The Arch

In relatively short order, prehistoric stone crafters gave us scrapers, axes, knives, needles, and spears. If any single advance made humans the greatest bad-asses of the entire animal kingdom, it was our habit of honing rocks into astoundingly effective weapons.

Discrete Technologies

Glue

Image Credit: Ytrottier

Air Foil

Dirigibles made people airborne as early as the late 18th century, but it wasn't until the advent of heavier-than-air flight that round-the-world trips became a commonplace experience for the hoi polloi. The development of the air foil made modern aircraft possible, and, by 1940, enabled air speeds capable of transporting a person across the Atlantic in just two days. Today, thanks to improvements in wing design and the advent of jet engines, a typical flight from New York to London takes just seven hours.

Microwave Ovens

If you have an iPhone in your pocket, you're packing more computing power on your person than could be found in all of NASA during the days of the Apollo program. So, yes, you should feel like a bit of a schmuck if you're just using it to play Angry Birds.

In a bid to "revolutionize publishing," a forward-thinking, but ultimately misguided, company called Digital Convergence made an ambitious move in the year 2000: It distributed free barcode scanners to thousands of magazine subscribers and concurrently sold magazine publishers on the prospect of adding barcodes to ads and articles. Like today's QR codes, the barcodes would take users to websites with related content.

#2: Virtual Reality

Far from the fully immersive sensory experience of fiction, real-world VR was a nightmarish, often physically painful experience that did nothing so much as constantly remind the user that he was really just standing around with an enormous set of goggles on his head. To this day, 3D gaming is about as close to VR as people care to get.

Once accomplished, the value of a company like Lycos or AOL could be computed in terms of the number of users who depended on its portals for access to the rest of the web. The obvious flaw in this thinking was that even the dumbest users could figure out how to use a search engine, and almost nobody wanted to be trapped inside a cluttered portal page the moment they logged onto the web. Once Google figured out how to personalize a user's web experience without pushing them to a portal, the concept mostly faded away.