Innovation Facts

The U.S. military's dried food rations can be re-hydrated with urine!

The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

If you opened up the case of the original Macintosh, you will find 47 signatures. One for each member of Apple's Macintosh divison as of 1982.

It is now possible to print human skin with an inkjet printer!

Thomas Edison held 1,093 U.S. patents during his lifetime—more than any other inventor until 2003!

Daizi Zheng, a Chinese designer based in London, created a concept phone for Nokia that would run on Coca-Cola. Her design used a bio-battery with enzymes to generate electricity from the sugar in the drink.

Hewlett Packard was started at a garage in Palo Alto in 1939.

The first coast-to-coast telephone line was established in 1914.

More than a billion transistors are manufactured every second.

In 1956, 80% of all U.S. households had a refrigerator, but only 8% of British households had one!

The hole in a soda can tab can be rotated to hold a straw in place, preventing it from rising up due to carbonation bubbles.

A singing birthday card has more computing power than the allied forces in 1945.

Grand Theft Auto was originally a racing game called Race’n’Chase. However, a glitch made the police cars go crazy, ramming the player. This glitch was so popular with testers that they rebuilt the game around it, creating GTA.

In Holland, the world’s first public glow-in-the-dark bike path has opened. It features beautiful swirling patterns inspired by Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh’s famous 'Starry Night' painting.

Mico headphones read your brainwaves and select music based on your state of mind.

A blind American man taught himself to navigate using echolocation. His hobbies include hiking and mountain-biking, and he has now trained over 500 students in his ‘tongue-click’ technique.

The Sprout pencil is a plantable pencil that contains a seed inside. When it's too short to use, you can plant it and watch it grow herbs and vegetables.

Some farmers in Kenya are using elephants' natural fear of bees and building "beehive fences" that keep wild elephants from trampling the crops. It keeps the farms safe, and prevents farmers from having to kill elephants to defend their livelihood!

Japanese engineers were asked to redesign the front end of the Bullet Train because it carried enough speed to create a sonic boom whenever it exited a tunnel. Residents could feel the blast from miles away.

In 2012, as phone booths become increasingly obsolete because of mobile phones, a Japanese artist has turned several booths in Osaka into aquariums.

The inventor of the Super Soaker squirt gun was a NASA Scientist who also helped develop the Stealth Bomber and the Galileo mission to Jupiter.

A 22-year-old Chinese man needed a new nose after losing his original in a traffic accident. Instead of a traditional transplant, surgeons grew a replacement nose on his forehead using cartilage from his ribs.

Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have long envisioned Google evolving into artificial intelligence itself. In 2010, they launched Google X (now simply 'X'), a secretive research lab dedicated to developing 'moonshot' technologies including AI, self-driving cars, and internet-beaming balloons.

Scientists in China have developed maglev train technology that could eventually reach speeds of 620 mph (1,000 km/h), more than twice as fast as current high-speed rail.