What is the greatest invention since the 19th century? If you’re someone like Om Malik, you might say the Internet. Others might say the personal computer, or computers. AI might be the choice of others.

While these are all great inventions, I’d nominate two others: medical technology and farm machinery.

 

Medical tech like vaccines and blood transfusions alone have saved billions of lives since they were created. And that’s two out of the many medical inventions that have increased our life expectancy according to this. It’s why we now can expect to live to be 80 as opposed to 40.

If that technology allows us to live longer, farm machinery enables us to do more than work the land in order to survive. Tech like tractors and the McCormick Reaper make it possible to harvest more food than ever before with much less effort. Other inventions like fertilizer enable us to get much more out of our harvests.

The Internet and other IT are grand inventions that help us in many ways. But I don’t think any IT can hold a candle to the benefits brought to us by medical and farm technology.

P.S. For more on farm technology, go here.