Scottish mechanical engineer James Watt taught himself engineering and at age 27 he invented the modern steam engine. Watt was inspired by a pot of tea which he observed boiling, as the lid of the kettle would move when excessive heat had built up. Watt realized from this encounter that steam power may have the ability to be harnessed to perform work. Building upon a design already in existence which used steam to drive a piston to pump water out of mining operations, Watt revolutionized this technology by adding gears and wheels. Early steam engines only pumped up and down, but after Watt discovered how to effectively implement wheels and other facets, he took the idea of steam power and made it transportable via rotary motion. This simple alternate design paved the way for countless machines which succeeded it, as gears and wheels allow an infinite number of combinations to be constructed allowing for adaptations to all forms of industry. The world became smaller and faster seemingly overnight as humans and animals were no longer required to perform all forms of work. Watts’ engine started the Industrial Revolution, one of the most important periods within human history as it nearly autonomously created the modern technological age
Tim Berners-Lee created the internet. Berners-Lee is the son of mathematicians, his mother and father part of a team who programmed the worlds first commercial stored program computer, the Manchester University Mark 1. Berners-Lee developed the original concept for the internet as a young boy, after discussing how machines might one day possess artificial intelligence with his father who was reading a book upon the human brain. Berners-Lee realized that if information could be linked, knowledge which would not normally be associated together, it would become much more useful. Ted Nelson helped expand upon Berners-Lee’s invention by developing the concept of hypertext, a method of digitally linking from one section to another. The development of the internet during the 1960’s became user friendly during the 1990’s as it became increasingly available to the public. Berners-Lee was able to take something which was too complicated for most people to use, and create a system which made it user friendly. Incompatibility between computers had been a thorn in the side of technology for years as specialized cables were needed to ensure computers could communicate with one another. Berners-Lee had the brilliant idea to create a centralized block which all cables would feed into so that one central unit could be used for every computer in the world to communicate. Berners-Lee furthered this idea by designing the concept of anything being linked to anything. A single global information space would be birthed as a direct result of this, a system with common rules, which would be accessible to everyone, that effectively provided as close as possible to no rules at all; a decentralized system. This arrangement would allow a new person to use the internet without having to ask anyone else. Anyone, anywhere, could now build a server and put anything upon it. Berners-Lee decided to name his creation the “World Wide Web” because he thought of it as a global network. Berners-Lee took his intellectual property and provided it to the public free of charge, despite having many commercial offers. Berners-Lee felt that the idea would not become the largest and greatest invention of humanity had it not been free, democratized, and decentralized. The fact that anybody could access the internet and anybody could put content onto it, made the internet massively popular early on and grew at a rate of 10x year upon year. Berners-Lee also created the World Wide Web Consortion, an institution which was designed to help the World Wide Web to develop and grow