Top 25 Inventions of 2006

March 22, 2006 8:47 PM

The Modern Marvels Invent Now Challengenamed 25 finalists (selected from over 4,000 entries) in a competition to find the greatest invention of 2006. The winner will be named during History Channel's Great Inventions Week (May 24-27th), but you won't have to wait to check out the finalists. MAKE: Blog briefly profiled each invention in a series of posts this week: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. The inventions will also be on exhibit at the California Science Center in Los Angeles (April 7-15th), the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago (April 20-30th), the Museum of Science in Boston (May 5-14th) and Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central Terminal in New York City (May 22-27th), and finally, the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, OH (through August 2006).
posted by paulychamp (10 comments total)

First post to the blue. Please be gentle.
posted by paulychamp at 8:48 PM on March 22, 2006

WAY better than American (re)Inventor
posted by ernie at 9:20 PM on March 22, 2006

My favorite is the Shift Bicycle from part 5, but there's a lot of cool ones. I wonder how they will judge.
posted by thirteenkiller at 9:22 PM on March 22, 2006

That's weird. I could have sworn that bike was posted to the blue in 2004.
posted by dobbs at 9:28 PM on March 22, 2006

Pauly, awesome. Thanks.
posted by dougunderscorenelso at 10:14 PM on March 22, 2006

I've seen that bike before... and I still don't get how the 2 rear wheels "become" one..? Any video clips?
posted by mhh5 at 1:01 AM on March 23, 2006

If I have to see that bike again I'm gonna puke. Nice computer generated mockup, but where is the prototype? It has been around for at least a year. What will this beast cost? Who is gonna buy this?
posted by fixedgear at 2:41 AM on March 23, 2006

I liked the floating arrow. Not very useful to most of us, but it has that geeky "neat" factor :)

For "useful to the rest of us" that Contour Clone patternmaker is a classic "Why did no one do that 100 years ago?!? Hell, why didn't I think of that?!" invention, so simply and brilliant it makes you kick yourself :)

A lot of the rest were not what I'd consider in the league of greatest inventions of the year.
posted by -harlequin- at 3:04 AM on March 23, 2006

Yeah, the arrow was pretty cool. It's a neat list, and admirably balanced between serious industrial inventions (the carbon, the bridge anchors, the bricks), and personal commercial inventions.
posted by OmieWise at 6:03 AM on March 23, 2006

I've seen that bike before... and I still don't get how the 2 rear wheels "become" one..?

I had this same thought last night. what I finally came up with is that the wheels will eventually meet at the bottom (when the bike speeds up) like they do at the top (when the bike's at rest).
^ || V
kinda like that.

Behrokh Khoshnevis, Professor of Industrial Assistance Engineering, Los Angeles, CA. Contour Crafting: Contour Crafting is a computerized fabrication technology for the automated construction of whole structures as well as sub-components, allowing a single house or colony of houses to be automatically constructed in a single run.
(from the Part 3 link)

I read a book called Fab last year that described something very similar to what this invention looks like. Neil Gershenfeld (the author) has some interesting ideas about info/comm revolutions vs. production revolutions, the latter being the idea behind his Fab Labs.
posted by carsonb at 6:45 AM on March 23, 2006