100 inventions that changed America

The calendar we still use today dates back to 1582, when it replaced and fine-tuned the previous Julian calendar. With 12 months of various lengths and an elaborate formula for the frequency of leap years, the Gregorian calendar keeps us on track with the real length of Earth's orbit around the sun.

In Classical times, people around the world saw an astonishing amount with the naked eye. But in the early 1600s, Hans Lippershey applied for the first-known patent for a magnifying lens to be fitted into what we now know as the telescope.

Thomas Jefferson brought ice cream back from France in the very late 1700s, but the food itself dates all the way back to the 17th century in Italy. The original gelato-like formula combined egg custard and sugar, making it both a rich treat and an exemplar of the craze for costly sugar at the time.

What is a microscope if not a telescope in reverse? In fact, the same Dutch spectacle makers credited with the telescope, including Hans Lippershey, are often credited with the compound microscope, and Galileo built his own version around 1609. Just over 50 years later, cells were observed and documented for the first time.

René Descartes invented analytical geometry in 1637, and by doing so, he put a name and a set of notations to different mathematical ideas in a way that brought them together and communicated their relationship. In doing so, he changed the course of history and paved the way for calculus.

It's wild to think of calculus as an invention, but at the time it was the subject of heated debate between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who developed it independently in the 1660s and 1670s. One difference in their very similar ideas is how they chose to notate different parts of their theories. In fact, while the public usually calls Newton the father of calculus, the notation we use is mostly from Leibniz.

Like calculus, probability theory changed the way people looked at the world itself. And probability goes a step further by offering a way to make educated guesses about future events, bringing ideas like forecasting and long-term trends into everyday life.

The piano feels absolutely timeless, but it's pretty new compared to instruments like the guitar or drums. The first true piano dates back to the early 1700s, when its softly dampened hammers replaced the pluckier, tinnier sound of the harpsichord.

The John Deere steel plow may be more well-known, but the moldboard plow, carved from wood, made a major impact on agriculture around the world in the 1700s. Later, Thomas Jefferson made a precise "improved" moldboard plow design, which he started making from iron in the 1810s.

By preparing a certain bread recipe a certain way, bakers were able to make long-lasting supplies that soldiers and sailors could take on long journeys. This was hardtack, which was invented in the 1700s but perfected, so to speak, for the U.S. Civil War.

Several men iterated on better steam engines starting in the 1690s, but Thomas Newcomen's 1712 design may be the most well-known today. The engine turned the heat from a boiler into steam that pumped water out of mines, and later improvements by James Watt and others brought steam power to factories and locomotives. By the 1800s, steam trains had become the fastest way to travel over land.

Temperature technology existed before the first mercury thermometer, but Gabriel Fahrenheit designed a predictable, extremely consistent instrument to measure temperature. Mercury is a liquid metal that always behaves the exact same way as the temperature changes, growing or shrinking in volume.

Christopher Columbus famously underestimated the size of the Earth, which is part of why he believed he'd reached Asia when he landed in the Caribbean. Surveying by triangulation, which came into its own with large-scale national surveys in the 1700s, helped mapmakers use plotted points and trigonometry to get an accurate picture of landscapes they'd never been able to measure.

Yes, people have pulled out loose teeth since, well, the first loose tooth. But in 1723, a landmark dentistry book laid out the first official comments on modern dentistry like cavity fillings. Unfortunately, Novocaine wasn't invented until almost 200 years later.

The ability to light the outdoors into the night changed everything for people who lived in the growing American cities of the 1700s. Benjamin Franklin was a civic leader in Philadelphia when the city began installing oil-burning street lamps, and he helped make a better design that stayed clearer and resisted accumulating soot

Today, ideas of navigation are almost a foregone conclusion because of the prevalence of GPS technology. Before, sailors had only the stars and their computations to decide where they were on the entire Earth. The sextant gave them a reliable way to gauge where they were using the position of the stars.

