Famous Inventions: The Aerosol Can

It is easy to become discouraged by the challenges, risks, and possible setbacks you may encounter when you get an idea for an invention. However, there are many stories of famous inventions that involved all of those setbacks and challenges—inventions that people can’t imagine living without today. While many products are the result of coming up with an idea first, and then developing it, many other projects are inspired by moments in everyday life. Some of the most famous inventions have even been invented entirely by accident. The aerosol can is an example of an invention that took several years to perfect, and is a testament to the level of patience required of prospective inventors.

The concept of an aerosol spray most likely goes back as far as 1790; however, the first patent for an aerosol spray can was granted to Erik Rotheim in 1926, with a United States patent for the same invention approved in 1931. Rotheim sold the rights to a US company for 100,000 Norwegian kroner. In 1939, the first disposable spray can was invented and patented by Julian S. Kahn. The product remained mostly undeveloped, however; Kahn’s idea was to mix cream and a propellant from two sources to make whipped cream at home, which is not a true aerosol in that sense. It was not until 1941 that the first aerosol spray can was put to use by American inventors Lyle D. Goodhue and William N. Sullivan who are credited as the inventors of the modern spray can. Their patent was filed on October 3, 1941 and approved on October 5, 1943. Their design of a refillable spray can dubbed the “bug bomb” is the founding design premise for many popular commercial spray products. Pressurized by liquefied gas, the small, portable can allowed soldiers to defend against malaria-carrying mosquitos by spraying inside tents and airplanes during World War II; the pair were later the first recipients of the Eric Andreas Rotheim Gold Medal from the Federation of European Aerosol Associations in 1970.

By 1948, three companies were granted licenses to manufacture aerosols; of the three, two—Chase Products Company and Claire Manufacturing—still manufacture aerosols. Later refinements included the “crimp-on valve,” used to control the spray in low-pressure aerosols, which was developed in 1949 by a Bronx machine shop proprietor named Robert Abplanalp. Various propellants were used until chlorofluorocarbons were discovered to have the best properties for the various products; unfortunately, CFCs were later recognized as having negative effects on the ozone layer, which resulted in the Montreal Protocol of 1989, requiring the elimination of CFCs from all products. The most common replacements are mixtures of volatile hydrocarbons, such as propane, butane, and isobutene. The majority of propellants have the disadvantage of being highly flammable; in foodstuffs, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide are common propellants, while asthma inhalers and other medical aerosols use hydrofluoroalkanes (HFAs).

In addition to changes in the propellant used, over the years the cans themselves have been refined, with different materials coming into use as technology offers alternatives to bulky or inconvenient previous alternatives. A UK company has recently developed and patented a technology to generate more finely dispersed mists by using a disk of superhydrophobic material within a manual pump, in order to generate an aerosol-like result without the use of a propellant.

The invention and development of the aerosol can is an interesting story which proves that the development of a new product requires patience from the inventor. Like many products, the aerosol can depended on prior understandings of technology and adaptation of new materials, until it reached its most effective form. The understanding of the principles spurred several inventors forward, but it still took many years for the product to be viable.

Famous Inventor Profiles-John Logie Baird

Throughout history there have been several individuals who have achieved fame and in some cases fortune by pursuing ideas they have had for new products. Some of these inventors have come across their creations by accident, and some of them saw a problem in their day-to-day lives that inspired them to create a solution. While there are many famous inventors, it’s important to remember that not all inventors achieve fame. However, for those individuals who have created products that fill a long-existing need, notoriety is one of the possible outcomes.

One of the most famous inventors in history is John Logie Baird, the Scottish engineer and the inventor of the world’s first practical television system. Baird also invented the first fully electronic color television tube. Although his electromechanical system was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems, Baird’s early successes have earned him a special place in the invention of the television.

In his first attempts to develop a working television, Baird experimented with an invention created by Paul Nipkow. The latter had invented a scanning disk system in 1884, called the Nipkow disk; this has been since called the “master television patent.” In early 1923, Baird moved to the south coast of England and rented a workshop in the town of Hastings. He build what would become the world’s first working television set using an odd collection of items including an old hat box, a pair of scissors, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, sealing wax, and darning needles. In February of the following year, he demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images. In July of the same year, he received a 1000-volt electric shock, though fortunately he survived with only a burned hand as an injury. His landlord, as a result, asked him to quit his workshop.

In his new laboratory on October 2, 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy in a 30-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second was the first image. Baird went downstairs and found an office worker to see what a human face would look like, and 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became the first person to be televised in full tonal range. Understandably excited, Baird visited the Daily Express to promote his invention; the news editor was terrified and asked his staff to get rid of the “lunatic.” Baird repeated the transmission weeks later, on January 26, 1926 for the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times. By this time Baird had improved the scan rate to 12.5 frames per second.

