For thousands of years people around the world have been chewing gum, the ancient Greeks flavored gum they got from the mastic tree, while Mayan people chewed gum they got from the sapodilla tree, but of course chewing gum in the US comes directly from the habit of native American Indians who used to chew the sap of spruce trees, which by the mid 1800s had been commercialized and was growing in popularity. Competing inventors […]

Toilets are perhaps one of the most useful inventions of all time, at least to anyone who has ever used one, yet despite their function are a fairly recent invention in the history of humankind. There are several versions of toilets, from bed pans, to deep holes dug in the ground, thru to the modern toilet with a flushing mechanism as we know today. Who first invented a container to be used for human waste […]

Who invented the Internet should be a really simple question to answer, after all the Internet has only been around for a few years, yet already controversy and the shrouding mists of time are starting to obscure the true record. Most importantly, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing, and this leads to a lot of confusion amongst people who see web browsing as the whole point of the Internet. […]

Baseball’s history is fascinating, and a lot of politics is involved, which seems sad for a game that is America’s national pastime and has been for nearly 200 years. Nobody knows who actually invented baseball but a couple of names, Abner Doubleday, and Alexander Cartwright have been linked with the sport. In 1905 Albert Spalding, formerly a star pitcher and the man who created the Spalding sporting goods company organized a commission of former baseball […]

Fireworks have been in existence for thousands of years, and most experts agree the the Chinese must have invented fireworks over 2000 years ago, perhaps even as much as 2500 years ago. The first fireworks know to these ancient people were discovered by accident when green bamboo stalks exploded in their evening camp fires. The sound of the explosion frightened them very much and were first attributed to the gods being angry with them but […]

The invention of gunpowder has had one of the most profound influences on the history of warfare for the last thousand years, even though gunpowder was known to alchemists for another thousand years or more before the first use as an explosive in a military situation. Gunpowder is used in military applications such as cannons and rifles, as well as in fireworks, and is primarily made by mixing sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate into a […]

The invention of the computer is a fascinating story all about arguably the most important scientific invention of humanity’s entire history, perhaps even more important than the invention of fire, the wheel, or weaving. Computers have become indispensable in modern life, so much so our entire civilization would collapse to pre-industrial revolution levels if computers suddenly stopped working. The origins of computers date back to the 1840s and the invention of the first adding machines […]

Perhaps the most useful invention of the 20th century, Velcro has become a ubiquitous product used extensively in clothing and the space industry because it attaches items together easily and without messy glues or causing damage. Velcro is a registered trademark of the Velcro Corporation founded by George de Mestral,the inventor of velcro. Back in 1941, de Mestral was walking around the hills of Commugny in Switzerland with his dog, and when he got home […]

The iPod is probably one of the most revolutionary consumer products ever developed, it’s right up there with velcro, computers, cars, even the paper clip. Designed and manufactured by Apple Inc, some say the iPod was invented by Steve Jobs, and since its launch in 2001 has become the world’s biggest selling mp3 player with over 180 million units shipped by the end of 2008. In 2000, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs setup a team of […]