The iPhone was history’s eighth greatest invention, narrowly losing out to penicillin, said 4,000 Britons surveyed in 2010, according to the Telegraph. The wheel ranked first, which makes sense — think about all those Far Side cavemen cartoons — but the internet, PCs, and the telephone made it on the list, too.
The printing press and movable type didn’t even crack the top 100. But an iPhone without the ability to read would be like a survey without proper statistical framework — and the fact that many think contemporary technologies like social communication channels or portable reading devices are such transcendent “disrupters” that they belong in the conversation of history’s greatest inventions is telling.
Part of the difficulty here is to imagine how radically different things were in Europe half a millennium ago. Today, regardless of profession or income bracket, we are bombarded with text. But in 1517, still the early days of movable type, text wasn’t nearly ubiquitous — in large part because most people couldn’t read.
Yet in Germany, a 33-year-old monk named Martin Luther rapidly disseminated a series of radical, reform-minded writings — so successfully, in fact, that it puzzled even him.
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