Bacon, a leading philosopher, politician, and adviser to King James I of England, wrote: It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequence of discoveries.

Gunpowder blasted the knight class to pieces, the compass opened the world market and established colonies, and printing became a tool of Protestantism.

[11] Before paper was invented, the ancient Chinese carved characters on pottery, animal bones and stones, cast them on bronzes, or wrote them on bamboo or wooden strips and silk fabric.

The compass's origins may be traced back to the Warring States period (476–221 BC), when Chinese people utilized a device known as a si nan to point in the right direction.

During the early Song dynasty, a spherical compass with a small needle made of magnetic steel was created after steady development.

People relied on interpreting the positions of the sun, moon, and pole stars to tell directions on open ocean or new area before the discovery of the compass.

[14] The earliest reference to a magnetic device used for navigation is in a Song dynasty book dated to 1040–1044, where there is a description of an iron "south-pointing fish" floating in a bowl of water, aligning itself to the south.

[19] By the time the Song dynasty treatise, Wujing Zongyao (武经总要), was written by Zeng Gongliang and Yang Weide in 1044, the various Chinese formulas for gunpowder held levels of nitrate in the range of 27% to 50%.

[20] By the end of the 12th century, Chinese formulas of gunpowder had a level of nitrate capable of bursting through cast iron metal containers, in the form of the earliest hollow, gunpowder-filled grenade bombs.

[21] In 1280, the bomb store of the large gunpowder arsenal at Weiyang accidentally caught fire, which produced such a large explosion that a team of inspectors at the site a week later deduced that 100 guards had been killed instantly, with wooden beams and pillars blown sky high and landing at a distance of over 10 li (~2 mi or ~3 km) away from the explosion.

Indeed, there were many cities in China where movable type printing, in wooden and metal form, was adopted by the enterprises of wealthy local families or large private industries.

[citation needed] This commonplace spread rapidly throughout Europe in the 16th century and was appropriated only in modern times by sinologists and Chinese scholars.

After reports by Portuguese sailors and Spanish missionaries began to filter back to Europe beginning in the 1530s, the notion that these inventions had existed for centuries in China took hold.

By 1620, when Francis Bacon wrote in his Instauratio magna that "printing, gunpowder, and the nautical compass... have altered the face and state of the world: first, in literary matters; second, in warfare; third, in navigation," this was hardly an original idea to most learned Europeans.

[33] Edkins' notes on these inventions were mentioned in an 1859 review in the journal Athenaeum, comparing the contemporary science and technology in China and Japan.

[34] Other examples include, in Johnson's New Universal Cyclopædia: A Scientific and Popular Treasury of Useful Knowledge in 1880,[35] The Chautauquan in 1887,[36] and by the sinologist, Berthold Laufer in 1915.

In the 20th century, this list was popularized and augmented by the noted British biochemist, historian, and sinologist Joseph Needham, who devoted the later part of his life to studying the science and civilization of ancient China.

The four inventions were regarded as the most important Chinese achievements in science and technology, simply because they had a prominent position in the exchanges between the East and the West and acted as a powerful dynamic in the development of capitalism in Europe.

As a matter of fact, ancient Chinese scored much more than the four major inventions: in farming, iron and copper metallurgy, exploitation of coal and petroleum, machinery, medicine, astronomy, mathematics, porcelain, silk, and wine making.

In his political discourse, Xi Jinping often cites the four great inventions as a source of national pride for China and its historic contributions to humanity.

[39]: 32–33 In 2017, the term "four great new inventions" became popularized in China in reference to high-speed rail, mobile payment, e-commerce, and bike-sharing.