Silly Putty was invented by accident when GE engineer James Wright was working to develop new types of rubber for the US military during World War II. Wright spent over a year experimenting with different combinations o...

In the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the an...  ...use the power of the atom. Read about some of the inventions

Alexander Graham Bell is best known for his work on the telephone, but that was far from his only interest. The Library of Congress preserved Bell's handwritten notes and sketchbooks for our perusal. They are filled with...

ShortList Magazine put together a list of foods that didn't catch on. Do you recall the McLobster? I don't. I remember EZ Squirt, but I never tried it. Never wanted to. Last time I checked (lie: I never have) people hav...

Want your child to turn that frown upside down? By any means necessary? This feels like it belongs on Arrested Development, alongside the injury-inducing cornballer, but amazingly enough it's a real thing. And there's on...

In 1983, Fritz Gall and Friedl Umscheid opened the...  ...rrnbaumgarten, Austria. The Nonseum is a home for inventions that never took off -many of which never made any...  ...d its 100,000th visitor. Among the many eccentric inventions of this unusual museum, you can find a Portable A...

In 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, invented an early telephone answering machine. The innovation that led to this machine was a revolutionary form of data storage: magnetic tape. Bell Labs ordered that th...

Every year, the editors of Popular Science compile a list of what they believe to be the 100 greatest technological innovations of the past year. This time, the #1 slot went to the Groasis Waterboxx. It's a plant incub...

Selfy the Self-Making Bed Railroads reduced travel time to days; airplanes to hours. But in today's fast-paced world, time-savers are measured in minutes and seconds. Behold the arrival of "Selfy," the bed that...

Some of the most important events can slip past us...  ...the oral contraceptive pill was one of the great inventions of the swinging sixties. In fact, it was a produc...