Business is the instrument that mankind has settled on to propagate change. Take a long step back and what do you see? A world of invention and unintended consequences.

Other things make the world go round as well—love, principally, and coffee—but there is nothing quite like the study of business to illuminate where we have been and where we are going. The poet Archibald MacLeish, when he was a staff writer at Fortune, described his job as to “report the world of business as an expression—a peculiarly enlightening expression—of the Republic, of the changing world.” It has become a bit of a catchphrase among tech people to say that one’s company is going to “change the world.” Many companies do, in small ways. But disrupting, say, the taxi business is not going to set future historians atwitter (though Twitter conceivably might). We surveyed Fortune’s brain trust to come up with a ranking of the 27 companies that have done the most to alter the way we live. Then, of course, we couldn’t stop. So when you’ve considered this compilation, click through to two companion pieces, 11 quirky companies that totally blew your mind, and 20 companies that changed the world—in fiction.

12. McDonald's

The fast-food giant turned food production into a science through automation, training us to expect consistency from our food. (Founder Ray Kroc has been credited with saying, "I put the hamburger on the assembly line.") McDonald's MCD -0.46% made the Big Mac and fries synonymous with American cuisine around the world, serving 70 million customers a day in more than 35,000 restaurants in 120 countries. "The hamburger is symbolic of our society," says Heidelberg University professor and fast-food industry scholar David Hogan, "and McDonald's is of course the ambassador and marketer of that concept." —Beth Kowitt

11. Wright Co.

The Wright brothers were not the first to build and fly airplanes, and their company focused more on defending their patent rights than on developing new aircraft. (In fact, some argue that the Wrights' patent battles impeded the growth of the nascent aviation business). But their patent, no. 821393, described the invention of three-axis control—covering pitch, roll, and yaw—that made fixed-wing aircraft practical. Their method remains standard for airplanes today. —Tim Smith

10. Facebook

A decade after Mark Zuckerberg, then a Harvard undergrad, launched a service to connect everyone in the world, Facebook FB 0.02% is growing closer to its goal: 1.3 billion active users, three-fifths of whom log on every single day. Facebook introduced a new way to navigate the web—via the scrolling “newsfeed” of personal updates that has become a staple on many websites—and a new way to organize digital information—via personal relationships instead of page links. In the process, the company reinvented brand marketing on the web, replacing the reviled banner ad with highly targeted ads that brought in $7.9 billion in sales in 2013. Even as Zuckerberg, who just turned 30, continues to run Facebook, he’s using his largesse to tackle education reform; he has pledged $220 million so far to school reform efforts in Newark, N.J. and the Bay Area. —Jessi Hempel

9. Otis Elevator

The year is 1854. Hundreds gather in the New York Crystal Palace, the iron-and-glass exhibition hall at the center of the World’s Fair, to watch a man standing on a platform four stories high, suspended by a single taut rope. A few electrifying moments pass before Elisha Otis signals his assistant, hovering by the rope with an outstretched sword, to sever the cable in two. The crowd gasps. The platform jolts—but doesn’t fall, as a pair of hidden leaf springs engage the rails, keeping Otis’s “safety elevator” miraculously in place. Credit the showmanship to P.T. Barnum, who hired Otis to perform this stunt several times a day for a whole month. Credit the world-changing invention to Otis, who founded his elevator company in an old Yonkers, N.Y., bedstead factory the year before. The safety elevator made it possible for buildings to climb ever skyward—from the 20-story Flatiron Building in New York (equipped with Otis elevators in 1902) to the nearly 60-story Woolworth Building a decade later, to the 103-story Empire State Building in 1931. It was this fast, reliable people-and-freight mover that made possible the office tower and the city skyline, that made high-rises and penthouses symbols of status, that made awkward elevator talk a daily rite of passage for hundreds of millions of souls. Fiber rope shifted to steel cables. Electronic buttons have largely replaced flesh-and-blood operators. But the safety elevator of today is much the same as the one that wowed the World’s Fair audience 16 decades ago. And for all that time, the Otis Elevator Company, now part of United Technologies UTX -0.70% , has dominated the industry it created. —Clifton Leaf

