From the way we dress to what we eat and drink, American innovation has changed lives around the world. And while many famous American inventors like Thomas Edison are household names, others are less well known...

Read on to discover 31 products that have made life easier, cleaner, healthier, or just plain better, and meet the Americans behind them.

Legend has it a dentist in New Orleans, Dr Levi Spear Parmly, advised his patients to use silk thread to clean between their teeth. When the idea caught on a company called Codman & Shurtleff started to sell unwaxed silk dental floss in 1882. But Johnson & Johnson was the first, in 1898, to patent dental floss, using the same silk that doctors used for stitches.

Dentists still rate flossing to be very important for oral hygiene, but the silk has since been replaced by nylon.

A prolific inventor named Walter Hunt built America's first sewing machine in 1834, the first to use an eye-pointed needle. But he didn't patent his creation as he feared it would lead to unemployment for seamstresses.

The sewing machine was later patented by Elias Howe (his model is pictured) in 1846. However, the design was copied by Isaac Singer, which led to a long battle over the patent, with Singer revealing that Hunt was the original inventor, not Howe. In the end, Howe retained the patent.

Ancient Egyptians can be credited for inventing locks, but the Yale family perfected the concept in the 19th century, making them much harder to pick. They received their first patent in 1843 and went on to create the cylinder lock. The locks changed the way we secure things, and because of the Yale family, banks began switching from key locks to dial or combination locks in the 1860s.

The Yale company, as it’s known today, launched in 1868 with 35 employees. It started to expand beyond America in the 20th century when the business bought British lock company H&T Vaughan. Today the Yale lock is a common sight on domestic and commercial buildings worldwide.

Walter Hunt may not have protected his sewing machine, but the inventor received patents for a number of different inventions from 1829 to 1853, including a knife sharpener, a rope-making machine, and several machines for making nails.

But the humble safety pin is Walter's most well-known creation today. The story goes that Hunt was fiddling with a piece of wire while he worried about a debt when inspiration struck. He created the covered clasp and the bottom's twist to give it spring, then sold the patent rights to repay the debt.

The concept of the zipper dates back to 1851, when an "automatic, continuous clothing closure" was patented by second sewing machine inventor Elias Howe. However, he never actually produced it.

Twenty-six years after Howe died and 44 years after the first patent,  American inventor Whitcomb Judson patented a zipper-style product called a Clasp Locker in 1893. He started a company in the hope of producing them, hiring Gideon Sundback to help him. These zippers didn’t resemble the ones on clothing today and weren't as effective. It was Sundback who patented the user-friendly design for a "separable fastener" in 1917 that's still used today.

In 1853, the height of the California Gold Rush, Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss opened a dry goods company in San Francisco. Inspired by the miners he was selling to and their need for hard-wearing clothes, he invented sturdy pants with copper rivets for reinforcement that could withstand harsh conditions.

First introduced in 1873 for miners and cowboys, the denim brand is now sold around the world. The iconic brand's label design remains faithful to the design's original purpose.

Many inventors worked on filament technology for light bulbs in the 19th century. However, Thomas Edison was the first to patent the incandescent light bulb in 1879. He used an uncoated cotton thread for the filament, which could last for 14.5 hours. After more experimentation using a bamboo filament, Edison’s lights eventually had a lifetime of 1,200 hours.

This became the standard for the Edison bulb for the next 10 years. Though light bulb technology has changed over the last century, the Edison style remains recognizable throughout the world today.

Kodak’s George Eastman is credited with introducing the first rolls of film in 1885, which were actually coated paper. Eastman continued to improve on his idea, eventually developing the transparent film roll that would enable not just professionals, but anyone to take photos.

He introduced the Kodak camera in 1888. While digital photography and smartphones have made film photography less popular, many photographers still choose to shoot with film.

One of the most recognized brands in the world, the man behind Coca-Cola was Dr John Pemberton of Atlanta. A chemist and a veteran of the American Civil War, Pemberton's battle injuries led to a morphine addiction. However, he thought he had created a morphine cure with his French Wine Coca, an alcoholic syrup infused with kola nuts and South American coca leaves – the key ingredient of cocaine.

He brought his syrup to a local pharmacy, which agreed to sell it for five cents a glass. With the threat of prohibition Pemberton changed the recipe to remove the alcohol in 1886, and the coca leaves were removed in 1905. During the first year of production, sales averaged a modest nine drinks per day, but they eventually took off, and in 2023 the company reported more than $45 billion in revenue.

William C. Hooker of Illinois patented the first spring-loaded mousetrap in 1894. However, the design wasn’t foolproof and could lead to snapped fingers. About 10 years later an inventor called John Mast, working at Hooker’s previous company, patented a modification of Hooker's design that could be set or adjusted safely.

