Short answers, pulled from the story.
Authorities of the 15th century singled out the printing press, firearms, and the nautical compass as the three inventions that proved the Moderns had surpassed the Ancients. These three technologies allowed people to communicate, exercise power, and travel at distances previously unimaginable.
By 1600, European printing presses had produced an estimated 150 to 200 million copies, a tenfold increase over the more than twenty million volumes already in circulation by the start of the 16th century. Presses were operating in more than 200 cities across a dozen countries by that point.
The earliest known parachute design appears in an anonymous Italian manuscript from the 1470s. Around 1485, Leonardo da Vinci sketched a more refined pyramidal version in his Codex Atlanticus. The Venetian inventor Fausto Veranzio, who lived from 1551 to 1617, later modified da Vinci's design by replacing the rigid canopy with a sail-like cloth.
Cristallo was an exceptionally clear, colourless glass developed by Venetian glassmakers in the mid-15th century. It was made from high-purity quartz pebbles with manganese oxide added as a decolorizer, and it was used for windows, mirrors, ships' lanterns, and lenses. The lens-grinding tradition it supported contributed to the later invention of the telescope.
Johann Carolus of Strassburg published the first press-printed newspaper, the Relation, in 1605. He turned to the press specifically to gain time over the slow process of hand-copying newssheets. Other German papers followed quickly in Wolfenbüttel, Basel, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
De re metallica, published in 1556, was a mining engineering treatise that also covered geology and chemistry. It served as the standard reference for mechanical arts in the mining trades and remained the leading chemistry reference for the following 180 years.