30
One early invention for storing energy was a basin above the level of the river.
It was filled with water when the water in the river was high, and then, when the water in the river was low, it was allowed to flow to the fields from the basin.
Such a basin could also be filled manually. Such devices were used in ancient Egypt, as a part of their irrigation ...
20
This is probably not what you were thinking of but "the earliest invention that allowed energy to be stored and released after a delay even it's just a short time" was a stone.
I can store energy in it briefly by flinging it at your head (kinetic). I can store energy in it even longer by putting it on a cliff above your head (potential).
Stone ...
9
Agriculture
The purpose of farming is to harness the freely available energy from the sun, and convert it into a form that can fuel the human body. Agriculture enabled significant food surpluses, which is simply a form of energy storage. Similar to how a flywheel stores mechanical energy which can be used later, food surpluses store chemical energy which can ...
4
According to this page, charcoal was in use circa 3750 BCE. That's an energy storage medium, although perhaps not the class of energy-release you were thinking of.
3
How about good-old fashioned pit traps? If 'stored energy' is something where you input work ahead of time and then it is expended at a later date for a use, a pit trap is a perfect example.
While digging the pit, you are removing a great deal of material, and effectively 'storing' gravitational potential energy in the difference between the height of the ...
3
In early modern philosophy and science there was a corpuscular theory of light and Newton's authority was also behind it. At the end of the 19th c. electromagnetic phenomena demonstrated that light is a wave, but Planck's work seemed to vindicate the alternative view. Actually the constant was introduced as a mathematical trick - an integral diverges to ...
2
Tree limb. Before humans became ground bound, they used tree limbs to catapult themselves to the next tree. But seriously, probably a stone, then a stone attached to a stick, then a stone attached to a stick shot from a string attached to a stick. Do I get voted off the island? I just got here.
1
It depends on, what they did.
Neither of them found the concept, but both made a lot of inventions/developments to make optical cables working.
Narinder Singh Kapany
He was the founder and chairman K2 Optronics Inc, and
published over 100 scientific papers and four books on opto-electronics and entrepreneurship.
Charles Huen Kao
created various methods to ...
1
I agree to candied_orange that it might be a stone, but for different reasons.
There still is a practice among nomadic people to heat stones in a fire [aka store energy] and then transfer them into a container (e.g. the fur of an animal filled with water) to cook/boil the contents [release the energy].
Here are two sources I could find:
Travel report from ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