He moved on to develop the technology and on July 3, 1928, Baird demonstrated the world’s first color transmission, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals containing filters of a different primary color. Prior to that, he transmitted a long-distance television signal over 438 miles in 1927. Baird went on to set up the Baird Television Development Company, which made the first transatlantic television transmission in 1928 from London to Hartsdale, New York. Baird’s invention would go on to provide the first program for the BBC, and Baird would also establish France’s first television company with Bernard Natan.

After mechanical televisions fell out of favor, Baird made several contributions to the field of electronic televisions. In 1939 he showed color television using a cathode ray tube with a fitted disk of color filters and in 1941 he patented and demonstrated a system of three-dimensional television. He also went on to develop an early video recording device, and helped to develop the field of fiber-optics, radio, infrared, and radar. Overall, Baird has been remembered for having a particular talent at invention; not all of his inventions were successful (he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite in his 20s and shorted out Glasgow’s electricity supply, for example), but Baird has achieved legendary status both in the UK and worldwide for the sheer volume of products and inventions he developed.

If you have an idea for a new invention, there are a number of different ways to pursue developing the idea. You can follow the traditional process of patenting your own invention and marketing and licensing it yourself or you can contact a company that specializes in new product development, who can take your idea and build prototypes and reach out to businesses that may be interested in adding your idea to their product line. Inventing is always a risk, and very few inventions are successful, but working with a reputable company may be extremely helpful, as the experienced employees of these companies could have a better understanding of what it takes to make a product successful.

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Famous Inventions: Barcode

When you get an idea for an invention, it is easy to consider the challenges, risks, and possible setbacks you may encounter and become discouraged. However, there are many stories of famous inventions that involved all of those setbacks and challenges—inventions that people can’t imagine living without today. While many products are the result of coming up with an idea first, and then developing it, many other projects are inspired by moments in everyday life. Some of the most famous inventions have even been invented entirely by accident. The bar code, a staple of the retail landscape, is an example of an invention that took many years to perfect.

In 1948 Bernard Silver overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans at the Drexel Institute of Technology to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about what he had heard, and the two began to work on a variety of systems. Their first system used ultraviolet ink, which was functional, but the ink faded easily and had the additional disadvantage of being expensive. Woodland left Drexel, convinced that the system could be workable with further development. He moved into his father’s Florida apartment and formed the first barcode based on the system of Morse code; he drew the design on the sand of the beach. "I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them,” Woodland later explained. For reading the resulting symbols, he adapted technology from optical soundtracks in movies, using a lightbulb shining through the paper onto a photomultiplier tube. He later decided that the system would work better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line, allowing it to be scanned in any direction.

On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for the designs as well as the systems used to read the codes. The patent was issued on October 7, 1952. The patent was purchased by Philco in 1962, and later sold to RCA. Sometime after the Silver-Woodland patent, in 1959 David Collins, who had just received his Master’s degree from MIT, began to work on addressing a problem he had noticed while working for the Pennsylvania Railroad: the need to automatically identify railroad cars. He developed a system of blue and yellow reflective stripes, which attached to the side of the car, encoding a six-digit company identifier and a four-digit car number. The KarTrack system, as he called it was tested until 1967, when the Association of American Railroads selected it as a standard across the entire North American fleet. However, the rash of bankruptcies in the early 1970s slowed the rollout and the system was found to be easily fooled by dirt in certain applications. The system was eventually adapted for other applications by the U.S. Post Office and others.

In 1966 the National Association of Food Chains held a meeting where they discussed the idea of automated checkout systems. Because RCA had purchased the rights to the original Woodland patent, they attended the meeting and initiated an internal project to develop a system based on the “bullseye” version of the code. In mid-1970, the NAFC established a committee for a Uniform Grocery Product Code, which set guidelines for barcode development and created a subcommittee to standardize the approach. In 1972 RCA began an eighteen-month test of the bullseye code; the codes were printed on adhesive paper which was attached by employees at the same time as price tags. The circular design of the code had a disadvantage however; during printing, presses sometimes smear ink in the direction that the paper is running, rendering the code unreadable. IBM, which employed Woodland, had already asked him to work on an alternative. His linear code was printed in the direction of the stripes, so extra ink was not a problem. On April 3, 1973 the IBM UPC was selected as the standard. The invention did not really take off until 1980, however. The first item officially scanned by a bar code machine was a packet of chewing gum in an Ohio supermarket in 1974.

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Famous Inventors

While the majority of the population continues to maintain the status quo, a very small minority work to change it. Throughout history, there have been only a handful of famous inventors -- and each one of them has had a significant impact on the way we live our lives today. From the first telephone, to the very harnessing of electricity, these men are truly the pioneers of society. In honor of their handwork and dedication, here's a short list of history's most famous inventors. 

