4 Important Inventions You Need To Know About
Inventions come about by visionary thinking and essential problem-solving. In your everyday lives, you are surrounded by technology that now feels commonplace, but was once innovative and life-changing. From the telephone to the light bulb, every invention has made human life easier and more productive. It is important to recognize how these inventions impact your life and their role in today’s market. This blog will give a rundown of four designs that are lesser-known but equally revolutionary in today’s world.
1. Flat-Bottomed Paper Bags: Margaret Knight 1870
Flat-bottomed paper bags are used worldwide in supermarkets; they make packing your groceries easy and hassle-free. The flat bottom allows you to stack your groceries into the bag, and they fit with ease. Margaret thought of the idea when working in a paper bag factory, and she noticed how difficult it was to pack items into a flimsy, shapeless sack.
Sadly, a colleague of Margaret stole the idea and claimed it for his own. Arguing that because she was a woman, she couldn’t have come up with the idea. Margaret sued him and won her case, clearly the rightful owner of the patent.
2. Vacuum-Sealed Packaging: Thomas Edison 1881
Thomas Edison is most famous for inventing the lightbulb, a revolutionary invention that has changed all our lives; but he is also the inventor of numerous other designs, for example, vacuum-sealed food packaging. He came up with the idea to preserve fruit to keep it fresh. This was one of the earliest uses of vacuum-sealed packaging. The substances were put into a glass container, hand-pumped to remove the air, and stored as preserved fruit. Today, some machines can vacuum seal items for you, revolutionizing food preservation.
3. Bradley Stencil Machine: Andrew Jackson Bradley 1893
Andrew Bradley invented the Bradley stencil machine on the shores of the Mississippi, where he saw people trying to label their products to go onto the ship. He realized that a label coding machine would revolutionize how production companies could uniquely and systematically label their products. This invention was the start of the Diagraph stencil machine and company, a distribution organization. Today, marking and coding with diagraph makes it easier and more reliable for manufacturers to mark and label their products, giving them the perfect mark and simplifying the distribution industry.
4. The Pop-Top On Soda Cans: Ernie Fraze 1959
In 1959 Ernie Fraze attended a picnic lunch and came up with the pop-top on soda cans. He had forgotten a can opener, which sparked the dilemma that he solved with his pop-top invention. He realized that to avoid the hassle of forgetting a can opener, you needed a can that could open itself.
The pop-top is such a familiar design that you almost forget how it changed the drinks industry. Pretty much all soda cans around the world use the pop-top. It is an iconic design of function and simplicity that makes drinking soda so easy and probably a lot more common.