BC Business
10. Heliocentrism This one really got the astronomers – and the Catholic Church – in a tizzy. When Copernicus first published his work about the sky and sun standing still, while the earth moved around them, it went against everything everyon
9. The Universal Law of Gravitation If an apple fell on my head there’s a good chance I’d throw a fit and go home. But not Isaac Newton; instead, he had an idea. Newton supposed that if gravity could make an apple fall to the ground, perhaps
8. Global Warming Thanks to An Inconvenient Truth or kind-of-truth according to the British Government we’ve decided that only man could have ruined the world and only man can save it. Nevertheless, ‘going green’ is a huge part of our l
7. Sliced Bread Does this even need an explanation? Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa invented the first loaf-at-a-time bread-slicing machine in 1928. His brilliant innovation will live on forever in the best cliché since – I have
6. Human Rights Although the idea had been toyed with by poets and philosophers for centuries, it was the UN’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” that set a milestone in sticking up for the little guy. With help from groups like Amne
5. Vaccination In the 17th century a group of Indians decided that rather than eat their smallpox scabs, they would use them to inoculate people against the disease. Thanks to this, came the rise of vaccines, which means longer lives and better healthcar
4. Evolution Maybe the Devil put the fossils in the ground to fool us. Maybe not. Either way, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory really got people thinking. The idea that we did not come from an archetype in seven days but that we probably came f
3. Consumer Culture In the 1920s Edward Bernays, the father of public relations and a nephew of Sigmund Freud, gave a group of young women cigarettes and had them march in a parade through New York City. The women said that smoking let them be free of ma
2. Relativity When you take two little things and bang them together they can make a big thing. And what a big thing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is. Nuclear energy is still one of the cleaner energy sources and nuclear weapons still pose a very
1. The Internet We can have business meetings, rent movies, share our lives, read the news and do pretty much whatever we want online. The Internet has completely changed the way we live our lives. We have access to information that we couldn’t eve