Summary

In ‘INVENTIONS AND DISCOVERIES’ bamber Gascoigne

discuss about the dawn of discoveries

A long slow sequence of invention and discovery has made

possible the familiar details of our everyday lives.
Mankind's programme of improvements has been erratic
and unpredictable. But good ideas are rarely forgotten.
They are borrowed and copied and spread more widely, in
an accelerating process which makes the luxuries of one
age the necessities of the next.

The story is a disjointed one, since inventions and

discoveries occur in a random fashion. They are described
here in an approximately chronological sequence.

Two million years of stone technology represent the first

long era of discovery at the start of human history. The use
of fire, more than 500,000 years ago, is also a discovery.
And some Stone Age artefacts (such as winged arrow-heads
to stick in the flesh of the prey, or hooks carved in bone)
have almost the quality of inventions. But these are
developments of such an extended nature that they seem
different in kind from the discoveries and inventions of
more recent history.

Perhaps the first two ideas worthy of the name of

'invention', even though invented many times in many
different places, are the eye of a needle and the string of a
bow.