Inventors Facts

The inventor of the Pringles can is buried in one. Fredric Baur was so proud of his creation that he requested part of his ashes be stored in a Pringles container after his death in 2008.

Hedy Lamarr - Hollywood's "most beautiful woman" - co-invented frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology during WWII to guide Allied torpedoes. The Navy dismissed it. Her patent expired in 1959. She never received a dollar. That technology became the foundation for WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

Garrett Morgan patented the safety hood in 1912 and had to hire a white actor to demo it - buyers refused to deal with a Black inventor. When an explosion trapped workers 120 feet under Lake Erie in 1916, Morgan descended into the tunnel at 3am wearing his hood and pulled 8 men out alive. The press barely named him. He later sold his traffic signal patent to GE for $40,000.

Robert Kearns invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Ford passed - then put it on every car they built. He sued, representing himself for 12 years after three law firms quit. Ford offered $30 million to settle. Kearns turned it down - the offer came without an admission. He didn't want their money. He wanted Ford to say they took it.

Lonnie Johnson, a NASA engineer, invented the Super Soaker by accident - a burst of water shot across his bathroom during a heat pump experiment. The toy went on to sell nearly $1 billion. When Johnson discovered Hasbro had underpaid his royalties for years, he took them to arbitration and won $72.9 million.

William Kamkwamba dropped out of school at 14 years old when famine hit Malawi and his family could not afford the fees. He walked to a local library and taught himself from the diagrams in a book he could barely read. Then he built a 16-foot windmill from scrapyard junk - and it lit up his family home.