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When we look around we don't even take a second to think about how we have advanced so much. We normally take things for granted. So in this post I would like to discuss about top ten inventions that changed the world.

10. Wheel

Today we see an amazing round object everywhere. Yes! It is wheel. Before 3500 BCE humans found it really impossible to transport loads of goods from place to place. The invention of the wheel falls in the late Neolithic, and may be seen in conjunction with other technological advances that gave rise to the early Bronze Age.

9.Nail

    Without nails, civilization would surely crumble. This key invention dates back more than 2,000 years to the Ancient Roman period, and became possible only after humans developed the ability to cast and shape metal. Previously, wood structures had to be built by interlocking adjacent boards geometrically a much more arduous construction process.Meanwhile, the screw a stronger but harder-to-insert fastener is thought to have been invented by the Greek scholar Archimedes in the third century B.C.

8. Compass

Before the invention of Compass the travellers used stars and Sun for directions. So it was not safe to travel during cloudy days . Chinese invented the first compass between 9th and 11th century.it was made of lodestone, a naturally-magnetized iron ore, the attractive properties of which they had been studying for centuries. Soon after, the technology passed to Europeans and Arabs through nautical contact. The compass enabled mariners to navigate safely far from land, increasing sea trade and contributing to the Age of Discovery.

7.Printing Press

Earlier the knowledge and ideas were copied down in Manuscripts which was time-consuming and delicate task. Due to this, manuscripts were expensive and only read by few. In the 1440s, a German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the first printing which consisted  of metal plate in which letter could change their places   and the metal plate was striked against the paper by hand driven screw. The new technologies for printing were patented and the books became cheap and accessible to all.

6.Internal Combustion Engine

In these engines, the combustion of a fuel releases a high-temperature gas, which, as it expands, applies a force to a piston, moving it. Thus, combustion engines convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Decades of engineering by many scientists went in to designing the internal combustion engine, which took its (essentially) modern form in the latter half of the 19th century. The engine ushered in the Industrial Age, as well as enabling the invention of a huge variety of machines, including modern cars and aircraft.

Pictured are the operating steps of a four-stroke internal combustion engine. The strokes are as follows: 1) Intake stroke - air and vaporised fuel are drawn in. 2) Compression stroke - fuel vapor and air are compressed and ignited. 3) Power stroke - fuel combusts and piston is pushed downwards, powering the machine. 4) Exhaust stroke - exhaust is driven out.

5. Telephone

Though many worked on electric transmissions, Alexander Graham Bell was the one who invented telephone. Although, this was well established as a means of long distance communication, the fact that only one message could be sent at any one time made it extremely limited. After various improvements, the underground  wires were set up all over New York in 1890s.

4. The Light Bulb

When all you have is natural light, productivity is limited to daylight hours. Light bulbs changed the world by allowing us to be active at night. According to historians, two dozen people were instrumental in inventing incandescent lamps throughout the 1800s; Thomas Edison is credited as the primary inventor because he created a completely functional lighting system, including a generator and wiring as well as a carbon-filament bulb like the one above, in 1879.

As well as initiating the introduction of electricity in homes throughout the Western world, this invention also had a rather unexpected consequence of changing people's sleep patterns. Instead of going to bed at nightfall (having nothing else to do) and sleeping in segments throughout the night separated by periods of wakefulness, we now stay up except for the 7 to 8 hours allotted for sleep, and, ideally, we sleep all in one go.

3. Penicillin

t's one of the most famous discovery stories in history. In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-filled Petri dish in his laboratory with its lid accidentally ajar. The sample had become contaminated with a mold, and everywhere the mold was, the bacteria was dead. That antibiotic mold turned out to be the fungus Penicillium, and over the next two decades, chemists purified it and developed the drug Penicillin, which fights a huge number of bacterial infections in humans without harming the humans themselves.

Penicillin was being mass produced and advertised by 1944. This poster attached to a curbside mailbox advised World War II servicemen to take the drug to rid themselves of venereal disease.

2. Contraceptives

Not only have birth control pills, condoms and other forms of contraception sparked a sexual revolution in the developed world by allowing men and women to have sex for leisure rather than procreation, they have also drastically reduced the average number of offspring per woman in countries where they are used. With fewer mouths to feed, modern families have achieved higher standards of living and can provide better for each child. Meanwhile, on the global scale, contraceptives are helping the human population gradually level off; our number will probably stabilize by the end of the century. Certain contraceptives, such as condoms, also curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Natural and herbal contraception has been used for millennia. Condoms came into use in the 18th century, while the earliest oral contraceptive "the pill" was invented in the late 1930s by a chemist named Russell Marker.

1.The Internet

It really needs no introduction: The global system of interconnected computer networks known as the Internet is used by billions of people worldwide. Countless people helped develop it, but the person most often credited with its invention is the computer scientist Lawrence Roberts. In the 1960s, a team of computer scientists working for the U.S. Defense Department's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) built a communications network to connect the computers in the agency, called ARPANET. It used a method of data transmission called "packet switching" which Roberts, a member of the team, developed based on prior work of other computer scientists. ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet.