Hey! Want a quick history of humanity's engineering (and
   science) achievements in a single post from Kenneth Udut's
   perspective? No? Well here it is anyway.

   Science - Yes - it's about 400 years old. If I had to point to
   the greatest advances gained in 400 years in Engineering and
   also in Science, it would be, in no order:

   a) our studies of electrostatics (especially Columb)

   b) Michael Faraday and all those that took his field lines and
   translated them into formulas and even investigated them
   further, breaking them into little chunks to make it easier to
   study.

   c) flying

   d) Industrial Revolution

   e) My personal favorite: the first underwater telegraph cable
   linking Nova Scotia and Ireland 160 years ago - for me, that was
   the birth of the Internet.

   f) Packet switching (1963)

   g) Newton (and those who clarified his ideas further like
   Einstein)

   h) That guy in 1948 whose name I forget (sigh) that wrote the
   paper on communication and noise - the one who estimated the
   redundancy of English language at 73% - I tripped over it in
   high school (I'm 42 now) while I was still into CB radio and
   just starting BBS's (then ARPANET/Usenet/www etc) - and I've
   always had an ear for cutting through the noise to find the
   signal. I don't always *find* the signal but I'm always
   listening for it.

   Prior to that, I'd go with the water wheels (led to Engines,
   with magnetic field lines instead of water), patterned sewing
   machines/automated weavers (led to computer programming)... and
   prior to that Algebra in the 12th century Constanople (and the
   fact in general that the area of modern Turkey/Greece were still
   teaching ancient Greek classics while the West was mired in the
   ''middle ages'' - how else did the renaissance get their
   knowledge? it was never lost!

   Before that, the Roman Empire and the Greeks that led up to the
   Romans (Romans were great at business, the Greeks were great at
   philosophizing - but both were excellent civilzation builders.

   Prior to that, you've got the making of alloys... especially the
   mixing of carbon into iron.. best idea ever. (my sink would be
   rusty without it).

   and Egypt with their understandings of surveying (many of their
   techniques we use to this day, thousands of years later)... and
   prior to that, cutting flint into chunks in successively sharper
   methods to allow cutting things.

   The Large Hadron Collidor (LHC) is today's version of using a
   very sharpened flint to cut something open to see what's inside.
   We're just cutting open much much smaller things with a much
   sharper flint.