Interesting Facts about Inventions
BAND AID-Josephine Dickson married a man who worked for a company that manufactured gauze and adhe-
sive tape called Johnson & Johnson. We will never know the reason, but it is a fact that Josephine Dick-
son was accident prone. One day her husband had an idea. He cut some tape into strips and stuck
a little square of gauze in the middle of the strips. From then on, whenever Josephine had an
accident, ready-made bandages were on hand for her to use quickly and without a lot of fuss. At
Johnson & Johnson, they heard about these new bandages that could be put on in thirty seconds.
Soon the company was making them to sell on a small scale. Four years later, in 1924, the com-
pany installed machines for mass producing the new product, and the trade name BAND-AID was adopted.
REMOTE CONTROL-The first TV remote control, called “Lazy Bones,”
was developed in 1950 by Zenith Electronics Corporation (then known as
Zenith Radio Corporation). Lazy Bones used a cable that ran from the TV
set to the viewer. In 1956, Zenith’s Dr. Robert Adler suggested using “ultra-
sonics,” that is, high-frequency sound, beyond the range of human hearing.
He was assigned to lead a team of engineers to work on the first use of ultra-
sonics technology in the home as a new approach for a remote control.
FRISBEE®-A baker named William Russel Fris-
bie came up with a clever marketing idea back in the
1870s. He put the family name in relief on the bottom
of the light tin pans in which his company’s homemade
pies were sold. The pans were reusable, but every time
a housewife started to bake a pie in one, she would see
the name Frisbie and, it was hoped, think, “How much
easier to buy one”. Eventually Mr. Frisbie’s pies were
sold throughout much of Connecticut, including New
Haven. There, sometime in the 1940s, Yale students
began sailing the pie tins through the air and catching
them. A decade later, out in California, a flying-saucer
enthusiast named Walter Frederick Morrison designed
a saucer-like disk for playing catch. It was produced
by a company named Wham-O. On a promotional
tour of college campuses, the president of Wham-O
encountered the pie-plate-tossing craze at Yale. And
so the flying saucer from California was renamed af-
ter the pie plate from Connecticut. Of course the name
was changed from Frisbie to Frisbee to avoid any legal
problems.
JIGSAW PUZZLE-For the purpose of teaching geography,
John Spilsbury, a teacher in England, created the first jigsaw
puzzle in 1767. Adhering his maps to flat hardwood, he used
a fine saw to cut along the borders of the European countries,
and the jigsaw puzzle was born. Soon, people began making
pictorial jigsaw puzzles. But it was not until the invention of
power tools, more than a century later, did jigsaw puzzles
with fully interlocking pieces come into being. In 1880, Mil-
ton Bradley made the first jigsaw puzzle for children “The
Smashed Up Locomotive.”
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HULA-HOOP®-In 1957, an Australian company began
SAFETY PIN-Walter Hunt had no trouble
thinking up new ideas. First he invented a
machine to spin flax. Then he invented a fire
engine gong, a forest saw, a stove that burned
hard coal. His inventions worked, but he just
did not have the knack for making money
from them. One day in 1849 Walter Hunt
wanted to pay a fifteen-dollar debt to a friend.
So he decided to invent something new. From
a piece of brass wire about eight inches long,
coiled at the center and shielded at one end,
he made the first safety pin. He took out a pat-
ent on his invention, sold the rights to it for
four hundred dollars, paid his friend back and
had three hundred eighty-five dollars to spare.
Then he watched his latest brainstorm go on
to become a million dollar money earner for
someone else.
ICE CREAM CONE-The
first true edible conical
shaped cone for serving ice
cream was created at the St.
Louis Worlds Fair by Ernest
Hamwi in 1904. His waffle
booth was next to an ice
cream vendor who ran short
of dishes. Hamwi rolled a
waffle to contain ice cream
and the cone was born.
making wood rings for sale in retail stores. The item at-
tracted the attention of Wham-0, a fledgling California
toy manufacturer. The next year Richard P. Knerr and
Arthur K. Melin, of Wham-O, manufactured a plastic
hoop in a variety of bright colors. The Hula-Hoop was
an instant success.
SUNGLASSES-Early sunglasses served a spe-
cial purpose and it wasn’t to block the rays of the
sun. For centuries, Chinese judges had routinely
worn smoke-colored quartz lenses to conceal
their eye expressions in court. It wasn’t until the
20th century that modern-type sunglasses came
to be. In 1929, Sam Foster, founder of the Foster
Grant company sold the first pair of Foster Grant
sunglasses on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City,
NJ. By 1930, sunglasses were all the rage.
TRAFFIC LIGHT-Police Officer William L. Potts
of Detroit, Michigan, decided to do something about
the problem caused by the ever increasing number of
automobiles on the streets. What he had in mind was
figuring out a way to adapt railroad signals for street
use. Potts used red, amber, and green railroad lights and
about thirty-seven dollars worth of wire and electrical
controls to make the world’s first 4-way three color
traffic light. It was installed in 1920 on the corner of
Woodward and Michigan Avenues in Detroit. Within a
year, Detroit had installed a total of fifteen of the new
automatic lights.
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