• Question: What is you favourite invention and why?

    Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 13 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Elaine Cloutman-Green

      Elaine Cloutman-Green answered on 13 Jun 2014:

      The smart phone has changed my life!!! Not only has it changed the way that I can communicate with my family and friends but it means that science is so much more accessible too. I have apps that let me look up facts and figures so I don’t have to memorize it all. I also have a scientific calculator on me where ever I go. Best of all we can put together apps at work to help the doctors and nurses look after their patients better; which is what we are all trying to do.

    • Photo: Zhiming Darren Tan

      Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 14 Jun 2014:

      Books – for preserving a knowledge of great thinkers such as Socrates, Shakespeare, Gallileo, and so many more…

    • Photo: Kevin O'Dell

      Kevin O'Dell answered on 14 Jun 2014:

      Language. However clever you or I or anyone else is, and however good we are at anything we’ll always do better or achieve more as a team or group of individuals, and we can only do this if we’ve developed some form of language so we can communicate with each other. So as far as inventions are concerned, language has to come first.

      (If you want something more physical than language then it must be the invention of the pencil sharpener, as without having a tool to sharpen your pencil how could you write instructions for your invention?).

    • Photo: Anna Bramwell-Dicks

      Anna Bramwell-Dicks answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      This is really hard! There have been soooo many amazing inventions that choosing one is just far too hard. So, I’m going to choose my top 3… in no particular order,
      – the World Wide Web. I use it everyday, without fail.
      – aeroplanes! I get sea sick, but I love to travel to new places. Without aeroplanes, I would not want to leave Britain!
      – washing machines. When it comes to household chores, I am quite lazy – there are so many other things I would rather be doing! The thought of washing my clothes by hand… I just wouldn’t. So I would smell pretty bad. And that would mean I had fewer friends, because who wants to be friends with someone smelly?

    • Photo: Fiona McLean

      Fiona McLean answered on 16 Jun 2014:

      Ooooh this is a tough one! I think my favourite invention would have to be glass. We use it all the time and yet we hardly even notice it (the windows in our houses, in cars, we drink out of cups made of it)! It is also used in other really important inventions which have let humans leap ahead! The development of optical glass for lenses has been a massive landmark as it allowed glasses for people with bad eyesight to be made, is used in telescopes which helps astronomers and is a crucial part of microscopes which lets scientists like me look at really tiny things such as cells and bacteria. Glass is even used in many solar power devices which is super important to make clean energy. Glass is the best!

Comments