“A History of the World in 100 Objects” is a fascinating book. A joint project of the British Museum and BBC Radio 4, it uses objects of ancient art, industry and technology as an introduction to key events in human history.
It was never going to be easy narrowing the field down to a mere hundred, but given the massive impact of recent technological advances, I wonder if at any point they considered including the mobile phone?
A mobile phone was listed in the top ten contenders for the final object, but it lost to a solar power lamp – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11531338
@Zoe – Thanks for the heads-up! So it looks as they did consider the mobile phone, but plumped for solar lamps instead. I’d love to know what decision-making process they went through on that. (Since they cheated on the mobile phone – sneakily adding it to the solar lamp image – maybe my blog title of 101 objects was right after all). =D