Greatest Human Discovery (Essay Sample)

The Greatest Scientific Discovery by Mankind: Fire
Stephen M. Kalekye
Abstract
For decades, fire has played various life-changing roles. Despite this, may still don’t clearly understand what fire is. Ideally, this confusion has been brought about by the use of the term "fire" in other fields such as military. In the context of this report, the term has been defined from a Chemical perspective where it is a chemical combustion process of materials through rapid oxidation releasing heat and light among other products. The visible part of fire is called a flame. Fire starts when a flammable material is exposed to its ambient temperature in the presence of an oxidizer. Today, fire can be considered the greatest scientific discovery because of its modern day uses.
Key words: fire, combustion, oxidizer, flammable
The Greatest Scientific Discovery by Mankind: Fire
Throughout the history of modern day scientific discoveries, the most significant is fire. This is so because of its transformative nature and the impact it has had on humanity. Its significance today has been defined by the numerous uses fire has ranging from its use in cooking, heating, burning among other.
Historical discovery of fire
The history of fire dates to about 1.9 million years ago. This was evidenced by the presence of cooked food that dates to around that time. Despite this early discovery, fire became widespread around 100 years ago. The history of this great phenomenon argues that fire was first discovered and used in Africa where the early man rubbed special pieces of indigenous wood to produce fire. "Without fire, life today would almost be impossible. All this dates from African descent" (Shelsmith, 2001, p. 15).
Evolution and use of fire
Over time, the fire usage advanced from the initial body warming during cold spells to cooking and other modern uses. Today, almost every main industrial process relies on a fire-related process. This being indicative of both the role and evolution of the fire to-date, there is still a greater room for the innovative use of the fire. Other than being used on industrial processes, vehicles and machines rely on combustion of fuel to release energy used in running them. This means that almost every step of our lives today needs fire. An American researcher, Lucien X. Polastron (2007) wrote the following:
Fire is a great servant and a good master who has been around for long enough. As a master, it commands all you need; food, transport, machines and more to be better for you. As a servant, its all that has made it be around for our use. (p. 6)
Fire is additionally used in lighting up and cooking in the large cities. This has been the main day-to-day use of fire to which most humans can identify with. This use of fire clearly ...