Gadgets That Changed The World

The alarm clock. The personal computer. The smartphone. The radio. You know the greatest gadgets of all time (and you’ve probably owned most of them), but which has changed the world more than any other? To make our list of 101, a gadget had to be something you could hold in your hands, mechanical or electronic, and a mass-produced personal item. The rest was up to the judges. Check out our selections, and let us know in the comments what you think! 

 

Duct Tape

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. 

 

Fiberglass Fishing Rod

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. 

 

Stapler

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. 

 

Roomba

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. 

 

Quick-Release Ski Binding

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. 

 

 

 

Super Soaker

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. 

 

 

Blender

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. 

 

Bra

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." 

 

 

Picinic Cooler

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. 

 

Digital Video Recorder

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. 

 

Zippo

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. 

 

Teflon Pan

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. 

 

 

Flash Drive

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. 

 

 

 

Sunglasses

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. 

 

DVD Player

The prototype DVD player, developed in 1994 by Toshiba, was a pile of circuit boards nicknamed the "fire watchtower." Though unstable, it proved that DVD quality crushed that of VHS. Players came out in 1996; the first DVD movie release, Twister, in 1997.