3. The printing press, making possible the archiving of technological knowledge
Yes indeed, it is one thing to have an idea, but another to pass that idea on to the generations. For technology to advance, innovators of the future must be able to innovate by innovations of the past. In other words, in order not to have to rethink the same idea in every generation, information regarding the development of technology must be passed on. Oral tradition can achieve this in simple technologies, but the march of progress owes more than we probably appreciate to the humble printing press.
The printing press, of course, debuted by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440, contributed much more than just developmental knowledge to the human experience. It was the beginning of the information age. For the first time ideas could circulate without the necessity of the spoken or handwritten word. Ideas certainly did circulate, and most of those ideas tended to be political and religious, and the liberalization of the human mind and the human consciousness was the result. In fact, in the age of technology, there have been one or two great leaps forwards, and the advent of the printed word was certainly one of these. It was the trigger for perhaps the greatest explosion of human creativity that would follow.