Compiled by Afheeba Alikhan

Badi-ud-Din Mahamud Girls’ College, Kandy.

Glo-Sheets

Where do inventive ideas come from? Sometimes they come out of the dark. That happened with Becky Schroeder's Glo-Sheets. Becky was ten-years-old when she began experimenting with phosphorescent (Shining with a phosphoric light; luminous without sensible heat) materials, which give off light but not heat. Then she covered an acrylic board with phosphorescent paint.

Acrylic is an especially tough plastic. After Becky exposed the board to light, the paint glowed through one or two sheets of paper in the dark.

Becky patented her invention when she was only 12. Luckily, her father was a patent lawyer. Altogether, she got 12 patents for Glo-Sheets and improvements on them.

By 1983, Becky was 22 and had set-up a company to market her Glo-Sheets. Doctors have used Glo-Sheets to read medical charts or take notes in dim hospital rooms without disturbing their patients.

Becky has also sold Glo-Sheets to police departments and the United States Navy.

Popsicle

In 1905, the popsicle was invented by an 11-year-old Frank Epperson. Frank Epperson was only 11-years-old when he invented the originally named Epsicle. He had left his fruit flavoured Soda outside on the porch with a stir stick in it. The drink froze to the stick and tasted good. It took 18 more years in 1923 for Epperson to apply for a patent for a “frozen ice on a stick” called the Epsicle ice pop, which his children re-named popsicle.

In 1925, Frank Epperson sold his famous popsicle to the Joe Lowe Company of New York. Good Humour now owns the rights to the popsicle. Popsicle sticks were first made from Birch wood.

Earmuffs

Chester Greenwood invented the earmuff, among other things, and almost anyone in town can tell you how it happened; he loved to skate as a young teen, 1873, but his ears got cold. He wrapped his woolen scarf around his head, but that was too itchy and uncomfortable, so he got his grandmother to sew circles of beaver pelt on a metal frame he had fashioned and (as a French-challenged college student of mine once wrote): wallah!

He patented the invention as “ear-mufflers” on March 13, 1877, and went into business, building a factory that produced 400,000 sets of earmuffs a year at its peak. He made his fortune during World War I supplying the U.S. Army, and the factory continued production for 60 years, till Chester’s death in 1937.

Water skiing

Water skiing came about on June 28, 1922 when 18-year-old Ralph Samuelson of Minnesota, proposed the idea that if you could ski on snow, then you could ski on water.

Ralph first attempted water skiing on Lake Pepin in Lake City, Minnesota, towed by his brother Ben. The brothers experimented for several days until July 2, 1922 when Ralph discovered that leaning backwards with ski tips up lead to successful water skiing.

Snowboards

Tom Sims, who was credited with inventing one of the earliest snowboards and as a world-champion competitor and manufacturer, with helping to further snowboarding’s widespread acceptance in the sporting world, died on September 12 in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 61. Tom Sims, an avid skateboarder, built a “ski board” in his seventh-grade wood shop class to ride in the winter.

“That’s what led me to build the first snowboard: not being able to skateboard on an icy street,”. “So after that, it was just 12 months a year of boarding, whether it be skateboarding, snowboarding or surfing, he told a newspaper magazine.

His boyhood invention did not work very well, but it inspired him to continue to refine the design. At the same time, he began building a career as a designer of skateboards. In the mid-1970s, when Sims was riding boards he had made in professional competitions, he founded Sims Skateboards in Whittier, Calif., to manufacture and market them.