20 Inventions We All Take For Granted And Liposuction Isn’t One Of Them

My days are all pretty much the same. I wake up, check my cellphone, switch on the lights, brew my coffee and search ‘liposuction’ on the Internet. Wait. What? Did I just say ‘liposuction’? We surround ourselves with inventions that are pure genius, but how often do we actually stop to appreciate these creations and discoveries? Here is a list of the 20 most overlooked inventions that influence our lives on a daily basis.

“Bleep, bleep!”

“Bleep, bleep!” – that’s the sound of the cashier scanning your stuff at the supermarket, if you didn’t realize. Almost every product we buy has been equipped with a bar code. This incredible technology allows us to instantly register and identify products so that store owners don’t have to remember every item and its price. The first bar code was printed on a pack of Wrigley Company chewing gum in 1974.

Mattress Liposuction

Gone are the days of having to hide your money in your mattress. No more obese beds desperately in need of bedroom liposuction. Today we have ATMs. This smart invention allows us to access our money at any time without having to fish for it under our sleeping partner. It also prevents us from having to panic about potential pick-pockets.

Plastic Money

What a pleasure it is not having to walk around with a wad of cash in our wallets. The credit card affords us the comfort and convenience of spending money without having the actual amount of cash that we need on us. I’m sure there are a high number of married folks who wish John Biggins had never invented the plastic money card.

Time Bomb Diffusers

I’m in a hurry so I shove my leftover macaroni into the microwave. I set the timer to 120 seconds. Nothing more and nothing less… or is it? Heck, if I don’t make it to that ‘stop’ button when the timer hits 1 second left, we’re all toast. Microwaves are brilliant! The box heats our food in no time. Can you imagine a machine that did the opposite? A machine that froze or cooled down our food in minutes? Engineers are working on it.

Invisible Power

To this day, experts still don’t know exactly what electricity is. And then there’s me – I can’t remember where the light switch is in my bathroom. This is not an invention per se, rather it is a discovery. Who actually made this discovery is a platform for controversy. Can you imagine a world without electricity? This list would hardly be complete if no-one had discovered it.

Voice Teleporters

Are you reading this on your mobile phone? If you answered ‘yes’ then you own a “voice teleporter”, my friend. It’s mind-blowing that according to the U.N. more people around the world have cell phones than they have access to toilets. Approximately 6 out 7 billion of the world’s population own this device.

Color Boxes

I say ‘television’, you say ‘telly’ or ‘boob tube’ or ‘idiot box’. By using the wonders of electricity and creativity, the television has become a staple for most homes around the world. Funnily enough, Philo Farnsworth, the man who invented the T.V., wouldn’t let his children watch T.V. “There’s nothing on it worthwhile, and we’re not going to watch it in this household, and I don’t want it in your intellectual diet.” he told his son.

Climate Changers

No, this isn’t Al Gore’s climate change TED talk. What we’re talking about here is air conditioning. Listen, I love the sun and heat when I head out to the beach, but I’m not really a fan of swimming in sweat to get to work. Air conditioning has become so widespread that we barely think when it’s on. “Apparatus for Treating Air” was actually the original name that Willis Carrier gave it.

One In A Billion

Take a look out the window and tell me what you see. The wrong answer is, “The neighbor stealing my newspaper, again!” The right answer is, “Cars. Oh, so many cars!” There are over a billion of them around the world and strangely 95% of a car’s lifetime is spent parked. Surely there’s a smarter way to spend your money, like perhaps on liposuction. What is this obsession with liposuction?

Disappearing Apparatuses

Among the greatest mysteries in the world, the disappearing remote control is one of the top hits. Some believe that a “remote control elf” hides it just to annoy us. This invention saves us from having to get up over and over again just to change channels. With today’s enormous collection of T.V. channels, we can only be thankful for this creation.

Flying Limousines

At least the front of an airplane resembles a limousine, but the rest is kind of like a bus. In 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright took the credit for being the first to successfully fly an airplane and since then it has really taken off, literally. At any given time, there are approximately 660,000 people in the air on commercial flights.

Time Machines

“Just 5 more minutes…” The ‘snooze’ button is probably the most loved button of all the buttons out there, because there are a lot. Without clocks and watches we wouldn’t be able to know just how late we slept. But I’m pretty sure that these time tickers have more important functions than that. We would have a pretty difficult time making plans and appointments without ever knowing exactly what time they should start.

Food Life-Preservers

Quite frequently comes the time when we cook too much food. Our tummies are filled to the brim and we feel like we’re about to fall into a food coma, “Quick, get the liposuction equipment!” Thank goodness we have somewhere to store all those leftovers and there’s no need to waste. Fridges are life extenders. They preserve food products for longer than they would ever have been able to survive in regular conditions.

Instant Images

Do we even appreciate the marvels of the printer? Instead we just get irritated when the ink runs out. Printing is incredible because it lets us take something digital and almost instantly bring it to life. It’s like, “Hey! This picture on the screen would look lovely in a frame.” An entire 13 seconds later, VOILA! With the introduction of 3D printing we’re changing the way we look at printing and production.

Wireless Telegraphy

Similar to electricity, radio waves are invisible to the naked eye. Every single day we listen to music, talk shows and the news on our radios. In fact, radio is considered the main news supplier in most African countries. The United Nations found that there are about 44,000 different radio stations around the world. Most people tune into about 2 to 4 channels on a regular basis.

Moment Savers

Saying “cheese” before the camera was invented was different to how it is now. A person stood in front of a canvas and waited patiently for the artist to finish their portrait. Thank heavens technology has moved us past that time. Today there’s a SNAP with our digital cameras and we’ve got ourselves a picture. An estimation put the number of pictures taken every day on a digital camera, including cellphones, at 1.8 billion!

3D Sound

There’s nothing more annoying than some dude getting onto the bus with a boombox blaring rock music. Then again, that’s a complaint from the 1980’s. We can only be grateful that earphones and headphones are around. No need to disturb those around you or to be disturbed by them. Earphones allow us to close ourselves in our own world of music without bugging anyone else. These earpieces give us the sensation of 3D sound and they can even fit into our pockets. Don’t get me started on untangling them, though.

Upgraded Feathers

“Sign here and here, please.” Without a pen, you can’t do much signing. There was a time when we signed by dipping a feather in ink. Today, with thanks to László Bíró, we have the ballpoint pen. No more messy ink everywhere, no more feathers in our fedoras. Alright, alright, you can still wear a fedora.

Mini Mathematicians

1 plus 1 is 2. 2 plus 2 is 4. Great, and that’s as far as we’re going with this. Once upon a time when we needed to count and calculate, we had something called an abacus. We’ve advanced big time from that time and now we have calculators so small that they can fit in our pockets. Would you believe it if I told you that educators are concerned that children in schools are losing valuable life skills because of these machines? Their claim is that kids need to learn the skills of calculating manually.

World Access

There was no way that the Internet wasn’t going up on this list. You wouldn’t have found this list without it. Well unless you took the time to page past my daily diary entries from my journal. We use the Internet to find information, to send messages across the world and to watch movies. There are hundreds of thousands of other uses too. It has so much information that we can’t even track it all – that makes sense since Google announced that the Internet has more than 5 million terabytes of data. However, we do need to be careful as hackers break into about 30,000 websites every day.

All around us there are inventions that have revolutionized the way we live, we just need to open our eyes and appreciate them. Some are more exciting than others, but they are all valuable. Liposuction is not one of them, though. If you ever want to really feel thankful for these creations, just imagine a life without them. Trust me, you’ll give them the credit they deserve.