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19. Electron microscopy, 0.6%

Clearly electricity dominates the list. Taking all electrically related inventions together the total is 37.3 percent. Biological-related developments, however, were not far behind at 30.9 percent. Quantum mechanics and special relativity were the only two theories on the list, though the theories behind the other developments, while not mentioned, are of equal or greater importance.

Marshall McLuhan, the famed communications expert who wrote extensively on the influence of the media on modern history (“the medium is the message”), made a presentation of a type of history’s list in the form of the “ten most potent extensions of man.” They included:

1. Fire

2. Clothing

3. The wheel

4. The lever

5. Phonetic alphabet

6. The sword

7. Print

8. Electric telegraph

9. Electric light

10. Radio/TV

McLuhan asserts that the alphabet is an “extension of language,” and radio and television are “extensions of the central nervous system.” He lists the telegraph as the predecessor to the telephone, and notes that “print makes everyone a reader” and “Xerox makes everyone a publisher.”

From the sublime to the ridiculous, the Book of Lists gives us William Manchester’s “ten favorite dinner guests from all history.” It is an absurd historical list, but it is interesting because Manchester is an independent scholar and historian, and has therefore not been restricted to working within the bounds of certain historical periods or places. His interests are broad and eclectic.

1. Newton

2. Elizabeth Tudor

3. Freud

4. Emma Hamilton

5. George Bernard Shaw

6. Oscar Wilde

7. Napoleon

8. Jane Austen

9. Goethe

10. H. L. Mencken

History as Accumulation

Top one hundred or top ten lists, by definition, are limiting. The advantage they do offer, however, is that they can give us a broad and sweeping glance at the richly detailed and highly convoluted connections of history. History’s lists are to historical data what science’s theories are to scientific facts. They allow us to search for general principles, trends, highlights, and conglomerations, within a myriad of seemingly disparate bits of information. To paraphrase a quote from the physicist Poincaré, a group of historical facts is no more a history than a pile of bricks is a building. History’s lists are the blueprints of the past.

Any list of scientific and technological advances in history is an “interactive” list, in that the later scientists and technologists had the earlier thinkers and cultures from which they could benefit. The steps that are early on the list make possible the later ones. Though they are listed individually, taken as a whole the steps later on the list are “richer” than the earlier selections, in the sense Will Durant described in The Lessons of History:

The heritage that we can now more fully transmit is richer than ever before. It is richer than that of Pericles, for it includes all the Greek flowering that followed him; richer than Leonardo’s, for it includes him and the Italian Renaissance; richer than Voltaire’s, for it embraces all the French Enlightenment and its ecumenical dissemination. If progress is real . . . it is not because we are born any healthier, better, or wiser than infants were in the past, but because we are born to a richer heritage, born on a higher level of that pedestal which the accumulation of knowledge and art raises as the ground and support of our being.

Knowledge is cumulative in this interactive sense. Ideas feed upon one another and are connected in innumerable ways. Any listing, whether it is the top ten, hundred, five hundred, thousand, will necessarily leave out a step in the development of some idea. But the selection of one invention over another, for example, does not really eliminate the unchosen step. Ideas evolve, not unlike species, through descent with modification. Later ideas are different from, but still connected by ancestry to, earlier ideas. Past thinkers and civilizations do not really die; they evolve into