Swiss Knife
Easy Access
Toothbrush
1. Zip, 1913
Look at your flies or your handbag and, chances are, the zip that keeps your valuables in place started life in a factory in the Qiaotou, a dusty town in Zhejiang Province, China. Qiaotou's zip plants manufacture an astonishing 80 per cent of the world's zips, churning out 124,000 miles of zip each year (enough to stretch five times round the globe or half way to the moon). Credit for the device's invention goes to Gideon Sundback. In 1913, the Swedish engineer made the first modern zip to fasten high boots.
2. Toothbrush, 1498
For millennia people have used a fantastic array of implements to keep their pearly whites brilliant. Frayed twigs, chewing sticks, birds' feathers and porcupine quills; all have been discovered in the excavated remains of the earliest bathrooms. An unknown Chinese was the first, at the turn of the 15th century, to mount bristles at right angles to a handle – the spines were plucked from hogs and set into bamboo or bone. By the 17th century toothbrushes were widely used in Europe.
3. The internet, 1969
The simplest way to illustrate the inestimable impact of the internet is to chart the growth in the number of people connected to it: from just four in 1969 to 50,000 in 1988; a million by 1991 and 500 million by 2001. And today - 1.2 billion, or 19 per cent of the world's population. Conceived by the US Department of Defense in the 1960s, the internet, together with the World Wide Web, invented in 1989 by Brit techie, Tim Berners-Lee, has shrunk the world like no other invention.
4. Swiss Army Knife, 1897
Every camper's favourite multitool was originally called the Offiziersmesser (officer's knife) but that was a bit of a mouthful for the American soldiers who popularised it outside its landlocked birthplace, so they called it the Swiss Army Knife. It originated in Schwyz, Switzerland, more than a 100 years ago, after a surgical equipment manufacturer was dismayed to learn Germany supplied the Swiss army with knives. The company he founded, Victorinox, still supplies Swiss soldiers and makes 5.5 million knives a year.
5. Sellotape, 1937
The earliest reference to sticky tape turns up in a 17th-century book about music, which describes how lute makers used "little pieces of Paper, so big as pence or two pences, wet with Glew" to help make their instruments. But it wasn't until the 1930s that Colin Kininmonth and George Gray, inspired by a French patent, coated Cellophane film with a natural rubber resin. They came up with the name Sellotape, and it stuck.
If you like this article, click the Like button below so that your friends can get the chance to read it as well.
6. Printing press, 1454
For the large part of modern civilisation, the written word reigned supreme as the only means of communication. The Chinese were the world's first printers – they practised block printing as early as 500 AD – but a German goldsmith called Johannes Gutenberg was the first to construct a press that comprised moveable metal type, which, when laid over ink, could print repeatedly on to paper. In 1454 he used the revolutionary system to print 300 bibles, of which 48 copies survive, each worth millions of pounds.
7. Pocket calculator, 1971
Even the legendary superbrain Isaac Newton was known to complain about the time it took to do simple sums on paper. He would have been delighted by the introduction in 1948 of the Curta calculator, a hand-cranked, barrel-shaped calculator small enough to fit in the pocket and capable of basic calculations. The first slimline digital pocket calculator was the Sinclair Executive, which cost about three times the average weekly wage but set the standard.
8. Microwave oven, 1946
The first victim of the microwave was a peanut bar. It had been in the pocket of American engineer Dr Percy Spencer, who was working in range of the radio waves emitted by a magnetron, a key component in radar. It melted, so an intrigued Spencer applied the magnetron to an egg, which exploded. By the end of the year, the first prototype had been built and commercial ovens (costing £30,000 in today's money) soon followed, eventually producing dodgy dinners by the million.
9. Nintendo Gameboy, 1989
On its release in the late 1980s, the Gameboy was surely the most coveted piece of kit in the playground, but dig one out of the attic today and its two-tone grey face and titchy screen give few clues to its extraordinary success. Many companies would try to better it but none could come close to toppling the Gameboy, and its stable of killer games, including Tetris and Super Mario Land, as the best-selling gaming system of all time (worldwide sales reached well over 100m).
10. Polaroid camera, 1947
Edwin Land probably did not predict his photographic innovation would one day allow a generation of couples to take naughty pictures without fear of exposure at the developer's. He was inspired by his daughter, Jennifer, who asked why she had to wait so long to see her holiday snaps. He unveiled the Land Camera in 1947, and the first instant camera became popular with police officers and artists (and those naughty couples – one luxury hotel in M
Read more about the 101 Gadgets that change the world in Part 10 of the series of articles.
The content for these articles is gathered from various online resources.
› See all 12 articles in category Gadgets and Technology Products