Like the telescope many years before, the development of the hot air balloon represented as much a spirit of scientific imagination and wonder as of palpable discovery. Inventors sketched designs with one big balloon, multiple small ones, and all manner of cabins and baskets. Some of the earliest science fiction followed.

Eli Whitney's cotton gin is a major talking point in American history classes, and the machine itself was a major technological breakthrough. It streamlined the step in which cotton is separated from its seeds for processing, which made cotton enormously profitable and fueled a massive expansion of slavery across the South, as plantations relied on enslaved labor to meet demand.

The earliest known smallpox vaccine was first used in 1796. Early researchers did astonishing things like test vaccines on themselves and their family members, because this technology predates most modern notions of medical ethics codes or FDA-style testing.

The first version of the electric battery was made by Alessandro Volta in 1799. Steam powered the first locomotives in the early 1800s, but batteries powered some of the earliest automobiles later in the century. Today, consumer goods are laden with batteries—try to imagine a day without them.

Gumbo is an early example of quintessential American food, created in New Orleans but likely brought at least in part from West Africa. The final dish combines African, Native American, and French influences together into a literal melting pot that represents early American culture as well as the costs of slavery and colonialism.

In a long list of global inventions, Noah Webster's first dictionary is truly and specially American. Webster standardized spelling in an unprecedented way and made a lot of decisions that still color the way we use and spell American English.

For the uninitiated, canning is the way commercial canned goods come to be, and it's also how home cooks preserve pickles and jams in jars using sterile equipment and lids. It dates back to a contest that Napoleon started in 1795 to find better ways to preserve food for his troops. French confectioner Nicolas Appert won in 1810 by sealing food in glass jars and boiling them. Pressure canning, which reaches higher temperatures, came decades later.

American Sign Language dates back to a regional sign language used in the United States, but adopting one standard for the nation, as with American English just ten years earlier, meant that deaf people anywhere in the nation could communicate with one another. This also allowed for the publication of guidebooks and other literature to help teach the language.

The ability to capture real life in images represented a technological leap that rivaled the computer in the 20th century. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce made the oldest surviving photograph in the 1820s, and the daguerreotype brought photography to the public in 1839. Suddenly, many jobs were transformed or even became obsolete, from quick portrait painters to scientific illustrators. Photographs were only for the wealthy at first, but cheaper processes soon let regular people sit for portraits.

Young Louis Braille lost sight in one eye and then the other, and he invented Braille at just 15 years old. He became a teacher at a school for blind children and spent his life giving away money and helping his students. He was also a talented musician and designed Braille not just for language but for musical notation.

We can almost hear your skepticism, but imagine your daily life without ever looking in a mirror. And when the first silver-backed mirror for the public was sold in 1835, gazing at one's own reflection became a populist pastime at last. Not coincidentally, many modern beauty businesses emerged in the wake.

Cast your mind back in time to when the only way to contact someone even a mile away was by letter. Samuel Morse did not invent the telegraph by himself, but his is the name we associate with the technology, and his standardized Morse code endured for decades as the go-to language for telegraphy.

Today, we think of data storage as something digital—on our phones or computers or in "the cloud." But the idea of storing data has analog roots as an offshoot of manufacturing: punch cards controlled the patterns woven on Jacquard looms in the early 1800s. Charles Babbage adapted the idea for his 1837 Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer designed to read instructions and data from punch cards.

Surgery in and before the 1800s was already a coin flip, and for thousands of years, people offered whatever they could to patients undergoing procedures. In the 1840s, physicians first used specific methods like nitrous oxide and ether to render patients unconscious, leading to better procedures and much better outcomes for patients who no longer experienced the shock of surgery firsthand.

Elias Howe patented the first lockstitch sewing machine in 1846, but he was unable to manufacture it profitably himself, and rivals, including Isaac Singer, soon built their own versions, sparking years of patent battles. The invention itself is contested between competitors, but its influence on clothing manufacturing can't be overstated, as it led to ready-to-wear retail clothes.

