Curated playlist
American inventions
- USBIn 1995, seven computer companies teamed up to kill the tangle of PC ports. The result was USB.
- Bass guitarThe first electric bass guitar came from a Seattle workshop in the 1930s. Only around 100 were ever made.
- Liquid-crystal displayA liquid-crystal display makes no light of its own. Its crystals twist and bend light from a backlight or the room.
- Electric guitarThe first electric guitar sold to the public was an aluminum lap steel nicknamed the "Frying Pan".
- Debit cardA debit card purchase can leave your account days after you pay. Offline debit only places a hold at first.
- Commodore 64Atari engineers gaped at the Commodore 64's $595 price. They kept asking how Commodore could do that for $595.
- Multitrack recordingBefore multitrack recording, one mistake meant the whole band had to start over.
- KeroseneKerosene lamp oil pushed American whaling ships out of business. The fleet fell from 199 ships in 1858 to 39 in 1876.
- SupermarketOn August 4, 1930, Michael J. Cullen opened King Kullen in a Queens garage.
- StoryboardWho invented the storyboard, Webb Smith or Ted Sears? Accounts from Disney animators still disagree.
- SynthesizerMusicians' unions once tried to ban the synthesizer. They feared it could replace a whole orchestra.
- Breakfast cerealBreakfast cereal began with a hand oats grinder in an Akron, Ohio store.
- Coca-ColaCoca-Cola began as a morphine addict's attempt to invent a cure. John Pemberton first sold it in Atlanta in 1886.
- AmigaThe Amiga computer debuted in 1985 with Andy Warhol drawing Debbie Harry on stage. Commodore sold it as a business tool.
- TransistorIn 1947, a failed experiment at Bell Labs led to a transistor that amplified a signal.
- Credit cardIn 1958, Bank of America mailed its BankAmericard to 60,000 people in Fresno, California at once.
- Nuclear weaponNuclear weapons have been used in combat exactly twice, both times in 1945. Both hit Japanese cities.
- Radiocarbon datingRadiocarbon dating works because living things absorb carbon-14 until they die.
- Polio vaccinePolio paralyzed an estimated 350,000 people in 1988, but only 33 reported cases remained by 2018.
- Random-access memoryRAM gets its name because data takes almost the same time to reach wherever it sits on the chip.
- JavaScriptJavaScript was first built in just ten days in 1995. Brendan Eich wrote it at Netscape for the web.
- Solar cellIn 1971, a solar cell cost approximately $100,000 per watt. Space users paid it, so no one cheapened production.
- AirplaneThe word airplane once meant only a wing. It comes from the French aéroplane, a plane moving through air.
- Curiosity (rover)The Curiosity rover landed on Mars in 2012 by dangling from a hovering sky crane.
- Rapid transitIn early 2010, the Nuremberg U-Bahn fully automated its U2 line without halting service for a day.
- Space tourismIn April 2001, Dennis Tito paid a reported twenty million dollars to ride a Russian rocket to space.
- Video game consoleGame console makers often sell the machine at little or no profit. They earn money on each game sold.
- Adobe FlashAdobe turned down the chance to buy the tool that became Flash in 1995, then bought its owner in 2005.
- NTSCNTSC color needed a tint knob so viewers could fix skin tones. Engineers joked the name meant Never The Same Color.
- InternetIn 2011, a woman digging for scrap metal cut most of Armenia's Internet connection.
- TelevisionEarly television could not show a real face, so an inventor filmed a ventriloquist's dummy.
- Integrated circuitJack Kilby's first integrated circuit was not the design modern chips descend from.
- LaserOn May 16, 1960, Theodore Maiman fired the first laser, measuring its power by whether it could burn a razor blade.
- Personal computerPaul Terrell of the Byte Shop ordered 50 Apple I computers, but only if they came assembled.
- Field-programmable gate arrayAn FPGA is a computer chip you can rewrite after it leaves the factory. Most chips are fixed the moment they are made.
- DiphenhydramineDiphenhydramine, sold under the brand name Benadryl, is a medicine that most people take in order to feel drowsy. In some people it does the opposite. Particularly at higher doses, it can bring agitation, anxiety, or restlessness where…
- ARPANETThe first message sent over ARPANET crashed the receiving computer. Only the letters l and o of "login" arrived.
- Monopoly (game)Monopoly has sold an estimated 275 million copies. It has been licensed in more than 113 countries and printed in more than 46 languages. Yet every one of those boards carries the geography of a single seaside city, Atlantic City, New…
- Hot dogIn 1892, a newspaper described a "hot dog" being quickly inserted in a gash in a roll. That line is one of the earliest printed glimpses of the hot dog, a sausage served in a partly sliced bun. Americans now eat 20 billion of them every…
- Video gameThe North American home video game market crashed in 1983 after dozens of companies cloned popular games.
- Space telescopeLyman Spitzer proposed a telescope in outer space in 1946. Hubble launched in 1990, nearly half a century later.
- Golden Dome (missile defense system)The Golden Dome missile shield would put interceptors in orbit, needing thousands of satellites.