Great inventions that were made in garages

DID YOU KNOW?

The American garage is the scaffolding of great innovation, a quiet place where genius can flourish, and (depending on your climate) maybe the room where you do your laundry and feed your cat. According to legend, once, long ago, people used to park their cars in garages, too. You really need a garage to get your invention going.


This childhood icon of frustration

Anyway, that traumatizing icon of childhood was not designed at the corporate headquarters of a toy company but in someone's garage. According to the V&A Museum of Childhood, French inventor Arthur Granjean called his creation "L'Ecran Magique," which means "The Magic Screen," and he thought it was cool because it was a drawing toy that did not require batteries.

This Internet icon that made time-wasting a way of life

According to Google's own backstory, the company actually got its start in a pair of Stanford University dorm rooms, but its first office was a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, where a lot of the real innovations were made – things like making sure the actual result you were looking for is buried on page 10 and giving you hotel listings in Suffolk, Virginia, when it knows perfectly well you're in the U.K. Still, hey, what would the world be like without cat memes? What a horrifying thought.

This communication device that preceded the iPhone

Alexander Graham Bell did a lot of his tinkering in a carriage house in Ontario, Canada. And although that famous first voice call was made in a Boston boarding house, the Parks Canada Agency says a lot of Bell's early work on the telephone happened in that Canadian carriage house, including the world's first long-distance phone call.


This glue that lets you decoupage literally anything

According to Martha Stewart, Mod Podge was invented in the garage of Jan Wetstone, who wanted a product that would make decoupage a less laborious and time-consuming process. She not only designed by Mod Podge in her garage, she also proved its worthiness in her garage when she used her brand-new invention to decoupage a Volkswagen Beetle.

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