This week Americans celebrated the 246th birthday of our country. We wanted to pile on by celebrating the 10 greatest inventions our nation has contributed to the world in that time. Some are big and some are small, but life changed for us all after these 10 ideas (in no particular order) hit the mainstream! 

  1. Bread Slicing Machine 
    1. America may not have invented sliced bread but the bread slicing machine was invented by an Iowan. Otto Frederick Rodwedder was a jeweler by trade but an inventor at heart. It took him more than a decade to perfect his invention, but it eventually went into commercial use in 1928 and quickly took the world by storm. Today, the merits of all subsequent inventions are compared against it as we continue to look for “the best thing since sliced bread.” 
  2.  The Internet
    1. The IT Crowd the Internet JenIn 1969, researchers working for the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency sent the first host-to-host message between laboratories at UCLA and Stanford. This marked the birth of the internet as we know it, but it still took decades for it to become commonplace. Once it did though, it took off in a big way! Today more than half of Earth’s total population is online, and the Internet contributes TRILLIONS of dollars to the global economy. 
  3.  Global Positioning System (GPS) 
    1. In 1973 the United States Department of Defense approved a project to synthesize the best aspects of various satellite navigation programs already in existence. The result of this effort was the Global Positioning System as we know it today. GPS may not have changed the world when it reached fully operational status in 1993 but it has continued to change the way we navigate it via land, sea, and air ever since! 
  4. Post-It Notes 
    1. Romy and Michelle Post-it notes3M chemist, Spencer Silver, stumbled upon a revolutionary type of adhesive during research that could stick and re-stick without leaving residue behind. But he didn’t know what to do with it until inspiration struck his colleague, Art Fry, while struggling through a choir practice with bookmarks that wouldn’t “stick”. By 1974 the Post-It Note hit the market. Offices, calendars, and refrigerator doors have never been the same. 
  5.  The Telephone 
    1. Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland, and many scientists worked to develop technology for transmitting sound. But it was Bell, already living and working in Massachusetts at the time, who was first awarded a patent for the electric telephone on March 7, 1876. It was also Bell who first made his device produce intelligible speech when he called his assistant, Thomas Watson, three days later on March 10 to complete the first ever phone call. “Mr. Watson – come here – I want you.”, were the words that brought Watson from the next room and made the world a little smaller for the rest of history. 
  6.  The Airplane 
    1. Wilbur and Orville Wright were bicycle mechanics who became intrigued by the concept of aeronautics in 1899. Despite struggles and setbacks their experiments led to the first successful flight of a powered aircraft in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. The basic design elements of the 1903 Wright Flyer have been incorporated in ALL successful aircraft since produced.  
  7. The Light Bulb  
    1. Few things are more disputed than the credit Thomas Edison receives for inventing the light bulb. While it’s true that many inventors were essential to developing the technology, Edison’s contributions are generally seen as primary. This consideration is due mainly to the fact that he created a fully functioning system, rather than just components, as well as the first commercially successful carbon filament bulb in 1879. This invention didn’t just light up the night, it actually changed sleep patterns for most of humankind! 
  8.  Interchangeable Parts 
    1. Henry Ford gets more credit for creating the moving assembly line, but it was Eli Whitney’s practical application of the concept of interchangeable parts that made “Fordism” possible. While others went on to perfect the concept, Whitney did it on a large scale first when he accepted (and eventually delivered on) a contract with the U.S. Congress for 10,000 muskets in the early 1800s. This changed the world, effectively eradicating the skilled artisan class, AND how the world makes things. 
  9. Plastic 
    1. Early plastics were invented in Europe but it was an American, Charles Goodyear, who invented the vulcanization process that made commercial plastics truly possible. After receiving a patent for his process in 1844, Goodyear went on to spend most of the rest of his life (and fortune) fighting patent infringement cases in various courts. Commercial plastics, on the other hand, went on to change or affect every industry we now know today. 
  10.  Moving Pictures 
    1. The Kinetograph, an early motion picture camera, was first introduced by William Dickson in 1890. Dickson was the British assistant of Thomas Edison but he developed the Kinetograph with Edison in New York City. In 1892, he announced the Kinetoscope (the first movie projector) and two years after that Edison started public film screenings in his new “Kinetograph Parlors”. This began America’s reign as the Motion Picture Capital of the World and forever changed how the world tells and consumes stories.