From the spear to the printing press to the computer: this colourful, vastly informative timeline covers these and practically every other significant invention that came before and after. Find out which civilisation discovered irrigation technology and who created everything from buttons, glass, the first cart with wheels, and clocks to telescopes, submarines, telegraphy, patent medicines, machine guns, washing machines, plastic, jet engines and disposable nappies. Sidebars throughout provide valuable historical context and even hazard a guess at what some of tomorrow's inventors may bring us - including disposable computers, self-cleaning glass, robotic domestics, machines operated by the electromagnetism of brainwaves, and much, much more.