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A Look At Great Chinese Inventions

      The World is forever in debt to China for its innovations.
Ancient China was extreme advance and many of its discoveries are
still in use today. This is what Robert Temple, the author of The
Genius of China 3000 years of science, discovery and invention. The
book is based on 11 main parts of Chinese innovation. Within these 11
categories, there are 3 main parts that contain the most significant
inventions. Robert Temple concentrates the bulk of his examples in
these three categories, agriculture, domestic and industrial
technology , and engineering. Temples examples were not limited
to these fields of innovation. The Chinese excelled in many other
areas, including mathematics, warfare and transportation, to name a
few. Although Temple wrote about eleven fields of invention, I feel
that these three sections contain the greatest examples of Chinese
innovation, and the debt that the modern world owes China.
      The first main area is the field of engineering. Within this
chapter, the development of iron and steel is the greatest
achievement. The development of iron and steel led to other advances.
By at least the 4th century the Chinese have developed blast furnaces
to obtain cast iron from iron ore. This was 1200 years before the
first blast furnace showed up in Europe. The reasons that the author
gave to explain the reasons why the Chinese developed this technology
are simple. The Chinese had access to large amounts of clay, the key
ingredient in making blast furnaces. The Chinese also figured out
that by adding a substance they called Black Earth, they could lower
the melting point of iron.
      Another major invention of the Chinese, that led to other
achievements, is steel. The common belief today is that Henry Bessemer
discovered the process of refining iron into steel. The fact is
Chinese had developed the process to refine iron into steel in the
second century BC The Chinese learned that by...