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Hard Fork hosts Casey Newton and Kevin Roose ranked 100 technologies, putting fire at No. 1, electricity at No. 2 and the iPhone at No. 3. The ranking is best read as an opinionated conversation starter—not a measured consensus or a formal history-of-technology index.
Which list is this?
The list is attributed to Casey Newton and Kevin Roose, hosts of the Hard Fork podcast. New Atlas published a reproduction on December 8, 2024, identifying the underlying episode as November 29, 2024. Its article reproduces the full ranking and selected explanations, rather than a complete episode transcript. Read New Atlas’s reproduction of the ranking.
The hosts’ broad definition, as quoted collectively by New Atlas, is: “By ‘iconic,’ we mean technologies that have either changed the world, ruined it or at the very least made life a little more interesting.” That framing makes room for influence, harm and cultural significance—not just usefulness or technical novelty.
What are the 100 most iconic tech inventions?
Here are the placements at the top, along with a handful of entries that show how widely the list ranges:
#1 Best Overall
| Rank | Technology |
|---|---|
| 1 | Fire |
| 2 | Electricity |
| 3 | iPhone |
| 4 | Printing press |
| 5 | Penicillin |
| 6 | Television |
| 7 | Airplanes |
| 8 | YouTube |
| 9 | Atomic bomb |
| 10 | Transformer neural networks |
| 14 | World Wide Web |
| 16 | Wi-Fi |
| 19 | Wheel |
| 21 | Telephone |
| 28 | Walkman |
| 98 | NFTs |
| 99 | Calculators |
| 100 | Boats |
The range is part of the provocation: the list puts basic technologies, infrastructure, medicines, consumer products, online services and scientific processes into one ranking. Readers can reasonably disagree about whether every entry is an invention in the same sense, let alone whether it belongs above or below another.
Why is fire No. 1 and the iPhone above the web?
The ranking reflects the hosts’ judgments, not a published scoring system. A reader might defend fire’s position by emphasizing how foundational it is, while another might argue that electricity or the web transformed more of modern life. The iPhone at No. 3, ahead of the World Wide Web at No. 14, is another natural point of disagreement: the ranking does not supply a common measure that settles comparisons like these.
Rank #2
New Atlas says the hosts aimed to explain each choice in roughly 30 seconds or less. It highlights the barcode’s contribution to faster retail processing, the Walkman’s role in portable personal listening and the hosts’ enthusiasm for transformer neural networks. Those short rationales offer glimpses of the case for individual entries, not a standardized evaluation of all 100. New Atlas’s reproduction also does not independently verify every historical detail in each explanation.
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How should you judge the ranking?
The hosts do not document a formal rubric. To make your own comparisons, consider these as reader-created lenses—not criteria the hosts say they used:
- Breadth of impact: How many people, industries or parts of daily life did the technology affect?
- Durability: Did its influence persist, or was it tied to a particular moment?
- Everyday usefulness: Did it solve a recurring problem or make a common activity easier?
- Social consequences: Did it bring substantial benefits, harms or both?
These lenses can help explain why two readers might reach different rankings without either having overlooked an objective answer. A list that intentionally includes technologies that “ruined” the world as well as those that improved it invites judgments about consequences, not just invention or convenience.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Why the list is worth arguing about
The 100 placements are editorial choices credited to two podcast hosts, reproduced by New Atlas in 2024. The list is useful as a prompt to debate what “iconic” means and how to compare technologies with radically different histories. It is not evidence of public consensus, and the reproduced material does not establish a measured method for deciding which invention is most important.
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