Ancient Chinese Contributions - Essay Example

Gunpowder is considered as the most important invention of the ancient Chinese, according to the legend, the invention of gunpowder was an accident (McClellan, 2011, p.125). Those who were responsible for inventing gunpowder were actually trying to locate a method through which human beings could remain immortal and by accident, they produced gunpowder which has the ability to take human life easier. Gunpowder is an essential contribution of the ancient Chinese because it has helped human beings in defending themselves against loss of life and loss of property for several years.

Gunpowder has been used by militia and defense forces of the western world to protect themselves at the time of war and to protect loss of property and life against enemy attacks. The use of gunpowder in the field of warfare started taking place during the 14th century. Ancienct Chinese have even gained heavy recognition for the creation of compass. If the compass would not have been invented then individuals would have suffered great difficulty in moving from one end to another. They would have faced difficulty in finding their local destinations and destinations they intended to reach.

Chinese should be thanked for their invention of compass because without this invention people would not have been able to fly aircrafts and condcut adventorours activities such as hiking. The early compass devloped by the ancient Chinese was created to help the chinese population in finding the location to the southern regions as these regions were considered as significant areas for them (McClellan, 2011, p.126). The compasses that were manufactured during the 4th century were created with the useof lodestone.

Today education is considered as one of the most essential parts of humanwellbeing and if it would not have been the contribution of paper made by the ancient Chinese, human beings would have remained uneducated for a very long period of time. If paper would not have been created by the great ancient chinese, record keeping would have never existed as there is no humanbeing who can hold huge amount of data in their memories for a long period of time. Paper has assisted in managing reocrds and has helped humanbeings in managing important information.

The modern day paper used by the entire world is an achievment that was created by Cai Lun, he was the inventor of paper and during A.D 105, he invented paper by mixing fibers obtained from wood and water (Ho, 2000, p.216). The fourth greatest invention made by the ancient chinese was the Chinese abacus which is a simple tool for conducting calculations that are mathematical in nature. The four main mathematical functions that are performed with the assistance of abacus includes: multiplication, divison, addition and subtraction.

The abacus was an invention of Chentg Dawei and this invention was created during the era in which the Ming Dynasty was in power (Ho, 2000, p.85). Abacus proved to be very