The Patent Office

In the summer of 1933, a college student named Ralph Wiley was handed the least glamorous job in a Michigan laboratory: he washed the glassware. One night he found a beaker he could not clean. Whateve…

On 10 April 1849 the United States Patent Office granted a patent for a pin. Not a machine, not an engine — the object at the bottom of a sewing tin, or holding a hem together on a coat this morning.…

In 1942, a team at Eastman Kodak's research laboratories in Rochester, New York, was trying to find a clear plastic that could be cast into precision gunsight lenses for the war effort. The chemicals…

Play-Doh began as something meant to remove soot from wallpaper. In the 1950s, that market was shrinking as homes moved from coal heat to cleaner oil, gas, and electricity. A struggling Cincinnati com…

Listerine began as a surgical antiseptic, not as a daily mouthwash. Joseph Lawrence formulated it in St. Louis in 1879, and Jordan Wheat Lambert licensed the formula and built the Lambert Pharmacal Co…

Bubble Wrap looks like a finished idea: a clear sheet, sealed air pockets, and a job protecting fragile things. It took two failed identities to find that job. This episode follows Alfred W. Fielding…

A piece of paper that sticks, lets go, and sticks again sounds like a finished idea. It took twelve years to become one. This episode follows Spencer Silver's 1968 adhesive, Art Fry's choir-bookmark p…

This episode explores "The Slinky: The Spring That Learned to Walk". It is presented as a solo narration, and the source list lets you revisit the original material.

In 1992, John Sylvan was hanging around Colby College in Maine, frustrated with the burnt coffee sitting on an office burner. He and his college friend Peter Dragone started working on a fix: a small,…

There's a small blue-and-yellow can that sits, reliably, under the sink or on the garage shelf of roughly four out of five American homes. Most people can't tell you when they bought it or where it ca…

In 1945, a Raytheon engineer named Percy Spencer was doing what he always did — working. He was standing near a radar magnetron in a test lab in Waltham, Massachusetts, when he noticed something odd:…

In 1994, a young engineer named Masahiro Hara was trying to solve a narrow, unglamorous problem: how do you track thousands of car parts across a Toyota assembly line fast enough to keep pace with the…