Four Great Inventions
Read this article to learn about the origins of China's great inventions, which include the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing. After reading about China's role in inventing each of these, feel free to search for articles about each specific invention for more history of the use and development of these tools.
Evolution
"The Three Great Inventions" was first proposed by the British philosopher Francis Bacon, and later by Walter Henry Medhurst, Karl Marx and other scholars agreed.
Printing, gunpowder, and the mariner's compass were brought to Europe by Arab traders during the Renaissance and Reformation. Bacon, a leading philosopher, politician, and adviser to King James I of England, wrote: "It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequence of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more clearly than those three which were unknown to the ancients [the Greeks], and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and stage of things throughout the world, the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these three mechanical discoveries".
Including Marx's comments:
"Gunpowder, compass, and printing-these are the three major inventions that foretell the arrival of bourgeois society. Gunpowder blasted the knight class to pieces, the compass opened the world market and established colonies, and printing became a tool of Protestantism. In general, it has become a means of scientific renaissance, and has become the most powerful lever to create the necessary preconditions for spiritual development".
Then, British Sinologist Medhurst pointed out:
"The Chinese people's genius for inventions has manifested in many aspects very early. The three Chinese inventions (navigation compass, printing, gunpowder) have provided an extraordinary impetus to the development of European civilization".
Joseph Edkins, a Chinese missionary and sinologist, was the first to add papermaking to the three major inventions mentioned above, and in comparing Japan and China he noted that "we must always remember that they (meaning Japan) have no such remarkable inventions as printing, papermaking, the compass, and gunpowder".