Soap existed for centuries or more, but it wasn't until the 1840s that someone made a firm connection between washing hands and better health outcomes. Even without the specific knowledge of germ theory, Ignaz Semmelweis observed that when doctors at his Vienna hospital washed their hands in a chlorinated solution before delivering babies, far fewer mothers died of infection.

Running water dates back to ancient Rome for a lucky few, but water treatment is far newer. Indoor plumbing arrived in some American businesses in the early 1800s. By the mid 1800s, cities had more and more residents with running water—and more water-borne illness from contaminated water supply. Beginning in the 1850s, cities like Chicago built modern sewer systems, and by the late 1800s, many began piping water from cleaner sources and treating it with filtration technologies.

Commercial and industrial refrigeration predated electric home refrigerators by decades. Even so, it changed the way food was stored and shipped, including on brand-new refrigerated train cars. Regular people had access to iceboxes, making it possible to keep perishable foods in the home.

Steel is centuries old, but industrial steelmaking dates back to the 1850s. The brand-new Bessemer process improved and scaled up steel smelting, and in the next few decades, other scientists made further improvements. The cost of steel continued to stabilize and fall.

The wide availability of petroleum tipped a domino effect that continues today, and industrially refining oil from its crude state into products like kerosene and gasoline didn't begin until the 1850s. After that, cleaner-burning petroleum products began to trickle into everyday life.

Scientists circled around the idea of germs for centuries, blaming bad air and miasmas and even "cadaver particles" for the transmission of disease. Finally, they observed germs, meaning bacteria, and began learning effective ways to identify germs as the cause of many diseases.

The safety elevator, which means the kind that doesn't freefall if the hoisting rope breaks, debuted in 1852, when Elisha Otis added a capable brake that locked the car in place. Electric elevators followed decades later, and today elevators are programmed to stop at specific points—something the inventors would find unthinkably advanced.

Store-bought baking yeast has experienced a new heyday in 2020, but in the 1850s, bakers welcomed the development of baking powder. Instead of relying on yeast or carefully whipped and folded egg whites, bakers could sprinkle a teaspoon of commercially made leavener. In turn, the nature and prevalence of cakes in particular were never the same.

The first oil drill in America began operation in 1859, marking the beginning of a petroleum revolution that shaped industry and American life. This first commercial oil well sought to meet increasing demand for kerosene for oil lamps.

The first sound recording is often described as eerie, which makes sense given the low fidelity of the experimental recording and the age of it today. Early recording pioneers etched sound waves onto soot-covered paper, tinfoil, and eventually wax cylinders to try to figure out what worked best.

Louis Pasteur developed his method for heating liquids to kill germs in the 1860s to keep wine and beer from spoiling. It was later applied to fresh milk, changing the way people bought and consumed dairy, and today many more food products are pasteurized for safety. Pasteur's work was one of the most immediate consequences of germ theory, in which he worked to kill something invisible to the naked eye that nonetheless could cause grave illness.

When the legendarily doomed Confederate submarine the Hunley sank in 1864, it was powered only by the crew's turn-cranking. The honor of the first powered submarine rests with the French submarine Le Plongeur, which had a small, quickly exhausted air-pressure engine.

Materials like plywood date back thousands of years in different forms, but in 1865, the first patent for plywood was issued. The material was widely used on doors and furniture, and today it's a staple of home construction, from subfloors to roof sheathing, since it's strong and stable at a much lighter weight than solid wood.

Today, more consumers are choosing electric or hybrid vehicles, but the course of automobile history was set by the internal combustion engine, perfected by Nikolaus Otto in 1876. Inside, a carefully timed series of small explosions of gasoline vapor pushes pistons that send energy through the entire powertrain. The same technology also powered early airplanes, but instead of turning wheels, the engine turns propellers.

The telephone was a major technological leap from the telegraph, turning the transmission of simple on and off signals into a legible, instantaneous voice. Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call from his Boston lab to his assistant Watson, who was in the next room. Remember this the next time you feel a little silly for texting a family member downstairs.

Heinz tomato ketchup is maybe the quintessential American condiment, representing a sweet change from the traditional mushroom, walnut, or oyster ketchups at the time. It's the basis of the prototypical American meatloaf as well as the basis for many barbecue sauces and even some American Chinese food.

