Inventions I Like

The contact lens. The soft, squidy friendly lens that we know today was invented by Otto Wichterle in the 1960s, but the concept of the contact is thought to go back to 1508 in a paper written by that wily polymath Leonardo Da Vinci. It is estimated that 125 million people (2%) wear contact lenses worldwide. More info: Wikipedia: Contact lens.

The tampon. This ingenious device dates back to the 19th Century when the French used to use it to stem the blood loss from bullet wounds (tampon means plug in French). Soldiers fighting in the Iraq war have been said to use tampons to the same effect. The modern tampon was invented in 1929 by Matthew Martin, patented in 1931. The expansible tampon in 1974 (1976 patent) by Kermit E Krantz. More info, Wikipedia: Tampon. (on a side note you can get pissed by dipping a tampon in vodka and absorbing the ethanol into the bloodstream).