, to break the bonds between air’s nitrogen atoms and persuade them to bond with hydrogen instead. Imagine the heat of a wood