Inventions That Shook the World: The 1970's (Proper Television, Questar Entertainment, The History Channel, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday night my husband Charl.es and I watched an interesting YouTube video called Inventions that Shook the World: The 1970’s, which was actually poart of a 10-episode mini-series from Canadian TV that detailed, decade by decade, the most socially important and transformative inventions of the 20th century. Ironically, the two inventions that did most to transform life in the 20th century were actually products of the late 19th century: home electricity and the automobile. The show featured much of the annoying golly-gee-whillikers tone of all too many TV programs dealing with science and technology, but at least it was reasonably well done, It touched on a number of interesting inventions, from the first human-powered aircraft to o9ther technological odds and ends, but the five inventions they mostly focused on, and the principal creators, were these:

_In 1972, in Schaumburg, Illinois, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper is assigned by his employers to beat rival AT&T to invent a practical car phone. He comes up with a device that would allow people to make and receive calls anywhere they are, without wires: the first cell phone.

_In 1972, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, two engineers at 3M, Art Fry and Spencer Silver, teamed up to invent a sticky substance that would adhere to paper and turn it into a self-sticking adhesive. The result was the Post-It note pad, which made millions for 3M and became an indispensable part of modern offices – though neither Fry nor Spencer ever saw any of the additional revenue the company earned from it.

_In 1972 in England, Lt. Col. Peter Miller invented a self-propelled lawn mower to cut his own grass. He soon realized that the basic principle of this gadget – a self-propelled vehicle guided by tethered ropes so it could travel far from the people controlling it – could be used by bomb disposal teams to do their dangerous job from a safe distance, and he developed what amounted to a surface drone that could tow a car bomb, like the ones the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was successfully using aganst British occupiers during the “Time of Troubles,” so it could either be disarmed or be detonated at a safe distance.

–In 1974 Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, was given the task to create an electronic camera out of an old movie camera and a computer chip. He created the first digital camera, then had to contend with a lack of interest among his bosses at Eastman Kodak because selling film and developing services had been their mainstay for over 135 years. Not until a quarter-century later did digital cameras, shrunk considerably in size from Sasson’s 20-pound prototype, take off and become ubiquitous.

–In 1970, in New Jersey, Bronx-born engineer Victor Wouk became convinced that the way to solve the air pollution problem from gasoline-powered cars was to build an automobile that combined a gas engine for long trips and an electric motor for shorter ranges. His idea was to use the waste heat created when a driver uses their brakes to recharge the batteries to keep down the need for outside electrical power. He entered a contest sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to come up with a more fuel-efficient car. Then, after the 1973 energy crisis ended, the EPA canceled the program after gas was once again relatively cheap and American auto buyers lost their interest in fuel efficiency. Not until 1997 was the first hybrid gas/electric car actually marketed – in Japan, the Toyota Prius – and though Wouk died in 1999, he actually bought one of the first Priuses sold in the U.S. and saw it as a vindication of his technology.

There was a certain sadness to the program in that so many of the actual technical creators of these world-changing inventions were screwed over by the capitalist system, including the companies that employed them at the time as well as government bureaucrats and the winds of politics. The show featured actual interviews with Art Fry, Spencer Silver and Steve Sasson, as well as the son of Victor Wouk, who recalled how his dad felt vindicated when he could finally buy a Toyota Prius and feel it had vindicated hs technology even though by then his prototype (based on an old Buick) had literally been gathering dust for two decades. It’s yet another indication of how the giant corporations screw over the individuals who actually create the technologies that enrich them, and it seemed to add insult to injury to see Fry and Silver win official recognition from a society of engineers without any actual share of the profits their invention generated to their employers. Most engineers and other technological innovators work under contracts that give their employers absolute rights over anything they invent on the job, and the result is they generally don’t see a penny from the profits their employers make on the strength of their ideas – exactly the opposite of the Libertarian myth of how capitalism supposedly works.