I wonder what you guys would think was the greatest?
The Best Gadget of All Time Revealed — You’ll Never Guess What It Is
By the 1950s, television had become the national nightly pastime, but tiny screens and monochrome pictures left viewers itching for improvement. Color was the obvious next step, and by 1954 the technical challenges of broadcasting in full color had been overcome. RCA gave America a way to watch the new waves, that same year releasing the CT-100 — an enormously complex device that required two sets of circuits, one for color, one for B&W. Alas, it met with little success in the market. Picture quality was poor; images were blurry and ghosted. “Only an inveterate (and well-heeled) experimenter should let the advertisements seduce him into being ‘among the very first’ to own a color TV set,” sniffed Consumer Reports. Yet more than 50 years later, Wired readers voted the CT-100 the Greatest Gadget of All Time for launching television as we know it today.
Here’s the items this TV was competing against. Click on the Results Bracket button to see them all.
Hands down, the greatest gadget of ALL time is the Cellular Phone.
It’s becoming like TVs in the home where one person is carrying two or more cell tower capable devices on their person at all times.
I think in the near future there will be a woman giving birth to female where the baby comes out feet first and her arm raised like a statue of liberty. That last push and the baby comes to the world clutching a miniature iPod.
I hate to say it, but I truly think the iPhone is the greatest gadget ever. Flawed, yes. Perfect, no. Awesome, yes! It does everything a gadget should do. It’s extremely useful (I use it every day for SO many things), it’s easy to use, and it has the x factor that makes everyone who sees it go WOW. Now, sure, color television is great, transistor radios are boss, and video games are the bomb. However, for now, I think the iPhone is it.
A deck of cards.
The wheel.
#1: Spoken by someone who doesn’t have the joy of the office always being able to get a hold of you. If it weren’t for work, I wouldn’t have a cell phone.
$5, Beloved Uncle Dave, I have a lot of time on my hands for YOUR benefit. It seems if it weren’t for work you wouldn’t have a life. Married, huh?
I’ll stick with Mel Brook’s 2000 year old man’s vote for the greatest invention of all time. Saran wrap…
#5 – I agree that the cell phone is not the greatest gadget… But I have no sympathy for the old “anyone can get in touch with me” bit…
Turn off the ringer.
I love my cell because I can use my phone no matter where I am and it remembers all my numbers and it is cheap. I don’t have a land line. But if I feel like not being bothered, I make the choice not to be bothered. Just turn it off for a while.
#2 – The iPhone is just a regular cell phone with a bigger screen. It might be an evolutionary step in cell phones, but it surely isn’t revolutionary or even particularly innovative.
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I don’t know what the greatest gadget is… But I know what I think it isn’t… I don’t think its the Laptop, the PC, the video game console, or anything like that, if only because those things, while revolutionary to varying degrees, seem to be of a scale bigger than “a gadget”
I don’t think it was the PDA if only because the essential nature of the PDA rolled into the cell phone and the full functionality of the PDA never really had a victory in the marketplace of ideas.
I don’t think it is the CT-100 because… wow… I’m not going to insult your intelligences by explaining. You guys deserve better.
If I’m picking the greatest gadget of all time, it might be the pocket watch which allowed the measuring of time to become portable. Time is critical to us, as evidenced by all of our wristwatches and the fact that time is displayed on every OS, on cell phones ans PDAs, and just about everywhere we go. Humorously, Sid Meier’s Civilization 4 has an option to show a clock in the game so you don’t lose track of time and stay up all night playing.
But I’m just not sure…
I guess it kind of depends on how you define gadget. But decidedly not the RCA CT-100. Sure, it was the first real color television, but it didn’t revolutionize anything for the general population, which continued to buy mostly black and white sets until the early 1960s. And it was black and white television that changed the way people lived….staying home at night instead of going out. Heck, prime time wasn’t completely color until 1966, IIRC.
I guess we are limited to a specific model of something, as in you couldn’t say “radio” but would need to say something like the “radiola III”, and like television, there simply wasn’t one model that did the trick.
So I will throw my vote for the Model T Ford. Certainly one of the very top life changing specific model of gadget of the 20th century. It and its influence completely transformed the continent (paved roads), manufacturing (assembly line), marketing among the first nationally marketed brand name products…kept getting cheaper!), agriculture (great reduction in the need for horse feed), and well, you get the picture.
Speaking of which, for pure unadulterated coolness, my vote would be for the Polaroid SX70. Even today, watching a photograph appear before your eyes seems like a miracle.
The internet hands down. A close second would be silicone breast implants.
Just kidding, *sort of*.
And #5 UD I am with you.
10. sorry I thought it said invention, so the transistor, then the computer.
the stick
#12 – The stick is better than a poke in the eye.
Deodorant.
Can probably deal with not having a cell phone.
CPU
“Television, the drug of the nation. Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6CgotCUtMo
The stick was probably humans first tool. When a stick was found to perform multiple tasks, digging, swatting or as a walking aide it became a possesion that was not disposed of after it’s use. It then became a weapon to retain the possesion of the stick or to gain possesion of someone elses stick. Whole communities were formed because sticks could be combined to provide meaningful work or used as protection. Because of community living, individuals were able to exchange ideas on how best to utilize the stick. Sticks were used to create non-stick things like tools, furniture and housing. And on and on…
17. Ug, fire stick. (matches)
#17 – All true… PLUS, it’s better than a poke in the eye.
#17,
I like the way you think.
#17, now that it’s World Series time, I had this horrible thought – with a stick and a rock, they could have invented and played baseball, adding recreation to the usefulness of this tool.
And if a stick weighs as much as a duck?