We get a calculator and use it everyday without thinking about who invented it. Here is a list of things children invented that we all use today. Am sure you did not know about many of these. So encourage your child to be creative and to think up solutions.
1. Calculator – In 1642, French wunderkind Blaise Pascal designed the first counting machine at the age of 18. He made somewhere between 20 and 50 of them, but nobody was interested; 300 years later, the calculator became all the rage. In 1968, the programming language PASCAL was named after him.
2. Braille – Louis Braille, invented the Braille in 1824, at the age of 15. He was born in Coupvray, France, in 1809 — lost his sight when he was just 3 years old. While attending the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, he and his classmates yearned for books that were easier to read than those available in the current format.
3. Earmuffs – In the 19th century 15-year-old Chester Greenwood invented the earmuffs. Tired of cold ears while ice skating in his home state of Maine, Greenwood made a wire loop and asked his grandmother to sew fur onto the ends. He improved the model, and in the early 1870s he obtained a patent for Greenwood’s Champion Ear Protectors. He made a fortune keeping U.S. soldiers’ ears warm during during World War I, and he went on to create more than 100 other inventions.
4. Television – 15-year-old Philo T. Farnsworth was one of the most important contributors to the invention of the television. In 1921, the teen had sketches, diagrams and notes to make an electronic television system. By the time he died in 1971, the average TV set included around 100 items that he originally patented.
5. Waterskiing – In 1922, an enterprising 18-year-old water-sports enthusiast, Ralph Samuelson, came up with the idea of waterskiing on Lake Pepin in Minnesota.
6. Superman – Two 18-year-olds who loved comic books and science fiction, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, began making cartoons and homemade fanzines while they were still in high school. One of their creations was a caped superhero called “the Superman” who appeared in the 1933 short story, “The Reign of the Superman.”
7. Trampoline – 16-year-old gymnast George Nissen cobbled together a rectangular steel frame and a canvas sheet in his parents’ garage in an effort to create a bouncy version of the net. He called it a bouncing rig. Nessen was given the honor of testing out the equipment before the Games began. He died in 2010 at the age of 96.
photo source: oldcalculatormuseum
