Sliced Bread and Other Monumental Inventions

Otto Rohwedder. Heard of him? How about George de Mestra? No? J.F. Brondel or John Harrington? No, no? Never even heard of Charles Strite, I'll bet. Our lives would indeed be very different without sliced bread, velcro, the flush toilet, and automatic toasters. Many of the world's greatest inventions were created by more than one person, often unbeknownst to the other. For example, while we all learned in elementary school that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, the true history of the telephone is a tangled web of inventors, claims, and counterclaims. And while many inventors have become associated with their inventions, such as Bell, Edison, and Pasteur, many others live lives of relative obscurity. The purpose of this site is to recognize a small few of the unsung giants of creativity, the unknown heros of our everyday lives. The inventors we never heard of.