Saccharin was the first widely available artificial sweetener, discovered by accident during a chemistry experiment. Diet soda and sugar-free foods in general owe a debt to saccharin, which has been rivaled and ousted over time by aspartame and other sugar-free sweeteners.

The steam turbine uses the heat energy produced by steam to turn a mechanical part. Through this process, the turbine can power any number of attached technologies. Today, much of America's power is still made from steam turbines, where the steam is created by burning coal or natural gas or by nuclear reaction.

The quintessential American soft drink dates back to 1886, and its iconic ads over the decades have made Coca-Cola one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Diet Coke has only existed since the 1980s.

You may not recognize the term "arc welding" offhand, but it's holding together the entire constructed world around you. Welding existed in some form for hundreds or even thousands of years, but arc welding, where electricity courses through an "arc" and heats the metal, changed everything.

The so-called "current wars" between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla raged on for years, but electricity changed American life almost instantaneously for those who had it. The dim light of gas lamps became the powerful illumination of the incandescent light bulb, turning the evening into a time of unprecedented activity.

Early automobiles ran on steam, electricity, or gasoline before gasoline eventually won out. These were created one piece at a time and all by hand. There was no regulation or modern notion of safety, and automobiles were considered more powerful versions of horse-drawn carriages.

Indoor plumbing was a major landmark, but that wasn't the only use for advanced water pump technology. In 1893, the most powerful water pump to date was built and used to drain a dangerous mine. The powerful pump could bring up millions of gallons of water each day.

People around the world have used willow bark as a pain reliever since antiquity, but in the 1890s, acetylsalicylic acid was standardized and sold as aspirin. Unlike popular headache and pain "remedies" made from opium, aspirin was effective, non-drowsy, and non-habit-forming.

The insulated food carrier sounds unimportant, until you try to imagine life without any kind of travel mug or cooler—or even the technology that powers cryogenic freezing. Organs and blood are still often carried in what amounts to an Igloo lunch pail filled with ice.

Gelatin as a dessert dates back decades before the development of the product called Jell-O, but these recipes often called for boiling the gelatin directly out of hooves—and they could have a distinctly animal flavor. Jell-O offered a flavored version that was easy to prepare in the home without any of the fancy, well, footwork.

It's true that much of the world still lives without air conditioning, but even apart from residential usage, the technology turned deadly heat waves into something much more survivable. In workplaces, especially since the invention of computers, air conditioning can mean the difference between equipment working as designed or shutting down.

Wilbur and Orville Wright got the Wright Flyer off the ground in 1903, and flight developed rapidly after that. Unlike existing hot air balloon technology, airplanes could travel fast and in a much more pointed direction.

The thermionic valve, or vacuum tube, was invented by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904 and became a key piece of hardware in radio, television, and early computing. By controlling the flow of electrons through a vacuum, tubes could amplify signals and switch them on and off, and early computer builders arranged thousands of them to carry out calculations.

The first radios were used by the military and government, allowing groups to communicate in tandem and in real time over great distances. This allowed broadcasts of important announcements and dissemination of critical information more quickly than ever before.

The USDA was technically founded in 1862, but after Upton Sinclair's 1905 book "The Jungle" caused a widespread uproar over the state of food safety, Congress passed both the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act in 1906. This greatly reduced adulteration of commercial foods like flour with plaster and other non-food fillers, and ensured access to cleaner, more sanitarily butchered meat.

Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, was designed to replace shellac, a costly natural resin, while earlier plastics like celluloid were made to emulate natural ivory. These brittle plastics were improved over time, especially with the adoption of petroleum-based plastics, for better or worse. The rest is history.

Commercial television didn't reach much of the country until the 1940s or 1950s, but the technology to power a television—sending images as information through the air—first emerged in the 1910s. The first public demonstration of a television set took place in 1927.

