There’s a lot to be said about human beings. We can be cruel, kind, intelligent, and foolish. But if there’s one thing you can’t argue, it’s that we are inventive. As long as problems have existed, we have been crafting tools to help us solve those problems.
So it should come as no surprise that humans have been inventing long before the Industrial Revolution or even the Renaissance. To prove it, here are a few inventions that are way older than you thought they were.
Electrotherapy (2500 BC)
Humankind was aware of electricity long before Benjamin Franklin’s famed lightning experiments of 1752. The ancient Greeks had some understanding of static electricity, and archeologists have discovered devices from ancient Persia and Rome that seem to be types of batteries.
This is directly related to the history of electrotherapy, or the practice of using mild electric shocks to relieve muscle pain. Ancient Egyptians, followed by the ancient Greeks, used electric fish such as the electric ray to treat arthritis, migraine, and grout.
The Telephone (613 BC)
Most of us learned in school that Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first intelligible words over the telephone in 1876. But the first telephone was actually used thousands of years earlier in Peru. The Chimú empire was a powerful nation known for its successful military conquests, irrigation systems, and art.
This culture was also known to be stratified by class. Archeologists theorize that the Chimú people created a device made with two resin-covered gourds attached by a 75-foot length of cotton thread. This would have allowed high-ranking officials to communicate with their underlings in different parts of the same building.
The Computer (1837)
Some people may be able to argue that this can’t be categorized under inventions that are older than we thought because it was never built in its entirety. But Charles Babbage described his “analytical engine” in the same year Queen Victoria took the throne and has astonished engineers ever since. This machine, built of a myriad of steam-powered mechanical cogs, was designed to be able to perform mathematical calculations as well as if-then statements.
Despite the work completed on it, including computer programs designed by Luigi Menabrea and by Ada Lovelace in the early 1940s, Babbage never completed the machine. However, people can still see the functional precursor, the Difference Engine, at the London Museum of Science and the Computer History Museum in California.
