From Invention to Necessity: Your Idea Could Be The Next BIG Thing

It is quite common for the most unexpected items and inventions to become absurdly lucrative products that people depend on each and every day. In many cases, these inventions occur completely by accident and take people by completely surprise. Regardless of the intentions behind such items as the spork, life simply would not be the same without them.

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The vast majority of us could not make it through the morning without a warm cup of coffee at our sides. However, there has been the traditional problem of keeping the coffee warm without scorching our fingertips. The inventor of the “Java Jacket” or coffee sleeve for paper coffee cups came when a dad dropped scalding hot coffee in his lap while at a drive-thru window. He took it upon himself to first try to invent an insulated paper coffee cup. The efforts were not successful, but he realized at the last minute that he needed to think more simply. Corrugated cardboard that was just laying around happened to be the best solution. His four-person operation was born and they sold more 250 million sleeves.

The patent for the spork, or a combination of a fork and spoon, was first submitted all the way back in 1874, to most people’s surprise. Samuel Francis takes the credit, inventing a word for his utensil that would later appear in the dictionary in the year 1909. It was not widely used at first. However, a U.S. company picked up on the idea in 1970, followed by a British manufacturing company five years later. The utensil was manufactured using plastic, and the idea really took hold. The vast majority are made using various plastics and distributed with meals in fast food restaurants all across the globe. Although, sporks have been made using a huge number of materials that include silver, titanium, aluminum, and stainless steel.

“If it cannot be fixed with Duct tape, then you might as well throw it away,” is a mindset that many people maintain today. This invaluable form of tape can fix everything from car parts to broken glass. It was first designed by a Minnesota Mining company in order to be used to seal munitions from water and conduct repairs on military equipment, thus its extraordinary strength. Today, it costs roughly five dollars a roll and has been used to fix repairs in a pinch by people as prestigious as NASA engineers while in space.

Source: Accounting-Degree.org Your Guide to a Quality Degree