Until this point, creating fertilizer was a matter of finding and mixing the right combinations of natural ingredients. When German chemists Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed a way to pull nitrogen from the air and turn it into ammonia in the 1910s, they turned fertilizing into a chemist's game rather than a farmer's work alone.

Henry Ford, who is also infamous for his anti-Semitic views, implemented the first moving assembly line for automobiles in his factory in 1913. Turning factory jobs into uniform, repetitive individual tasks reduced costs and increased efficiency, making cars affordable for millions of Americans.

The power drill and other power tools cut down the tedious work of drilling and digging, reducing construction time and making for more uniform work. Soon, full-size construction vehicles like bulldozers and backhoes followed.

The decision to put all children in school began on a state by state basis but finally went nationwide in 1918, when Mississippi became the last state to pass a compulsory attendance law. By requiring all children to be in school until a certain age, American states reshaped the idea of childhood itself. Afterward, children were expected to have at least a few years of education toward goals like literacy and numeracy.

Farmers and fruit growers understood how to physically graft fruit trees together in order to cross-breed better and different varieties. But after scientists rediscovered Gregor Mendel's work on heredity in 1900, plant breeders could carefully document outcomes and breed for dominant and recessive traits. By the 1920s, the approach produced hybrid corn, which dramatically boosted yields.

Henry Ford had sold millions of Model Ts by the 1920s, but the real invention was around the corner: the convertible-top car. The first convertibles faced major safety challenges because removing the top from the car's frame reduced its structural integrity and led to flexion and bending.

The first commercial radio broadcasts went out in the 1920s, when people tuned in to music and talk radio on stations that could transmit hundreds of miles during the quiet nighttime. Some major radio stations formed the foundation of what became the major television networks just a few decades later.

Almost anyone who's watched HGTV can tell you how to put up the walls of a house, which is a testament to how accessible and straightforward platform frame construction is. A frame of two-by-fours leaves room for insulation, wiring, and structural studs, which are then covered with gypsum sheets and put up in sections. It's modular, it's effective, and it's been the American home standard for 100 years.

Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926. Where airplanes take off from a horizontal roll, rockets blast straight up and fight gravity head on. The development of rockets led directly to satellite launches and then spaceflight, where massive power is needed to push a huge payload free of Earth's gravity.

Alexander Fleming discovered the first antibiotic in 1928, and penicillin was formulated from naturally occurring molds and cultivated, first in erratic mixes and eventually, by the 1940s, in mass-produced, standardized formats. Suddenly, illnesses that were previously often fatal weren't just curable—they were easily curable.

Horse-drawn combines existed in the 1800s, but the powered combine harvester turned a tedious farm job into a well-oiled machine—literally. By reaping, threshing, and cleaning grain in a single pass, it freed up labor and spared farmers from grueling harvest work.

By inventing and implementing the unique Social Security system, the U.S. dramatically reduced the endemic elderly poverty that marked American society beforehand. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935.

The Turing Machine is a theoretical model of everything a programming language would need to be able to do almost any task—to be "Turing complete." And in fact, surprising systems can meet the qualities of Alan Turing's theoretical language, including the game "Minecraft."

The technology that eventually lit up nuclear power plants emerged in the 1930s as scientific research on splitting the atom. The earliest nuclear bombs were also fission weapons, where splitting the atom releases massive energy that explodes outward.

Norman Borlaug's research into high-yield, high-survival dwarf wheat saved millions of people from starvation by increasing yields multiple times. His secret was that shorter wheat stalks were more able to hold up their heavy fruits, so they were less likely to bend or break and then decay.

"Important" can mean terrible, and in this instance, the atomic bomb is arguably the most terrible thing ever invented. The United States is still the only nation to use a nuclear bomb in warfare.

Vacuum tubes were an inefficient way to build the computers that scientists were designing during the 1940s. In their stead, a team assembled by Bell Labs' Mervin Kelly—John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley—invented the transistor in 1947. This pronged semiconducting widget is many times smaller than a vacuum tube, requiring far less energy and space to operate.

In the development of the first computers, scientists found ways to encode information in the form of repetitive instructions. In punch card computing, this means the open spaces in the punch card connect the circuits in the right way to do certain tasks.

