Inventions Facts for Kids
Genius facts about great inventions
Wi-Fi was developed in the 1990s partly from technology invented by Australian astronomer John O'Sullivan while he was trying to detect mini black holes. His work on preventing radio signals from echoing in buildings became the basis of wireless internet.
The Inuit people made the first sunglasses from flattened walrus ivory with thin slits cut into them, to prevent snow blindness. Tinted glass lenses for blocking sunlight were introduced in China during the 12th century.
Teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene) was accidentally discovered in 1938 by chemist Roy Plunkett at DuPont when a gas he was testing turned into a slippery white solid. It was first used in the Manhattan Project during World War Two before becoming famous as a non-stick coating for pans.
The modern pencil was invented after a large deposit of pure graphite was discovered in Borrowdale, Cumbria, England, in 1565. People were so amazed by the black marks it made that they initially thought it was a form of lead — which is why pencil cores are still sometimes incorrectly called 'lead'.
The combine harvester, which cuts, threshes, and cleans grain in a single pass, was invented by Hiram Moore in Michigan in 1835. It transformed farming so dramatically that one machine could do the work of hundreds of labourers.
The double-helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick, using X-ray images taken by Rosalind Franklin. This discovery unlocked the secret of how living things pass on genetic information to their offspring.
The blue LED (light-emitting diode) was invented in the early 1990s by Japanese scientist Shuji Nakamura, completing the set of colours needed for white LED light. This breakthrough earned him and his colleagues the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014.
The MRI scanner was invented by Raymond Damadian, who performed the first scan of a human body in 1977. Unlike X-rays, MRI scans use powerful magnets and radio waves, so they produce no harmful radiation.
ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, was completed in 1945 and filled an entire room, weighing around 27 tonnes. It could perform 5,000 additions per second — a task that would take a modern laptop processor billions of times less time.
The first steam-powered locomotive to run on rails was built by Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick in 1804 and hauled 10 tonnes of iron along nearly 16 kilometres of track. George Stephenson later refined the design, leading to the famous Rocket locomotive of 1829.