101 Gadgets That Changed The World

NASA astronauts have used it to make repairs on the moon and in space. The MythBusters built a boat and held a car together with the stuff. Brookhaven National Laboratory fixed their particle accelerator with it. And enthusiasts have used it to make prom dresses and wallets. You might say it's a material, not a gadget, but trust us: Duct tape is the ultimate multitool.

When hostilities in Asia curtailed bamboo imports, rod producers like Shakespeare, Phillipson, and Montague needed a new material to keep anglers equipped with low-cost, quality tackle in the '50s and '60s. Fiberglass fit the bill.

No office supply has enjoyed a star turn quite like that of the stapler, which had its breakthrough role in the comedy Office Space. Much of the movie's plot revolved around Milton Waddams's beloved red Swingline, but it was only in 2002, three years after the film's release--and in response to demand from fans--that Swingline went to market with a red stapler.

Before it unveiled the Roomba Floorvac for the home market in 2002, iRobot built land-mine-clearing robots, which used the so-called crop circle algorithm. This very same technology was adapted to make the Roomba circle and sweep autonomously. Within a year of its launch, iRobot's Roomba Floorvac was the top gift request on American wedding registries, and sales of the revolutionary vacuum cleaner surpassed the combined total number of all mobile robots previously sold.

In 1941, the USDA's Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan used the newly discovered refrigerant, Freon, to enable the deployment of a lethal (to critters, anyway) mist by American troops fighting on insect-infested fronts. The "bug bomb" cocktail, held in a 16-ounce steel canister, consisted of Freon-12, sesame oil and pyrethrum (the last is a natural insecticide derived from chrysanthemum blooms).

Prior to the introduction of this gadget, the ski hill could be an unforgiving place. Strapped to two planks, the skier was always one tough tumble away from catastrophic injury. It was one such break--a severe spinal fracture--that motivated Norweigan-American skiing champion Hjalmar Hvam to conceive the first safety binding in 1937. "When I came out of the ether I called the nurse for a pencil and paper," he once wrote. "I had awakened with the complete principle of a release toe iron." Subsequent developments in safety bindings changed the perception of skiing from a high-risk endeavor to a leisurely pursuit, and the sport boomed.

Originally dubbed the Power Drencher when it debuted in 1989, the Super Soaker was the brainchild of NASA engineer Lonnie Johnson. The idea for the world's greatest squirt gun grew out of Johnson's lab work on a heat pump. He told the AP in 1992, "I was watching the stream of water come out of the nozzle and stream across the bathroom and strike a towel. The curtains were swirling around the bathroom. It was pretty impressive. I thought, 'That would make a pretty neat water gun.'" Since, no fewer than two dozen Super Soaker models have contributed to backyard mayhem--and none is more coveted than the CPS 2000 Mk1. The most powerful water gun ever manufactured, it shoots nearly 1 liter of water per second up to 50 feet. The Mk1 was discontinued soon after its release, but it's available on eBay for a cool $350.

Stephen Poplawski invented the blender in 1922, but his name is not the one most often associated with the gadget. That honor belongs to Fred Waring--an orchestra leader in Pennsylvania who, in 1936, offered financial backing to a tinkerer named Frederick Osius who was developing a similar invention. One reason for Waring's interest: He could use Osius's widget to puree raw vegetables for the ulcer diet his doctors prescribed. The Waring Blender debuted in 1937 and cost $29.75; by 1954 one million of the devices had been sold.

As a publishing luminary of the expatriate bohemian scene in late-'20s Paris, Caresse Crosby helped launch the careers of D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. Years earlier, as a 19-year-old Manhattan socialite, she laid the groundwork for a fashion revolution when she and the family maid used two silk handkerchiefs, pink ribbon, and a cord to produce a forerunner to the modern bra. She patented her "backless brassiere" in 1914 and then sold the patent to the Warner Bros. Corset Co. the following year for $1500. Writing later in life, she said: "I can't say the brassiere will ever take as great a place in history as the steamboat, but I did invent it."

As the American populace went forth after World War II into the woods to camp, onto the lakes to fish, and into the parking lots to tailgate, it required a gadget capable of keeping beer cool and food from spoiling. The portable cooler, patented in 1953 by Richard Laramy and popularized by the Coleman Company, was that obvious, but essential device.

