They changed the world
From the wheel to driverless cars, inventors and their marvellous inventions keep us shaking our heads in amazement.
An invention is the creation of something new and original. History is full of great invention and inventor stories — both planned and serendipitous.
Post-It notes: In 1970, Spencer Silver, while trying to make a strong adhesive, accidentally developed a weak one. Disheartened, he put it away and forgot about it. Four years later, a church choir singer discovered the markers stuck to paper, stayed in place yet lifted without damaging the paper. The Post-It note was born.
In 1885, Dr John Pemberton was working on a new headache medicine and brain tonic. The green concoction did not work, but after a colour change and carbonated water was added … voila! Coco-Cola.
In the 9th century Chinese alchemists were trying to find the elixir of immortality and came up with a mixture that had a big bang … gunpowder.
Not everyone sees the potential in new inventions.
In 1946, a 20th Century Fox executive thought TV was just a passing fancy and said: “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
In 1943 an IBM expert predicted: “There would be a market for about five computers.”
“This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is of no value to us,” said a Western Union telegraph company memo in 1877.
If you think inventions are only for white-haired mad scientists, think again.
Thomas Alva Edison showed signs of inventive genius at an early age.
Not all his early inventions were a success. By the age of six, Edison’s experiments with fire were said to have cost his father a barn.
Soon after, young Edison tried to launch the first human balloon by persuading another boy to swallow large quantities of effervescent powders to inflate himself with gas. Again … not a great success.
Edison said he never failed: he just found 14,000 ways not to build a light bulb. However, he kept trying and by his early teens, he had designed and perfected his first real invention, an electrical cockroach control system.
He glued parallel strips of tinfoil to a wall and wired the strips to the poles of a powerful battery — quite a shock for the unsuspecting insect.
Edison was not the only young inventor. At age 14, one schoolboy invented a rotary brush device to remove husks from wheat in the flour mill run by his friend’s father. The young inventor’s name? Alexander Graham Bell.
James Harrison, the Geelong Advertiser’s first editor, began operation of a mechanical ice-making machine in 1851 on the banks of the Barwon River.
His first commercial icemaking machine followed in 1854, and by 1861 a dozen of his systems were in operation.
In 1912, Geelong inventor Gilbert Toyne designed a rotary clothes hoist and by early 1920s Toyne’s All Metal Rotary Clothes Hoist was manufactured and advertised in Australia — 25 years before the Hills hoist.
The ute is an Australian icon. In the 1930s, Lewis Bandt was a designer at Geelong’s Ford Motor Company plant when he was given an unusual request for a motor car suitable for driving to church on Sunday and transporting the pigs to market on Monday.
In 1934, he designed the first utility — known as the ‘ute’.