Question: what is your favorite invention , and why ?

Chris Mansell answered on 20 Jun 2013:

When I was a child, I really liked the inventions of Wallace and Gromit. Obviously, they were fictional but they were fun.

Nowadays, I would say my favourite invention is Edward Jenner’s invention of the vaccine. It has saved so many lives. Also, the story of its invention is quite captivating. The following two paragraphs are taken from

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/edward_jenner.htm

“Edward Jenner was a country doctor who had studied nature and his natural surroundings since childhood. He had always been fascinated by the rural old wives tale that milkmaids could not get smallpox. He believed that there was a connection between the fact that milkmaids only got a weak version of smallpox – the non-life threatening cowpox – but did not get smallpox itself. A milkmaid who caught cowpox got blisters on her hands and Jenner concluded that it must be the pus in the blisters that somehow protected the milkmaids.

“Jenner decided to try out a theory he had developed. A young boy called James Phipps would be his guinea pig. He took some pus from cowpox blisters found on the hand of a milkmaid called Sarah. She had milked a cow called Blossom and had developed the tell-tale blisters. Jenner ‘injected’ some of the pus into James. This process he repeated over a number of days gradually increasing the amount of pus he put into the boy. He then deliberately injected Phipps with smallpox. James became ill but after a few days made a full recovery with no side effects. It seemed that Jenner had made a brilliant discovery.”

Even though I know how the story turns out, I still feel a bit nervous at the point where Jenner injects the boy with the extremely deadly smallpox virus!