Consumer

London watchmaker Cumming patented the first flush toilet design with an S-shaped trap holding water against sewer gas. His slidin...

American inventor Perkins, working in London, patented the first closed-cycle compressor system using ether. The principle, compre...

Cochrane, granddaughter of steamboat inventor John Fitch, built wire compartments and water jets after servants chipped her china....

Anderson, an Alabama developer, watched trolley drivers open windows in New York sleet and patented a spring-loaded rubber blade o...

Gillette, a bottle-cap salesman, imagined a blade so cheap it could be thrown away, and with MIT-trained William Nickerson achieve...

Carrier's Apparatus for Treating Air, patented 1906, was born from a Brooklyn printer's humidity problem. His rational psychrometr...

Sundback, a Swedish-American engineer, solved earlier hook-and-eye failures with the dimpled scooped teeth of the Hookless 2, pate...

Hungarian journalist Biro, escaping Europe, patented the ball-and-quick-dry-ink pen in Paris 1938 and Argentina 1940 after pilots ...

Silver's 1968 microsphere acrylate was too weak for anything, a glue that would not stay stuck. Fry, a choir bookmark sufferer, fo...

Prolific New York mechanic Walter Hunt twisted a length of wire into a pin with a coiled spring at one end and a clasp shielding t...

Reno tailor Jacob Davis reinforced the pocket corners of work pants with copper rivets after a customer kept tearing them. Lacking...

Charles Darrow sold Monopoly to Parker Brothers in 1935 and received a patent at the end of that year, presenting himself as its i...

Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer noticed a candy bar melting in his pocket while working near an active magnetron, the radar tube b...

Lego's early plastic bricks, adapted from a British design, did not hold together well. In January 1958 Godtfred Kirk Christiansen...

Budapest architecture professor Erno Rubik built his first cube in 1974 to show students how parts could move independently withou...