Today a wide range of mouse traps are available, including electric traps, glue pads, and the more humane catch-and-release traps, but many still purchase the spring-loaded style from more than 100 years ago.

In 1885, two cousins, Edwin Binney and Charles Smith, went into business together producing paint pigments. They soon started to make pencils for school slates, and after talking to teachers also invented dustless chalk.

The cousins also noticed schools needed safe and affordable wax crayons. They first made their color crayons in 1902, and they were offered for sale in a box of eight the following year. The name comes from the French words “craie” for chalk and “ola” for oily. Crayola still sells eight-crayon packs today, with the range reaching all the way up to a 152-crayon set.

Lizzie Magie patented her Landlord’s Game as an educational tool as she wanted to show students the consequences of concentrating land in private monopolies. Over the next 20 years the game changed to include cardboard houses, and Magie re-patented it in 1923.

Parker Brothers (now Hasbro) bought the rights to the game and started selling it as Monopoly in 1935. More than 275 million copies of the game have been sold in the years since.

Patented hand mixers with rotating parts date back to the 1850s, and in the 1890s and 1910s several US manufacturers developed electric motors for them. Herbert Johnson of Hobart Manufacturing is said to have been inspired by a baker mixing dough with a metal spoon, and he invented stand mixers in 1908.

To begin with, they were marketed to industrial bakers, and the US Navy even installed them on ships. It wasn’t until 1918 that the manufacturer made a domestic model, though, launching the KitchenAid in 1919.

John Lloyd Wright, son of the renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, had been working as his father’s assistant when the idea for his invention struck. He created a timber design for the Imperial Hotel in Japan where the interlocking beams would provide stability in an earthquake.

When father and son fell out, John took the concept to a smaller scale, creating the beloved toy construction set. The interlocking logs could better withstand kids' play than other building blocks, and they're still sold in huge volumes today. 

The origins of modern automatic transmission (automatic gears in cars) date back to the Sturtevants in Boston at the turn of the century, but their efforts weren’t quite up to the task. Henry Ford’s Model T from 1908 also relied on a similar concept.

Eventually, in 1921 Henry Hoffman of Chicago applied for a patent for automatic gear shift and speed control, which was approved in 1923. However, Alfred Munro in Saskatchewan, Canada made a similar application in 1921, which was also approved there in 1923. 

Richard Drew worked in the sandpaper department for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, now 3M. He saw the need for a sticky tape that could be easily removed while visiting a local auto body shop. Painters in the 1920s needed to “mask” off one part of a car while working on another.

Drew worked on the project for several years and developed masking tape in 1925, eventually earning a patent in 1930. He later went on to create Scotch tape, the world's first transparent tape.

Many inventors were involved in the competitive race to develop and create television. Scottish inventor John Logie Baird is often held up as the television's inventor, but while his mechanical scanning device had some success and was the first to transmit images in 1926, it was eventually overtaken by electronic systems.

American Philo Farnsworth patented the electronic television system that led to TV as we know it in the US in 1930, after he and his wife, Alma, made the first television transmission in 1927.

In 1927, the director of DuPont’s chemical department convinced Wallace Carothers, an organic chemistry professor, to leave Harvard and research polymers for him instead. With the growth of the auto industry and World War I increasing demand for natural rubber, scientists began to develop synthetic versions.

A team of 28 scientists in Carothers’ research group at DuPont finessed the synthetic chloroprene rubber that today makes up wetsuits, cable sleeves, and some clothing items.  

While Carothers’ team was busy developing neoprene, he had been working on combining various chemicals to create synthetic fibers. In 1935 he created a formula for strong and elastic fibers similar to silk. DuPont named this product nylon.

The company secured the patent for nylon in September 1938. When sample stockings went on sale in March 1939 they're said to have sold out in three hours. While demand for nylon has fallen with changing clothing trends, it's still found in many common products today, including toothbrushes.

Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts invented the chocolate chip cookie by accident. Wakefield was making a batch of chocolate butter drop cookies but had run out of baking chocolate. She decided to chop up a bar of Nestlé chocolate instead, but the chocolate did not melt and spread through the dough. Instead, it stayed in place creating pockets of melted chocolate.

She called it the Chocolate Crunch Cookie and published her recipe in 1938 as an ice cream garnish. A year later she officially gave Nestlé permission to use her recipe, as well as the Toll House name. While the concept has evolved over the years, the recipe for the iconic treat has largely remained the same. In the 1950s, baking companies began to offer refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough, a treat on its own, which Ben & Jerry’s later added to ice cream.

