Basic Inventions - Man inventor - CLIL Polska

Throughout history, inventions have been based on simple ideas and devices. Combining these simple inventions and discoveries can lead to complex machines. The first inventions were simple tools used to make life easier. Man's ability to learn and consciously design tools sets him apart from animals. Man constantly seeks to improve and control his environment. Basic inventions, such as the wheel and gunpowder, have led to significant changes in human life. Early inventions were made from materials like wood, stone, and bone. These tools were the beginning of a long journey of technological and cultural advancement. 🎵 The first toolmakers. There is no such thing as a complicated invention. They are complicated machines, but the basic ideas and devices that made up a complex mechanism are almost always fairly simple. The sleek, streamlined and smoothly functioning machines of our civilization have developed from all the clever but simple inventions and discoveries that gradually accumulated over the many centuries of human history. Combining several but simple, basic inventions and discoveries can result in a complicated machine such as the car, which could never have come about without the wheel, the process of smelting metals, electricity, and several other inventions and discoveries. That is what has happened throughout history. True inventions are almost always uncomplicated. If they are not simple in concept, they can be expressed simply. Einstein's famous equation E equals mc², although the result of years of intense work, expresses the whole field of atomic energy. And what could be plainer than a wheel spinning on an axle? They are simple and basic ideas, yet they show the directness and purposefulness of man's inventive mind. In the beginning, man never deliberately set out to invent things. The devices that were first designed were accidentally discovered or built because of need or the desire to improve a hard life. The first inventions were simple tools, devices with which to cut, to hammer, to dig, to throw, tools that at first were the extensions of the hands. Later, much later, man's inventiveness extended to his eyes, ears, legs. Eventually, he even learned to fly in machines. How to make a wheel However, at the beginning, perhaps a million years ago, primitive man could only shape stones and sticks to give his already skillful hands added power. Man was not the first of the creatures on earth to use a tool. There is a burrowing wasp that uses a paddle for a tamper to pound the sand down over her nest. A finch that lives in the Galapagos Islands pries insects from the surfaces in tree trunks with a cactus spine-weaver. And the English spotted woodpecker holds open a cleft in a tree branch with a pine-cone wedge. The sea otter, while floating on its back in the water, is known to place a stone on its chest and to hammer shellfish on it until the shell breaks open. And finally, many of the monkeys and apes sometimes use sticks and stones as levers and missiles. The great difference between man and tool-using animals is that while animals follow an inherited instinctive pattern, a manner of behaviour that, if it varies at all, does so only slightly from generation to generation, man can learn. Also, animals use only those tools they find that fit the purpose. Man builds his. Man has a conscious concept of a tool's use and make a conscious effort to design the one that will do the job. In addition to building tools, man seeks to improve them. In the prehistoric days, early man deliberately chipped pieces of stone until he had a hammerhead or a cutting edge. He sharpened the ends of sticks for spears and lashed handles to his stone tools. He wove grasses together to form mats and learned to make fire. Man began to consciously invent devices that would make life easier for him, devices to protect him, devices to entertain him. Man was never content to accept just what the environment of the world around him offered. He even now constantly seeks to change it, to control it, to make it serve him. This is how he became an inventor. For hundreds of millions of years, the animals endured their way of life on Earth and still do. But in the short one million odd years, that man has inhabited Earth and has literally changed his very relationship with the planet. Man has made thousands of inventions, but only several dozen are really basic. Basic inventions are those that lead to a change in the manner of man's life on Earth. It is one thing to invent a better hammer, but it is completely different and more important to invent a wheel or gunpowder. Inventions like these changed the direction of progress and led humanity to new paths. The devices that were truly important and that set man on the path to civilization were simple hand tools and weapons. They were all made of wood, stone or bone, materials early man could find and shape to his needs. However, they served to start him on a long road of technology and culture. The primitive hammers, scrapers, spare points, stone knives were only the beginning. There was much more to come. Transcription by ESO. Translation by — Transcription by ESO. Translation by —