8. Sony

The way the world thinks of audio and video products was fundamentally redirected by Sony SNE -1.17% from the 1950s through the 1980s. The company didn't make the first transistor radio, but in 1957 it introduced a hugely successful one that helped propel the concurrent revolution in popular music. Its color TV sets of the 1960s and 1970s raised the global standard for quality. The Walkman, introduced in 1979, again revolutionized the way the world listens to music; it foreshadowed the iPod, which Sony obviously should have invented. But by then its fortunes had changed. Beyond transforming an industry, Sony also helped advance its country. In the 1950s and 1960s, “Made in Japan” was a punchline that meant laughably poor quality. By the 1980s it meant the opposite, and Sony products were the most visible cause of the change. —Geoff Colvin

7. Bayer

Chemists working for Bayer synthesized Prontosil, the first antibiotic, in 1932, more than a decade before penicillin became commercially available. Prontosil and subsequent “sulfa” drugs—the first chemicals used to treat bacterial infections—opened a new era in medicine. Gerhard Domagk, a Bayer researcher, was awarded the Nobel Price for his work on prontosil in 1939. —Tim Smith

6. Apple

Apple AAPL -0.41% changed the world by augmenting its simple-to-use PC with music software and a portable player to go with it, a groundbreaking smartphone, and a tablet computer—all of which work together brilliantly. It also taught us that mavericks can succeed in business; that even a box of molded plastic can be beautifully designed; that single-digit market share doesn’t spell death in a fast-moving industry; that one man really can define the soul of a giant corporation; that focus trumps breadth; that clever marketing can convince people around the world to love a company, even a company whose workplace is a brutal grind; that brand matters; that putting an “i” in front of a product’s name is infinitely repeatable; and, perhaps most importantly, that being better is vastly preferable to being first. —Adam Lashinsky

5. Suez Canal Co.

Fernand de Lesseps’s company dug the modern canal, completed in 1869, using forced Egyptian labor. It wasn’t an original idea; Pharaohs had been doing the same thing in the same place in pre-Christian times. No wonder: The canal, at 102 miles long (and about 78 feet deep today) is the shortest route between the East and the West. —Tim Smith

4. Google

Dream up something outlandish. Make it ubiquitous. Repeat. That’s been Google’s formula since day one, as it embarked on an ambitious mission to organize the world’s information. Tame the web? Check. Build a computer that fits in your pocket? Check. Photograph every street to make it navigable from afar? Check. Digitize the planet's books? Check. Build a polyglot translator in software? Check. Think of Google GOOG as a factory for major innovations, from self-driving cars to wearable computers to technology for extending the lifespan of humans. —Miguel Helft

3. GE

GE GE changed the world in not one or two, but three big ways. Guided by Thomas Edison, founder of the predecessor company Edison General Electric, it brought electricity and light bulbs to America and the world. That alone would be enough to put GE high up on our list, but there’s more. Transformation No. 2 was creating America’s first research lab. No. 3 was building an elaborate system of management development, a new idea at the advent of the giant corporation, that has guided companies around the world for over a hundred years. —Geoff Colvin

2 British East India Company

The Dutch had their East India Company, considered by many the first true multinational, which rampaged across Asia using military force to pursue the spice trade. But the British East India Company, founded in 1600, was the real imperial colossus: It ruled much of India, sparked the Opium Wars with China, and grew to account for half the world’s trade. —Tim Smith

1. Ford

During a period of unparalleled innovation early in the 20th century, Ford Motor F developed the moving assembly line, raised the wages of the workers who manned it to $5 a day, and made the Model T affordable to millions of buyers, thereby giving birth to the automobile age. By constantly refining its mass-production methods, Ford brought the price of the “T” down to $240, and the car became so popular it required no advertising. The “T” was also built in 12 foreign countries, making it the first world car. Today, Ford is still the world’s fifth-largest automaker, controlled by the descendants of Henry Ford, the inventor who founded it 111 years ago. —Alex Taylor III