Friday, February 18, 2005
The 100 greatest gadgets. Ever.
77. HASBRO LITE-BRITE, 1967
Who knew that all those happy hours spent punching multicolored pins into black paper were actually preparing us for a rewarding career designing web page bullets and desktop icons?...
54. THE CAR ALARM KEY FOB, 1990s
The guy who invented the car alarm? We have no idea. With any luck, he's roasting in hell. The one who invented a way of turning those alarms off wirelessly? No idea, either, but we nominate him for sainthood...
20. SWISS ARMY KNIFE, 1891
Karl Elsener's first knife, which was distributed to Swiss enlisted men, featured a blade, a screwdriver, a can opener, and a punch. Today, the company Elsener founded, Victorinox, and its competitor, Wenger, offer dozens of knives featuring up to 33 different tools. Meanwhile, the name has passed into cliche as an apt description of the knife's versatility...
12. APPLE IPOD, 2001
It wasn't the first hard-drive audio player, it was expensive, and it worked only with Macintosh computers. But the original iPod cracked the portable audio market wide open with its ease of use and to-die-for aesthetics. Some estimates peg Apple as now claiming an astounding 92 percent of the mobile audio market...
There are 96 more where they came from.
CWCID: Donald Sensing.
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