Richard Dudgeon
invented the compact, portable hydraulic jack, in 1851. when he was just
32 years old. Now a staple of every auto shop and pit row in the land,
its original habitats were shipyards and railroad repair shops.
Ballpoint Pen
The Reynolds Rocket,
America's first ballpoint pen, cost $12.50 when it went on sale at
Gimbels in 1945. Adjusting for inflation, $12.50 in 1945 dollars equals
about $150 today. At $3.29 per dozen, that's 546 Bic pens.
Outboard Motor
Ole Evinrude. It's the first name in outboard motors,
and his 1909 two-stroke boat motor practically created the industry.
However, it was Cameron Westerman, a Yale engineering student, who built
the first outboard motor in America. Waterman patented his four-stroke
outboard in 1905, and went on to sell hundreds of motors before Ole
Evinrude founded the company that took outboards to the masses.
CD-ROM
Early computer games required multiple floppies; Alone in the Dark,
for example, took four. The CD-ROM, packed with huge stores of
animation and gaming data, allowed kids to upload one disc and disappear
into the Myst.
Charcoal Grill
For George Stephen,
there was no joy in grilling. Every time he fired up his open-top
backyard brazier pit, de rigueur in 1951, he "was smoking up the
neighborhood and burning up half of what I cooked." A welder at the
Weber Brothers Metal Works, Stephen built a solution by adapting
materials typically used to make steel buoys for Chicago's harbor. A
year later, the Weber kettle was born.
Lunchbox
A fixture on American
work sites since the 19th century, the lunchbox became a cultural
sensation at the midpoint of the 20th century. Between 1950 and 1970,
120 million branded lunchboxes shot off store shelves. The origin of the
lunchbox boom dates to 1954, when Aladdin Industries launched the
Hopalong Cassidy-branded kit ($2.39). In the first year alone, Aladdin
sold 550,000 units more than it had the previous year.
Zipper
When inventor and farm
implement salesman Whitcomb Judson unveiled his newly patented
"clasp-locker"--which featured a central guide that hooked together the
fastening clasps when pulled upward--at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in
Chicago, the odd-looking and ungainly device failed to impress. The
modern zipper didn't come about until the 1920s, when Goodyear put an
improved version of the fastener on its Zipper galoshes.
