Six amazing things invented by young people

The great thing about brilliant new ideas is that anyone can have one; it really doesn’t matter how old you are.

A bolt of inspiration is as likely to hit a 15-year-old as it is someone twice their age.

Here are six things that you might be surprised to know were invented by young people.

Braille alphabet

Louis Braille, who had been blind since an accident when he was three, was just 15 when he adapted a complicated system of raised dots and dashes used by the French military for reading at night into a simplified alphabet that could be used by blind people.

What would become known as Braille was competed in 1824 and finally published in 1829.

Since then it has been adapted for uses from Lego to banknotes and has helped tens of millions of blind people to read.

The trampoline

We can thank 16-year-old gymnast George Nissen for the modern trampoline. He invented the bouncing apparatus after observing acrobats at the circus falling safely into the nets under the tightrope.

In 1936, after a long period of design trial and error, the modern trampoline was born. Originally called the ‘tumbling rig’ it was finally named the trampoline after the Spanish word el trampolín which translates as ‘diving board’.

By the 1950s trampolining was a craze with ‘jump centres’ springing up at petrol stations over the United States. It helped that George was an avid salesman for his new device. In 1960 he rented a kangaroo named Victoria and bounced up and down alongside her in New York’s Central Park.

Happily, he lived long enough to see trampolining become an Olympic sport in 2000.

Snowmobiles

In 1935, after noticing the difficulties people had traversing the icy terrain of his native Quebec, 15-year-old budding mechanic Joseph-Armand Bombardier developed the first snowmobile. It relied on a system of sprocket wheels and tracks to propel the vehicle across the snow without sinking in.

The first models were a tad on the unwieldy side, looking more like snow-tanks than today’s compact versions.

But Joseph continued refining his design before releasing a slimmed-down model, the Ski-Doo, in 1960. He would go on to found Bombardier, a world-famous Canadian engineering company, which manufactures business jets among many other things.

Christmas lights

Looking for someone to blame for the Christmas tradition of desperately rooting around in the loft for a cardboard box, before spending three hours untangling some lights? Well, Albert Sadacca is your man.

Candles were the traditional, and very unsafe, way of lighting the tree until Albert came along. The Edison Company had used electric lights on a Christmas tree as a publicity stunt in 1882, but having lights that plugged in at home wasn’t a thing for ordinary people until 15-year-old Albert, whose father owned a novelty lighting company, developed a consumer-version of the product.

He began selling the decorations to the public in 1917 but at first he sold only a few of the strings of white-coloured lights. But then he came up with the brilliant idea of having the lights come in different colours, popularising the product and giving us the colourful displays we all still enjoy each year.

Earmuffs

Chester Greenwood, a 15-year-old from Maine, USA, was the young genius behind the humble earmuff.

A keen ice-skater, Chester suffered from cold ears, a problem he solved by asking his grandmother to sew pieces of beaver fur onto a wire frame. His ear protectors were patented four years later in 1877 and were subsequently used by soldiers fighting in World War One. By 1936 his company was shipping 400,000 ‘Champion Ear Protectors’ a year.

Like many young inventors Chester would continue creating new products into his adult years including the wide-bottomed kettle, a new kind of spark plug and a design for a folding bed.

Transforming toy truck

In 1963 six-year-old Robert Patch became the youngest person ever to be awarded a US patent (a legal document declaring you as the only person allowed to make or sell an invention). His toy truck, which was made of cardboard, bottle caps and nails, was unusual enough to be patent-worthy as it could be disassembled and reconfigured as different styles of vehicle. Of course, it might have helped that Robert’s dad was a patent attorney.

Understandably, given his age, Robert was unable to sign the patent form, and instead marked it with an ‘X’.

His record as the youngest inventor to be awarded a patent in the US still stands, but in the UK in 2008 five-year-old Sam Houghton was granted a patent for a new kind of two-headed broom.