Mobile PC – Features – The Top 100 Gadgets of All Time — Generlally speaking I’m not a big fan of lists unless I do them myself and even then I’m dubious. That said, this is one of the most fun an interesting lists I’ve seen in a long time. Good reading.
Criteria:
It has to have electronic and/or moving parts of some kind. Scissors count, but the knife does not.
It has to be a self-contained apparatus that can be used on its own, not a subset of another device. The flashlight counts; the light bulb does not. The notebook counts, but the hard drive doesn’t.
It has to be smaller than the proverbial bread box. This is the most flexible of the categories, since gadgets have gotten inexorably smaller over time. But in general we included only items that were potentially mobile: The Dustbuster counts; the vacuum cleaner doesn’t.
hmmm, What about the pocket rocket?
Off the top of my head
Pacemaker
FAX
Cordless Drill
Scanner
the Mouse.
It’s interesting that some of these items date back further than one realized. For example…
POPEIL POCKET FISHERMAN, 1950s
I remember these commercials well but placed them in the 1960s. So apparently they had been around even longer than I had thought.
Were it not for the size restrictions on what items can be included in the list of gadgets, I would nominate Ron Popeil himself as one of the most interesting gadgets of all time. He has my respect.
2 mentions for the Powerbook and 2 for the Sony Walkman?
Ron Popeil is certainly up thier. His funniest invention was the the can of spray paint with the hidden promised to hide bald spots. just spay this stuff on your head, brush it in a bit and the bald spot will vanish…
Rich, my favorite part was when he was doing an infomercial– was it for the rotisserie oven?– and he pulled out the spray can, making a commercial within a commercial.
(And if you don’t like it, please, I don’t want you to keep it, send it back to me and get your money back… [clap][clap][clap])
One of these days they should put the Ron Popeil commercials/infomercials on DVD and sell them like they do the Mayberry First Season and such…. Seems to me there would be the same sort of nostalgia value.
My list:
Hinged knife to cut French baguettes with crumb catcher (patented 1876)
Clay wine cooler that, when dampened, and by evaporation, cools bottled wine (never patented)
Leveraged cork screw that pulls wine bottle corks with a simple twist of the wrist (patented late 19th century)
Finally cut bamboo shoot, curled to form a whisk for beating eggs to a mousse, used to make omelets. (never patented)
Espresso machine developing pressured steam passed through milled coffee grains (patented 1890)
Meaning, simply, that nothing really that innovative, which also adds recognizable value to the quality of life, has been invented since the end of the 19th century.
Hey KB:
Ron Popeil is a true marketing genuis.
I endeded up buying his rotisserie oven when it hit the stores.
Good item but expensive to use.
He needs a blog!!!!
Rich, my favorite part was when he was doing an infomercial– was it for the rotisserie oven?– and he pulled out the spray can, making a commercial within a commercial.
(And if you don’t like it, please, I don’t want you to keep it, send it back to me and get your money back… [clap][clap][clap])
One of these days they should put the Ron Popeil commercials/infomercials on DVD and sell them like they do the Mayberry First Season and such…. Seems to me there would be the same sort of nostalgia value.
Comment by K B — 3/20/2005 @ 11:48 pm