How the Greatest Inventions bracket works
Rank inventions without dragging anything into rows. You get one matchup at a time — The Internet or Printing Press? Electricity or The Wheel? — and after 15 picks the bracket has a champion, with everything else placed by how far it got. The awkward pairings are the point: they are the calls a drag-and-drop tier list quietly lets you avoid.
This bracket runs 4 rounds at the default 16-slot size (Round of 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship), with every one of the 16 options in the field. Entrants are drawn at random each time, so an early upset in one run may never happen in the next. You can also play it at 8 slots for a shorter or longer run.
15 picks, 4 rounds
- Round of 168 matchups
- Elite 84 matchups
- Final Four2 matchups
- Championship1 matchup
Roughly 1-2 minutes start to finish.
All 16 entrants
All 16 entrants are listed below, including The Internet, Printing Press, Electricity and The Wheel.
The Internet
1983
Printing Press
1440
Electricity
1879 (light bulb)
The Wheel
~3500 BC
Smartphone
2007 (iPhone)
Penicillin
1928
Airplane
1903
Telephone
1876
Television
1927
Automobile
1886
Computer
1945
Steam Engine
1712
Vaccines
1796
Compass
~1100
Camera
1816
GPS
1978
Would rather group them than rank them? Open all 16 in the tier list maker and sort them into S, A, B, C, D and F tiers instead — same entrants, no matchups.
How everyone else ranked them
Aggregated from 22 completed Greatest Inventions brackets. Win rate is the share of head-to-head matchups each entrant has won across every play.
- 1
Vaccines
46W - 17L · won 5 brackets
73%
win rate
- 2
Electricity
40W - 17L · won 5 brackets
70%
win rate
- 3
The Wheel
35W - 18L · won 4 brackets
66%
win rate
- 4
The Internet
33W - 20L · won 2 brackets
62%
win rate
- 5
Computer
24W - 21L · won 1 bracket
53%
win rate
- 6
Smartphone
20W - 22L
48%
win rate
- 7
Automobile
18W - 21L · won 1 bracket
46%
win rate
- 8
Printing Press
17W - 20L · won 2 brackets
46%
win rate
- 9
Television
15W - 21L · won 1 bracket
42%
win rate
- 10
Airplane
14W - 21L · won 1 bracket
40%
win rate
Getting a ranking you actually agree with
- 1Trust the first instinct. Overthinking a matchup usually produces a ranking you do not agree with later.
- 2The default run puts all 16 options in the draw. Short on time? Drop to 8 slots — a quicker run over a random 8 of them.
- 3Watch for the option you keep beating reluctantly. That is usually the sign you should undo and reconsider the pick before it.
Greatest Inventions bracket FAQ
How many options are in the Greatest Inventions bracket?
The pool holds 16 options. A default run puts all of them in the draw and takes 15 picks across 4 rounds: Round of 16, Elite 8, Final Four, Championship. Other field sizes are available too — 8, 16 slots.
Which options are included?
The Internet, Printing Press, Electricity, The Wheel, Smartphone, Penicillin, Airplane, Telephone, Television, Automobile, Computer and Steam Engine, plus 4 more. Every entrant is listed further down this page with its artwork.
How long does the rank inventions take?
About 1-2 minutes — 15 choices at the default size, or 7 if you drop to a 8-slot bracket. No account is needed, and you can abandon a run at any point without losing anything.
Can I turn the result into S/A/B tiers?
Both are here, and the bracket is closer to a tier list than it looks. It ends with a champion, a runner-up and then every other option grouped by the round it went out in — which is exactly a set of tiers, decided by 15 direct comparisons rather than by your first guess at a layout. What it deliberately does not do is claim a precise gap between two options that never met. If you would rather place the options into S through F rows yourself, the tier list maker loads all 16 of them at bracketranker.com/tier-list-maker.
Can I compare my order with other people's?
Every completed bracket feeds the Greatest Inventions community results page, which aggregates win rates across all plays and tracks how often each of the 16 entrants takes the title. It updates continuously, so it moves as more people play.
What if a option I wanted is missing?
Use the bracket maker: add your own options, name it, and share the link so other people play the same field. That is the route to take when this pool of 16 is missing something you would have picked, or when you want a version scoped to one era, label or franchise.