Jonn Elledge invites us to join him on a fascinating and often surprising tour of the ideas and technologies that made modernity possible.

31 Inventions that Built Our World

For over 10,000 years, we humans have been busy altering our environment and embracing 'progress', evolving seamlessly from hunter gatherers to the modern urban sophisticates we see ourselves as today.

But what are the ideas and inventions that enabled humanity to become, by the early 21st century, a majority urban species for the first time? How did the essential infrastructure of modern life - the innovations that we barely even notice, but without which our world would fall apart - actually come to be?

With his characteristic wit and boundless curiosity, Jonn Elledge invites us to join him on a fascinating and often surprising tour of the ideas and technologies that made modernity possible. From elevators to electric lighting, parks to pedestrian crossings, he guides us through the history of civilisation itself.

Jonn Elledge

Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist and the author of three books, including the #1 international bestseller A History of the World in 47 Borders. He’s also a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and a number of other newspapers, and has written more than 200 editions of his weekly Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, and spent six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast.

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