ENIAC, often called the first computer and, more precisely, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, was housed in an entire room and employed a team of operators feeding it punch cards. This breakthrough rapidly led to ideas like the operating system and even computer word processing through a combination of computing and telegraph-like ticker tapes.

Living things absorb carbon, including a small amount of radioactive carbon-14, which decays at a steady rate after they die. Using this information, chemist Willard Libby and his team discovered they could pinpoint the age of once-living materials like wood, bone, and cloth up to about 50,000 years old.

Glasses date back centuries, but contact lenses worn over the irises date back to just 1949. These lenses clung to the natural topography of the eyeball and used existing technology to change vision directly from the surface of the eye.

The semiconductor is what enables computer microchips, which turned computers from huge collections of vacuum tubes into smaller and smaller machines that now fit easily in our pockets. The secret lies in using the right semiconductor materials to build tiny electrical circuitry that sends signals in order to operate.

Sputnik was the beep heard 'round the world, but the technology itself rivaled the satellite's international security threat. Today, satellites form a mesh that blankets the world for communications, navigation, and more.

Nuclear fission discovered in the 1930s quickly led to the idea of the nuclear power plant, the first of which appeared in the United States in 1958, just a few years after similar plants in Russia and Europe. Plants grew larger and larger with subsequent generations, providing power for entire cities.

The overall computer network we call the internet dates back decades to a government-built network. Like telephones, the internet is enabled by a physical web of cables that blanket the nation, and at first they connected sites like government labs and university computers.

The World Health Organization considers contraception access to be a human right, but the first reliable chemical contraceptive pill didn't become widely available until the 1960s. Today, there are dozens of varieties with different formulations.

Today we use Google to find single words from the entire internet; however, that technology dates back to both compiled databases and the idea of full text search. Instead of human eyes scanning entire printed documents, computers consider documents as collections of characters that are scannable one at a time for keywords.

Project Mercury put the first Americans in space. Over several years and half a dozen trips, astronauts mostly drafted from test pilot programs rode in tiny capsules positioned on the nose of single-use rocket boosters.

The first semblance of modern computer-aided design, or CAD, was 1963's revolutionary Sketchpad software. Like a computer-boosted Etch-a-Sketch, the program let users see what they were drawing and carefully control an image for the first time.

Before the invention of the reliable home pregnancy test, pregnancy tests had to be sent to a doctor's office or lab. Putting that power in the hands of families in their own homes reduced cost, increased access, and gave people a lot more decision-making power over their own bodies.

Unlike the bulky research and government computers found in labs around the world, the personal computer had to be small enough to fit into a home setting and be used by a civilian. From there, technology rapidly evolved, from huge floppy disks to CD-ROMS and beyond.

Sequencing the human genome is a complex mix of computing, microscopy, and of course the very DNA itself. With the ability to search and identify patterns, scientists have unlocked secrets, repetitions, and genetic "switches" that reveal health and even human nature.

Cryptography dates back thousands of years, but public key cryptography, where the scramble comes in the form of complex math rather than secrecy and hidden information, changed the game for computing over brand-new public networks. For now, the math has stayed ahead of the most powerful computers trying to hack it.

The ancestors of the phone you carry around today date back to the early 1970s. What was initially a glorified walkie-talkie transformed into the bulky portable phones spotted in '80s movies and then Zack Morris's hand on "Saved by the Bell." Better batteries and computer chips continue to both shrink and expand the "cell phone."

The U.S. Space Shuttle was a groundbreaking reusable spacecraft that operated for three decades. It took off vertically like a rocket but landed horizontally like an airplane, flying 135 missions before it retired in 2011.

What will the next invention be that changes America forever? The roots of the things changing our lives today date back years or even decades. But in 2019, Google made headlines when it claimed to have reached quantum supremacy. That's the hypothetical state where quantum computers reach the warp-speed promise that scientists have suggested since the notion of quantum computing began decades ago, and the race among tech giants has only intensified since.