20 Famous Inventions Created By Teenagers And Young Geniuses

In 1583, a lighted chandelier swung slowly inside Pisa Cathedral in Italy as 19-year-old medical student Galileo Galilei observed it. He timed its swings against his own pulse and saw that each swing took the same amount of time regardless of the size of the arc. This property became known as isochronism. Galileo later experimented with pendulums of various lengths at home and invented the pulsilogium, a device to measure the pulse. It was not until decades later that Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens made the first functioning pendulum clock.

Blaise Pascal’s father spent several hours each day doing the arithmetical calculations necessary for taxes by hand in Rouen. In 1642, Pascal, who was 18 at the time, decided to change all this. After about three years of work, he had created a device consisting of a brass box connected with interlocking cogged wheels that could perform addition automatically, and subtraction through the use of nines’ complements. About 20 were made, known as “pascalines,” and Pascal received a Royal Privilege from France in 1645. The device could not perform multiplication or division, though. To be fair, it did not have to!

In around 1717, when 11-year-old Benjamin Franklin was swimming in Boston, he thought of an idea that could help him to swim faster. He cut two oval-shaped pieces of wood with holes for his thumbs, and found that they helped. He also made two wooden sandals for his feet, in case they would help him swim faster. But these were too heavy, and he abandoned them. He described these experiments himself, but only decades later.

At the age of three, Louis Braille lost his sight. As a 15-year-old in 1824, he discovered night writing at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. It was developed by an officer named Charles Barbier as a way for soldiers to communicate in the dark, consisting of a 12-dot tactile code. The cells were too large to be read with one fingertip. So Braille, between the ages of 15 and 20, developed his own version of night writing: a 6-dot grid arranged in two columns of three. He published it at the age of 20 in 1829.

In 1830, Samuel Colt was 16 years old and employed as a deckhand on the merchant ship Corvo. When the ship turned, the capstan locked into place every turn with a ratchet-and-pawl device. Colt figured that the cylinder of a gun could turn and lock the same way each time the hammer was cocked, and he carved a wooden model on the ship’s deck with his pocketknife. Later, back home in the U.S., he remade it in metal and obtained a patent for it in February 1836, at age 21.

It was 1850, and Margaret E. Knight was 12, working at a cotton mill in Manchester, N.H., when a wooden shuttle tipped with a steel point flew from its place on a loom and hit a child worker. Knight constructed a guard of wood and wire that stopped shuttles before they flew free. The mill took the invention. Unfortunately, she didn’t know enough about patent law to file a claim for it, and so she received no compensation.

William Henry Perkin was an 18-year-old student who was spending his Easter break in 1856 in his London home lab trying to synthesize the anti-malarial drug quinine from coal tar. His reaction didn’t work and left a dark residue in the flask. When he rinsed the flask with alcohol, the resulting liquid was a bright purple. When he tried it out on silk, the dye clung to it and didn’t fade. He patented the dye that August as mauveine, the first synthetic organic dye. Funny enough, he was just hoping to make a medical compound, not something for fashion!

George Westinghouse served in the Civil War, and at 19 he returned to his father’s machine shop in Schenectady, New York. He patented a rotary steam engine on October 31, 1865, but found that the device was of no commercial use. The patent opened doors for him, though, and he would go on to hold 361 patents in all, including one for the railway air brake, patented four years later.

Back around 1869, Brooklyn inventor Thomas Adams was working to make synthetic rubber out of Mexican chicle. It didn’t work out. His son Horatio, who was 15 at the time, tried eating the excess chicle anyway, finding it smooth and pliable. I’m not judging the thought process, but it did turn out for the better! He proposed boiling it, rolling it into strips, and adding some flavoring for sale; then he made 200 balls of chewing gum by hand. The balls sold out within a day at a local drugstore. Safe to say, it was a hit!

In the 1800s, you would hold the cast-iron sadiron by its hot handle. On July 18, 1870, a 19-year-old named Mary Florence Potts from Ottumwa, Iowa, got a patent for a sadiron filled with insulating plaster of Paris with a fixed wood handle. Ten months later, in May 1871, at age 20, she got another patent on a detachable wood handle that would snap onto multiple heated iron bases.

