Major Breakthroughs

First posting. Are you a student?

The introduction of substances into water intended for use for drinking has had a profound impact on societal health, survival rates and longevity across the globe.

Wikipedia, among other sources, has heaps of reading available on this topic.

How about the laptop computer.

Most true breakthroughs take awhile to be utilized broadly by the masses. Thus your question presents opposing and obfuscating attributes.

very important, bur hardly recent, unless you're a geologist.

No indication as to what recent means. I thought maybe my response might have elicited a higher level of specificity from the OP. As engineers, we are loathe to assume anything because we know you always get burned when you do.

" The cell phone OFF switch."

This is Golden. How about, I do not own or use a cell phone.......

The answer to the question is very little. I have watched the quality and stability of Engineered systems that I work with daily go down over the last 30 years. The goods are literally evaporating and this is because everything has been Monetized and we are oprating under a debt based, and fradulent monetary system. If this one thing was done away with then there would be real incentive to move back to quality of goods. Digital implementation is destroying a lot of things that it is not the answer for. The other thing is the forced incursion of metric hardware terms into the US market. This is both unwanted and a bad idea. a lot of documentation is becoming unreadable and useless just like the components. Get on any Electrical or HVACR forum and see how Solid State nonsense is wasting time. Its a colossal joke. The other thing is to look at the purposeful degradation of the Electrical distribution system by insane types of people. Eric Dollard can tell you all about this and just how dangerous it is. All of this needs to stop.

Cell phones are making people stupid, and people are also not supposed to be immersed in a field of microwave pollution. The few who are still capable of critical thought need to start saying no.

Star

I guess it depends on how you interpret "recent". I'm old enough to consider the digital camera a recent breakthrough. When combined with digital image processing (more recent), It has made pictorial communication vastly better, cheaper, faster and easier. Processes that used to take hours in the darkroom now take seconds, processes that required expensive equipment can now be accomplished with no extra equipment at all (since most people now have access to a smartphone and a computer), and the only chemicals involved are those used to fabricate the camera. I know there is more sophisticated software, but Apple's free Photos software does most of what I need/want.

It may not directly affect most people's everyday lives, but CAD, and especially 3D-CAD have greatly improved the quality of my life. I still find it incredible that 3D-Cad is even possible on a laptop computer, especially when it comes to rotating a complex object to view it from any desired point of view, and doing it essentially instantly in real time.

Recent major breakthroughs, as in my lifetime? I think it was the computer Graphic User Interface (GUI) first pioneered by Apple and made ubiquitous by Windows. That opened up the use of computers to the general public, beyond just those of us with technical educations.

If computer engineers hadn't broken the barrier of arcane string commands none of the devices we take for granted would have been made.

20 years ago nobody had ever heard of a vehicle interior ladder rack for contractors?

Now there are different units in the market and there are hundreds of thousands of people who have used them and as many people that use them everyday.