INVENTORS GONNA INVENT Which is why it’s not so unusual that Hiram Maxim, the man who designed a machine gun and gun silencer, also held a patent for a curling iron … and then went on to create a headlamp for locomotives. Of course, Maxim wasn’t the first to alter the structure of hair with …

LET’S NOT GET INTO Cleopatra’s apocryphal gourd full of bees or the hand-cranked and steam-powered experiments from the Victorian era. Instead, we’ll join the makers of the film Hysteria in giving credit to Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville, who was the first to patent an electromagnetically vibrator in the 1880s. Nicknamed The Hammer, it looked like …

SYMBIOTICALLY ADHERED TO EACH OTHER in consumer invention history, Richard Drew and John A. Borden were both 3M engineers when they respectively changed the face of office desktops and craft projects. 3M (which stood for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) was primarily a sandpaper concern when Drew introduced what later became known as Scotch tape back …

ELECTRICALLY,AN IRON IS SIMPLE; its circuit consists of cord, thermostat, and heating element. The string tension on the thermostat elements is varied to give different temperature settings. and the iron, once hot, will cycle on and off within a few degrees of the desired temperature. The goal: For heat to loosen long-chain polymer molecules in …

Ah, the unsafe old days, when a family could load into a station wagon without regard for the safety of the children climbing from seat to seat without a strap in sight. Babies were particularly vulnerable—at best they were strapped into a backpack-like sack that hung on the back of a seat. Leonard Riv kin, …

No denying, pepper spray is nasty stuff. The extract of dried chili pepper fruit, it’s chemically known as Oleo resin Capsicum (OC) and is designed to make the eyes of an attacker so teary and painful that attacking someone becomes a very low priority. As an inflammatory, its immediate effects include coughing, difficulty breathing, and …