When ownership of this gadget crept past 1 million in 2002, TV and advertising execs worried aloud that DVRs, by enabling viewers to skip commercials, were surefire TV killers. "There's no Santa Claus," one CEO said. "If you don't watch the commercials, someone's going to have to pay for television and it's going to be you." Fast forward to today: 40 percent of households have a DVR; whether out of habit or laziness almost 50 percent of DVR users still watch ads; and the networks have, on average, seen ratings jump 10 percent, thanks to playback.

The Zippo, that stalwart status symbol of the smoky second half of the 20th century, was born in 1932 in the most inauspicious of settings: a rented room over the Rickerson and Pryde auto shop in tiny Bradford, Penn. Equipped with a kitchen hotplate for soldering, a used welding kit, and a punch press, founder George Blaisdell and two employees went to work. In the first month of production, January 1933, they produced 82 lighters. In February, output jumped to 367. By 2006, the total number of Zippo lighters surpassed 425 million lighters. And now, there's a Zippo app for the iPhone and the Droid phone that allows users to recreate the Zippo moment--when a concert audience raises its lighters in the air. The digital Zippo operates just like the real thing, opening with a flick of the wrist, lighting with a swipe of the flint wheel and mimicking real flame movement as the user waves his phone in the air.

In 1938 Roy Plunkett discovered PTFE, or polytetrafluoroethylene, at the DuPont research laboratories while working with gases related to Freon refrigerants. He accidentally froze and compressed a sample of tetrafluoroethylene gas into a white, waxy solid, creating a polymer so slick that virtually nothing sticks to it or is absorbed by it. Today, manufacturers apply it to cookware by roughening a pan's surface through sandblasting. A nonstick coating--often referred to as DuPont's proprietary Teflon--is embedded in a primer that's applied to the roughened surface.

Toshiba engineer Fujio Masuoka developed the concept of flash memory--so-called because the erasure process reminded a colleague of a camera flash--in the early 1980s. But the good ship flash drive needed a way to dock. Intel's Ajay Bhatt and his Universal Serial Bus (USB), which was introduced in 1996, provided part of the solution. But data still didn't travel well until 2000, when the first USB flash-drive stick, with 8 megabytes of storage, arrived.

Originally known as the "Eversharp" brand of blades from the Scott Fetzer Co. of Freemont, Ohio, Ginsu knives could cut through nails, tin cans, radiator hoses--and still slice a tomato paper thin. But wait--there's more! The company's multibillion-dollar success was as much about the marketing as the product. The late-night ads begun by Ed Valenti and Barry Becher in 1978 ushered in the era of the infomercial, and made Ginsu the most memorable brand ever hocked on American TV.

According to the National Institutes of Health, only one out of five people who could benefit from a hearing aid actually wear one.

Ten years after founding the Foster Grant plastic company in 1919 to make hair accessories for women, Sam Foster switched his focus to a new consumer product--sun-blocking eyewear. Targeting the throngs of beachgoers in Atlantic City, Foster started selling his wares--America's first mass-produced plastic lens sunglasses--at the Woolworth's on the oceanfront boardwalk. Foster's business boomed, prompting him to adopt the manufacturing technique known "injection molding" in 1934, which revolutionized American plastic production.

In 1972, the Mr. Coffee machine simplified a brewing process that had been long dominated by traditional percolators. The machine's success, however, was also an early example of celebrity spokesmanship: When Joe DiMaggio became the face of the brand, Mr. Coffee machines became the runaway best-selling model in the United States. (Its success was even spoofed in the 1985 film Back to the Future: The DeLorean time machine is powered by a "Mr. Fusion Home Energy Reactor.") Today, approximately 14 million drip coffee makers are sold each year in the U.S.

People have been toasting bread since the days of the Holy Roman Empire; for a thousand years, the job was done by simply holding the bread over an open flame. In 1919, however, a plant mechanic in Stillwater, Minn., finally got fed up with the burnt toast in his company cafeteria. So, Charles Strite built a box that incorporated heating elements that browned both sides of the bread at once, a variable timer and springs to eject the bread. Originally intended for restaurants, the toaster is now in 90 percent of American homes; 12 million of the gadgets are sold annually.

Although a flashlight is a relatively simple device--a small electric bulb with a power switch--it wasn't invented until 1896 simply because it required a portable power source: the dry cell battery. Early carbon filament bulbs were inefficient and the batteries weak, mustering just enough current to keep the light on for a few seconds at a time--hence, flashlight.