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison is best known for the invention of the first every phonograph. The phonograph allowed users of the telephones to leave each other messages, by physically engraving these messages on a tin foil cylinder with the help of a stylus. Edison went on to do a great many things in the fields of electricity, audio and film devices, light bulbs and more.

Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney played a significant role in the industrial revolution, and specifically the expedition of agricultural gathering. He is most famous for the invention of the cotton gin in 1794; the cotton gin quickly separated hulls, seeds and other contaminants found in cotton. Unfortunately for Eli, he made almost no money from his invention due to poorly-worded patent laws that were in effect when his invention was constructed. However, Eli didn't just stop at the cotton gin and also created a way to manufacture muskets with interchangeable parts -- by this time, patent laws had been reconstructed and he deservedly made quite a bit of money. 

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin is one of the most prolific inventors in our history, churning out inventions his entire life. Not only did he invent the lightning rod, giving us the ability to harness the awesome power of lightning, he also created the iron furnace stove, the odometer and bifocal glasses! A scientist, publisher and a statesman, Benjamin went on to contribute a great wealth of knowledge to his fellow humans throughout his lifetime. 

Alexander Graham Bell

Undoubtedly one of the most famous inventors in all of human history, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone at the young age of just 29, and just a year letter started the Bell Telephone Company. Despite the immense riches that he received through his invention and company, he continued to relentlessly pursue new ideas purely for the sake of intellectual curiosity. From this curiosity stemmed the "photophone", the first device ever conceived with the ability to transmit sound on beams of light. Graham called this the "greatest invention he had ever created, better than the telephone", and is still used today as the basis of laser and fiber optic technology.


While usually eccentric, sensitive, and occasionally overbearing, inventors are none-the-less an integral part of society. While they may not fit in with everybody else, they usually prefer it that way, tending to their projects without the everyday distractions of life. While we tend to take much of our modern day technology for granted, we truly owe our respects to these great men.

Famous Inventions: Scotchgard

When you get an idea for an invention, it is easy to consider the challenges, risks, and possible setbacks you may encounter and become discouraged. However, there are many stories of famous inventions that involved all of those setbacks and challenges—inventions that people can’t imagine living without today. While many products are the result of coming up with an idea first, and then developing it, many other projects are inspired by moments in everyday life. Some of the most famous inventions have even been invented entirely by accident. The invention of Scotchgard is the story of a product that was discovered entirely by accident, but which still required several years, and a great deal of patience, to develop.

Patsy Sherman, a recent graduate of Gustavus Adolphus College and Samuel Smith, were working for the 3M Company in 1952, attempting to develop a new kind of rubber for jet aircraft fuel lines. One day, a lab assistant spilled some freshly-made synthetic latex that Sherman had mixed onto his shoe. The canvas tennis shoe didn’t appear changed, but after repeated attempts Sherman and Smith were unable to dissolve the substance with a solvent or scrub it off. Instead of focusing on removing it, the two concentrated on understanding the principles of what caused the substance to behave in that way. The area resisted soiling and repelled water. The two recognized the commercial potential of its application and worked on developing it for four years; the product was first sold in 1956. It would be another several years until Sherman and Smith received their first patent for the chemical, Scotchgard, however. The patent, # 3574791 was approved in 1973. During the products development in the 1950s, Sherman was required to wait for performance results outside of the textile mill during testing, due to a rule at that time that women were not allowed in the mill. Sherman was one of few female chemists working at the time, and a rarity in the corporate environment. She was asked to speak on Minnesota Public Radio in 1969 to appeal to the housewives in the radio audience, discussing the merits of her product.

Scotchgard was the first of 13 patents that Sherman and Smith would go on to hold together in fluorochemical polymers and polymerization processes. In 1999, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began an investigation into the class of chemicals used in Scotchgard, after receiving information about the global distribution and toxicity of the key ingredient the product used. Under pressure from the EPA 3M announced the phase-out of production of products with the chemicals PFOA and PFOS in May of 2000. It took three years for the company to develop another substance that could be used in its place; in June 2003, 3M was able to replace the PFOS with a butane-based acid, which had a much shorter half-life in people than the original PFOS (slightly over one month, as opposed to 5.4 years), and the production of Scotchgard was allowed to recommence. Sherman and Smith were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2001, and Sherman was also inducted into the Minnesota Science & Technology Hall of Fame in 2011; she also received the Joseph M. Biedenbach Distinguished Service Award in 1991 from the American Society for Engineering Education. Smith accumulated 30 United States Patents in total, and retired from 3M in 1998.

The invention of Scotchgard illustrates that the process of developing a new invention requires a great deal of patience. A new product can be discovered by accident, and many are, but the true test of an invention is the ability to gradually develop the idea into a marketable product. There are many trials in front of any inventor, and not all inventions will be successful, but the story of Patsy Sherman, Samuel Smith, and their invention of Scotchgard illustrate that anyone can be an inventor.