If asked what the most important invention of the 20th century is, the most common response is the atom bomb. It's right there in the history books, after all. It's also not true. As a society we tend to be really bad at assessing the importance of technological advancements.

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So what is the most important invention, then? Other major contenders include computers, airplanes, cars, and antibiotics, but it's none of those. The most important invention? The Haber process.

The Haber, or Haber-Bosch process, is an artificial nitrogen-fixing process. It's used to convert unusable atmostpheric nitrogen into ammonia, which has a variety of industrial uses, including in explosives. It has another, far more important use, however: Nitrogen fertilizers. Nitrogen fertilizers supplied by the Haber process feed as much as half of our global population today. Simply speaking, the current global population, for better or worse, could not likely have been reached without the Haber process.

So why do so many history books and teachers claim it was the atomic bomb?

It's because we, as a society, have some real problems in how we think of technology and progress.

First off, we tend to obsess about flashy inventions. Rockets are awesome, but radar and improved encryption and decryption were far more important in winning WWII. They're not particularly flashy, but the refrigerated rail car and canning were some of the most critical inventions in allowing for our modern system of food distribution and storage. Sometimes, it's the little boring inventions that change history the most. Barbed wire is laughably simple looking, but it utterly changed farming and ranching.

We also tend to lump all inventions and advancements together under the general banner of progress, which is a mistake. It's much more useful to divide them into different categories. The actual divisions themselves are up for debate- you can rearrange them endlessly, and even then the influence of one technology often reaches into the other categories. The very act of dividing it into categories, however, forces us to think about how technology and society interact on many levels.

Advancements are also often thought of in purely technological terms. Their importance comes from how much of an advance they are from the previous solution. Air travel is a huge improvement over sea travel. The telephone is a huge improvement over the telegraph. We should, however, be thinking about them in more terms than that. We need to be thinking of them in terms of resource cost. We should be thinking of them in terms of logistics- does it make it easier or harder to manage the day to day operation of civilization? (Non-technological logistical advancements often get ignored as well. In fairness, these are usually incredibly boring, but technological progress could not have occurred without them.) We should be asking whether this invention was expected (as the cell phone was) or came completely out of left field (the microwave oven). We should be asking whether advancements make previously existing goals and tasks easier, or whether they actually allow us brand new opportunities that the human race didn't have before. (This one is tricky- one might say that the nuclear bomb is a brand new ability of humanity to interfere with the fundamental forces of the universe while the Haber process is just a way to feed more people, but one might also say that the atom bomb is just a better way to blow stuff up, while the Haber process is fashioning bread out of air.)

Ultimately, you need to think about all of these inventions in a historical context. You can really only assess the importance of an invention in retrospect- not least because it's far too easy to get caught up in hype. For a great example of thinking about an invention in historical context, check out Alexander Monro's The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of the World's Greatest Invention. Monro not only makes an excellent argument for the invention and dissemination of paper being a lynchpin of history, he provides a thoroughly enjoyable history as well.

When someone claims that a revolution- whether technological, social, or political- changes everything, and that we're no longer bound by the chains of history, you should be entirely skeptical, unless they're talking about, say, language or fire. Even the wheel is useless without a smooth enough surface to travel on. Everything builds upon everything else. History doesn't chain us; it provides the very surface we travel upon, and nothing escapes it. Cultivating a historical mindset will ultimately serve you incredibly well in all avenues of life.

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Think I'm wrong about the most important inventions, or know other obscure or overlooked technologies that changed history? Let me know in the comments!

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Bibliography:

The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of the World's Greatest Invention, by Alexander Monro

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/10/21/head-count-3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process