In December 1873, 15-year-old Chester Greenwood of Farmington, Maine, was ice skating when he wanted to keep his ears warm but didn’t like the itchiness of his wool cap. So he bent wire into ear-shaped loops and asked his grandmother, Phrelove Wood, to sew fur and velvet pads onto them. To prevent the loops from sliding off, he created a headband made of spring steel that included a swivel hinge. That mechanism, not the concept of covering one’s ears for the first time, is what Greenwood patented in 1877, at age 18.

At age 20, Guglielmo Marconi rigged a spark-gap transmitter and coherer receiver in the attic of his family’s country house near Bologna in December 1894. Pushing a telegraph key on one side of the attic rang a bell on the other side without any wires between them. By the summer of 1895, at age 21, he’d moved outside, added aerials and grounded plates to his apparatus, and sent Morse code signals more than a mile. Hertz and Maxwell had discovered radio waves, but Marconi created the first wireless communication system to exploit them.

In 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson was living in San Francisco when he left a cup of powdered soda water outside on a cold night, and when he walked out the next morning, the cup was frozen solid, with a wooden stirring stick still inside. Epperson called it the “Eppsicle,” and he distributed the treats to the neighborhood. Almost 20 years later, and prompted by his children’s urging, Epperson began selling them commercially in 1923, calling them “Popsicles.” He filed for a patent for it in 1924 at the age of 30.

At 19, Igor Sikorsky went to Paris and bought a 25-horsepower engine, which he carried back to Kyiv in May 1909. Over the next two months, he built a coaxial, twin-rotor helicopter prototype called the H-1. The H-1 never left the ground because the engine wasn’t strong enough, but it provided him with actual measurements of rotor pitch, torque, and lift that Sikorsky would use 30 years later to design the first mass-produced helicopter.

In 1910, at age 19, Mary Phelps Jacob was getting dressed for a ball in New York when the whalebone corset under her sheer gown kept poking through. She called her maid for two silk handkerchiefs, some ribbon, thread, and pins, and sewed them together into soft cups that tied over her shoulders. It worked! She patented it in 1914, in her own name, many years before she went by her pen name, Caresse Crosby.

Philo Farnsworth was 14 and plowing potato fields in Rigby, Idaho, in 1921 when it struck him that an image could be broken down and scanned line by line with an electron beam. The following spring, he drew up plans for the device on a blackboard and showed them to his teacher, Justin Tolman. Farnsworth would be 21 before the actual device came to fruition in 1927, in San Francisco, with investors behind him. Tolman’s recollection of the blackboard would later help Farnsworth win the patent battle.

During the 1922 New Year’s holiday, 15-year-old Joseph-Armand Bombardier bolted a used Ford Model T engine onto four wooden sleigh runners in Valcourt, Quebec, and hooked a carved wooden propeller onto the shaft. With his brother Leopold steering the front runners by rope, it skimmed half a mile across the snow. After the test run, his father saw the exposed spinning propeller and had them tear out the motor and propeller immediately. Not yet a snowmobile in sight!

In June 1922, 18-year-old Ralph Samuelson of Lake City, Minnesota, tried adapting snow skiing to water. Barrel staves didn’t work, so he bought two eight-foot pine planks and boiled the tips in his mother’s kettle to curl them upward, then strapped on leather foot loops. On July 2, 1922, he was pulled out onto the surface of Lake Pepin by his brother’s motorboat and skied. He never applied for a patent for water skiing, though!

In 1928, at age 19, Edwin Land departed from Harvard University and moved to New York. By day, he researched at the public library; by night, he labored in borrowed labs at Columbia University. Rather than growing large polarizing crystals, he filled thin flexible sheets of celluloid with millions of microscopic herapathite crystals, aligned them with a magnetic field, and then stretched the sheets to spread out the crystal particles enough to block the glare. In April of 1929, at age 19, he filed his first patent for these sheets. The instant camera was still many years off.

At age 16, George Nissen watched circus trapeze artists hit their safety nets and rebound back up for another set of tricks. In his parents’ Cedar Rapids, Iowa, garage in 1930, Nissen made a steel frame with a canvas cover and rubber tire inner tubes to create that springy effect. He and his coach, Larry Griswold, replaced the inner tubes with coiled steel springs in 1934, when Nissen was 20. And so, the modern trampoline was born.

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