When we think of the past, we tend to have the impression that people weren’t as advanced as they are now. It’s easy to feel that all the scientific and technological know-how, the machinery, or the skill that we have now couldn’t have been thought of back then. But, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention. 

1. Central heating was first used by ancient Greeks and Romans in their homes, the earliest known proof of it dating back to 350 BCE.

Central heating was originally invented by the ancient Greeks. Buildings in ancient Greece and the Roman Empire employed a heating system known as “hypocaust” in which the air heated by furnaces was conducted through empty spaces under the floors and pipes in the walls.

2. Eyeglasses were invented in 1290, and Leonardo da Vinci had the idea of contact lenses in 1508. The first successful contact lenses were made in 1888.

The first mentions of reading aids or reading stones date back to the Greek and Roman times. One such mention is Emperor Nero’s use of emerald.  During the early 13th century, English scholar and Bishop of Lincoln Robert Grosseteste wrote of using optics for reading small letters.

 In his 1508 Codex of the eye, Manual D, Leonardo da Vinci introduced the idea of contact lenses in which he described a method of changing eye power by submerging the face in a bowl of water or by wearing glass hemispheres filled with water.

3. The spring-loaded mousetrap first appeared in 1884 and is still the most effective and inexpensive way to eliminate mice in your house.

The first historical reference to mousetraps can be found in Emblemata by Andrea Alcaiato from 1534. Though there have been several other mentions of mousetraps during 17th and 18th century, it was in 1884 that the conventional mousetrap with a spring-loaded snap mechanism first appeared. Before the mechanical trap, the mice were caught by professional rat-catchers.

4. The earliest hints of smallpox vaccine date back to 10th century in China and the first successful smallpox inoculation was done in 1796. 

The Chinese documented a practice known as “nasal insufflation” in which powdered smallpox material, usually made from smallpox scabs, is blown up the nostrils to prevent smallpox. Various insufflation techniques were recorded in China between the 15th and 17th century. Reports of these techniques were received at the Royal Society in London in 1700 by Dr. Martin Lister from an employee of East India Company working in China and by Clopton Havers.

5. 3D printing was first invented in 1981, but it wasn’t until the 2010s that small companies could introduce more affordable and less industrial printers to the general public.

Additive manufacturing or printing, also known as “3D printing,” is a technique in which an object is “printed” by gradually laying or adding material and then fusing it. Hideo Kodama of Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute first invented two methods for additive printing of 3D plastic models using a photo-hardening thermoset polymer in 1981. Two other methods of stereolithography, the process in which chains of polymers form links upon exposure to light, were patented independently in both the US and France in 1984.

6. The fax machine was first patented in 1843 and built in 1846.

Alexander Bain, a Scottish inventor, received a patent for chemical, mechanical fax-type devices on May 27, 1843. In 1846, he was able to successfully reproduce his designs in laboratory experiments to which Frederick Bakewell made several improvements. In 1865, Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli, who also invented the Pantelegraph, introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyon 11 years before the invention of the telephone.

7. The modern headphone jack was invented in 1878 and has only changed in size since then.

The audio jacks that we normally use come in three different sizes. The original 1/4 inch (6.35 mm) jack was created by George W. Coy back in 1878 and was used for the first commercial manual telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut. It is still used for mainstream musical equipment, especially the standard guitar models, making it the oldest jack still in use.

8. The world’s oldest color film footage was shot by inventor Edward Raymond Turner way back in 1899. 

In March 1899, Edward Raymond Turner, initially with the financial backing from cricketer Frederick Marshall Lee, began working in the workshop of color photography pioneer Frederic E. Ives. There he developed a camera which uses a rotating disk of three color filters to photograph color separations on one roll of black-and-white film. The image is recorded on three frames, one filtered by red, one by green, and one by blue. When the finished, film is then projected three frames at a time. 

9. The seismograph was first invented in 132 CE in China by Zhang Heng of the Han dynasty.

Zhang Heng was a Han Chinese polymath and was a successful scientist, geographer, mathematician, astronomer, and inventor. As the knowledge of tectonic plate movement was unavailable at the time, earthquakes were believed to be the result of disturbances in cosmic yin and yang. Many learned scholars, including Zhang Heng, believed in the “oracles of the wind” that were part of cosmic operations and predicted events on Earth. Zhang’s views on earthquakes were based on these ideas, and in 132 CE he presented to the Han court the first seismoscope, an invention considered most impressive by many historians.