Top 20 Greatest Things You Didn't Know Were Invented by Kids

Hart Main

Like any good brother, Hart Main would sometimes poke fun at his sister. On one such occasion, Main was teasing his sister about the so-called girlie-scented candles she was selling for a school fundraiser - saying she should have more “manly” scents. Well, his parents heard the joke and told their 13-year-old son that he should do it himself. So he did - and ManCans was born. Candles with scents like sawdust and coffee, fresh-cut grass, and new baseball mitt. To add an even more male-centric touch, Main put his candles in used soup cans - donating the contents to soup kitchens across his state. Knowing that, we like the candles even more now.

Fabian Fernandez-Han

For most of us, the concept of saving money and investing for our future wasn’t something we really thought about until we were older - and then wished we’d started when we were younger. Well, that’s never going to be a regret of Fabian Fernandez-Han - given that he was 10 years old when he started saving. If that isn’t enough to make you jealous and impressed, when he was 12 years old, the New York Stock Exchange had a competition to create something that would help educate kids about investing. Fernandez-Han invented the Oink-A-Saurus application… and won the contest.

Kelly Reinhart

Next time you’re stuck inside on a rainy day with nothing to do, just think about Kelly Reinhart and how a day just like that was the beginning of a million-dollar idea. Reinhart was just 6 years old when her parents, one rainy afternoon, challenged her and her siblings to draw an idea for an invention - pledging to turn the best idea into a prototype. Kelly’s idea was for a hip holster thing to carry around video games. She and her parents made a few changes to the design, but they did make a prototype and in 1998, got it patented.

Cassidy Goldstein

As kids know - and as the parents of kids know - crayons break all the time. One day you have a fresh set of beautiful crayons and not too long later, you have a set of crayon pieces - some too small to even work with properly. Well, that was the problem 11-year-old Cassidy Goldstein was dealing with when she inserted a piece of crayon into a plastic tube used to keep flowers fresh during transport. This elegant solution became a patent in 2002. What followed was a licensing deal with Rand International for 5% of sales and a 2006 Youth Inventor of the Year award from the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation.

Kathryn “KK” Gregory

In 1997, 13-year-old Kathryn “KK” Gregory became the youngest person to sell a product on the QVC shopping network. Her product - invented 3 years earlier - was Wristies. While we all think about keeping our arms and hands warm during those cold winter days, many of us forget about that oh-so-important body part between them… the wrists. On one cold winter day in 1994, Gregory felt her wrists getting really cold and painful, and it was that experience that led to her coming up with the idea for Wristies. After taking some time off from the business to go to college, travel, and work as a videographer, Gregory came back to Wristies in 2010 as CEO.

Sarah Buckel

We all remember the fun of decorating the inside of our locker at school with posters, pictures, and such. But many of us also remember the non-fun of taking it all down at the end of the year and having to scrape off all the tape and that sticky residue. As a kid we may have thought that there oughta be a better way to do this - but unlike the rest of us, 14-year-old Sarah Buckel thought it, and did something about it. What she did was talk to her dad - who was the COO at MagnaCard - about creating magnetic wallpaper for lockers. According to her dad, the company made “boring” magnetic business products, so this was exactly what they needed.

Spencer Whale

Spencer Whale was just 6 years old in 1998 when he visited a hospital and noticed how hard it was for sick children to play and move around when attached to an IV. So, what did Whale do about it? He went home and worked on creating something that would allow children attached to IVs to be more mobile. What he came up with was the KidCare Riding Car. This plastic “car” was big enough for kids and their IVs, making it possible for these once immobile children to move around the hospital and feel just maybe a little more normal during these hard times.

Abbey Fleck

We know that bacon makes everything taste better. But in the early 90s, 8-year-old Abbey Fleck came up with a way to make making bacon better. It all started when she and her dad were cooking up some bacon and realized they didn’t have any paper towels to soak up all that fat. This was the lightbulb moment for Fleck who thought of hanging the bacon so that the fat dripped off during the cooking process making it cleaner and healthier. She and her dad got to work and eventually, the Makin' Bacon was born. In 2002, it was reported that Fleck was makin’ $1 million in royalties from a distribution deal signed with WalMart - and it’s still going strong today.