Radar technology advanced dramatically during World War II. But it was Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, who discovered its use for heating food. While working with magnetrons, used to create microwave signals, he noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He tested this with popcorn kernels and an egg, and after encasing the technology in a metal box, the rest is history.

Raytheon filed the microwave oven patent in 1945. According to industry estimates, more than 30 million microwaves are sold each year.

In 1898, way before the invention of television, Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla first demonstrated the wireless remote control at Madison Square Garden in New York, unsuccessfully suggesting its use for the US Navy to control boats. 

In the 1950s, while working for television manufacturer Zenith, engineer Eugene Polley devised the first, true wireless TV remote, the Flash-Matic. It could power the TV on or off, change channels, and mute the sound using light beams that it sent to receptors positioned on the front of the TV set. A year later Zenith replaced it with a newer version called Space Command that used sound wave technology devised by Polley's colleague Robert Adler. 

The concept of a card to allow customers to buy now and pay later had been introduced by stores and airlines in the 1920s. However, none of these could be used beyond their specific merchant or company.

In 1958, Bank of America launched the first nationally-licensed credit card, a paper card that was originally called BankAmericard. It had a limit of $300 and was the first card to offer revolving credit. American shoppers and merchants quickly adopted the program, which would expand around the globe and eventually be renamed Visa.

Inventor Chester Carlson made the first-ever photocopy in 1938 using light, dry powder, and static electricity from a handkerchief. He received a patent for his new technique in 1942 before joining Haloid, the company that licensed the rights to the process. The business later rebranded to Xerox.

This new technique, soon named xerography, paved the way for the office mainstay. In 1959, Xerox unveiled the first automatic, plain-paper commercial copier, the Xerox 914. Carbon copies, mimeographs, and other duplicating machines were soon phased out of the workplace due to the photocopier’s speed and efficiency.

With the introduction of synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester, which didn’t need ironing, cotton farmers saw demand for their crop fall.

Physical chemist Ruth Benerito is said to have saved the cotton industry with her discovery of a method to make the fabric wrinkle-resistant in the 1950s. By attaching organic chemicals to cotton fibers, she and her research team at the US Department of Agriculture made cotton fabric not just wrinkle-resistant but also stain and flame-resistant. 

Ermal Fraze, the Owner of Dayton Reliable Tool and Manufacturing, was set on a path of discovery after he went to a picnic and forgot his can opener, forcing him to open beers using his car’s bumper. He set to work on creating something easy to open, but strong enough to keep pressurized liquid in the can.

This was realized by making the rivet part of the lid. While early versions were incredibly sharp, requiring a redesign, he sold the cans to a Pittsburgh brewery in 1962. His invention quickly took off, and he secured a patent in 1967.

The story goes that General Electric scientist Nick Holonyak, who's credited with inventing light-emitting diodes (LEDs), wasn’t trying to invent a new type of light bulb. In fact, he wanted to make a laser.

LEDs were initially used for circuit boards, but many people recognized their potential, including their role in energy efficiency. Today LEDs are widely used in products, homes, and businesses, replacing Edison's incandescent light bulbs.

An engineer for Sanders Associates (now BAE Systems), Ralph Baer watched the popularity of TVs grow and pondered other uses for the technology. The firm provided Baer with funding and two engineers to help research the possibility of playing games on a television set.

He built several prototypes between 1966 and 1968, which led to the “Brown Box," a system comprising two controllers and a multiprogram game system – basic features that are still present in most games consoles today. Patented in 1973, it was sold as the first home video game system in 1972.

American engineer Gary Starkweather was working at Xerox, researching ways to speed up the scanning and printing of early fax machines, when he came across his invention. 

He was particularly interested in using lasers and it was during this work that he developed the prototype for what would become laser printing. The company’s first laser printer, the Xerox 9700, went on sale in 1977. 

Whether using a receiver in your car, phone, or even your watch, the GPS that helps us navigate today comes courtesy of the US government. The Department of Defense started the program in 1973, with the first prototype spacecraft launched in 1978. By 1989, the first commercially available GPS units went on sale with a price tag of around $3,000, or $7,500 in today's money. 

Since the 1980s, GPS satellites have helped generate an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits, while GPS-enabled guidance equipment and apps have saved American drivers as much as 52 billion gallons of gas. 

Another success from the laboratories at 3M, scientist Dr Spencer Silver discovered something peculiar during his research, an adhesive that stuck lightly to surfaces but didn’t bond tightly to them. However, he struggled to find a use for his invention for years.

Meanwhile, another 3M scientist named Dr Art Fry got fed up with the little scraps of paper he used to mark the pages in his hymnal at choir practice. He recalled Silver’s adhesive and they teamed up to make Post-Its.

Now discover the accidental inventions that made a fortune