Robert W. Patch

In June 1962, Robert W. Patch was just 5 years old when he took some old shoe boxes, nails, and bottle caps, setting out to make a toy truck. What he ended up with wasn’t just any toy truck though. It could be taken apart and put back together, and turned into different types of trucks as well. The young patch might never have made history had his father not been a patent attorney and seen patent potential in his son’s creation. At the age of 6, Patch became the youngest-ever recipient of a US patent. He could invent a new toy truck, but the young Patch still couldn’t write his name - so he signed the patent papers with an “X.”

Ralph Samuelson

On October 27, 1925, Fred Waller was issued a patent for his "Dolphin Akwa-Skees" waterskis. However, it was three years earlier that 18-year-old Ralph Samuelson had invented the sport and performed the first ride-on skis he created. The problem for Samuelson was that he didn’t patent his creation nor was there sufficient acknowledgment of it to keep Waller from getting his patent three years later. For a while, Waller was even getting credited by some as the inventor of the sport. Thankfully, today we can give Samuelson that well-deserved recognition - if not his well-deserved patent.

Frank Epperson

Here’s a reason not to tell your kids to clean up. In 1905, after mixing soda powder and water in a cup with a stir stick, 11-year-old Frank Epperson of San Francisco abandoned his concoction on the porch for the night. The weather dropped to record lows for the city, and the next day Epperson realized he’d created a pretty (ahem)... cool treat. He then let the concept lie for 18 years, before marketing and patenting it as the Epsicle in 1923. It was later changed to popsicle, after his children referred to it as “Pop’s ‘sicle”. Today, over 2 billion popsicles are sold each year and are a summer must.

Chester Greenwood

The cold’s to blame for this invention, too. In 1873, while ice-skating in Farmington, Maine, 15-year-old Chester Greenwood was bothered by his cold ears. Allergic to the wool used in then-popular hats with earflaps, Greenwood got creative. He took wire, shaped it into circles, and then asked his grandmother to sew what was either flannel or beaver fur onto them. He patented the idea by age 19, and earmuffs would go on to be used by American soldiers in WWI. Current residents of Farmington now hold a parade to celebrate Greenwood and his invention, which is still seen as an effective way to warm our ears.

Alissa Chavez

From science fair project to potentially lifesaving consumer childcare product – this small pad with a sensor can be placed by parents under an infant’s booster or car seat. If the parent then walks further than 20 feet from the car, an alarm will sound on their phone and key-chain. The car can also be equipped with an alarm to alert people nearby that there’s an unattended infant in the vehicle. Growing up very close to children in her mother’s daycare, 17-year-old Alissa Chavez got the idea after researching the grim statistics of child hot car deaths. The product, now patented, is available through her company “Assila”.

Richie Stachowski

Snorkeling can give you access to some awe-inspiring underwater sights. The only problem? You can’t communicate with your friends until you’re back on the surface. Having experienced this frustration firsthand on a trip to Hawaii, 11-year-old Richie Stachowski decided to find a solution. After researching how sound travels underwater and some experimentation, he created the Water Talkie - a simple but effective device that lets people talk to each other up to 15 feet away underwater. Following his pitch, Toys’R’Us ordered 50,000 Water Talkies, and Stachowski opened his own company, Short Stack LLC. Three years and a few products later, he sold it for a reported $7 million.

Philo Farnsworth

Philo Farnsworth is considered one of the inventors of electronic TV, coming up with the idea for an “image dissector” at age 15. At the time, mechanical televisions worked by scanning pictures through a wheel with holes that would spin around. But Farnsworth wanted to scan images in a line pattern instead. He actually got the idea from the lines he would create while plowing fields. As a 21-year-old, he finished building the dissector. He later won a lengthy patent lawsuit with RCA, and after his death, was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Joseph-Armand Bombardier

Living in rural Quebec in the early 1900s, Joseph-Armand Bombardier was always a tinkerer. Given an old Model T engine at 15, Bombardier worked on it with his brother, and in 1922, came up with his first snowmobile. Well, it was just a sled and propeller powered by the Model T engine, but it was a start. He later significantly improved the design, swapping out the propeller for caterpillar tracks, and began marketing a multi-passenger vehicle in the 1930s and ‘40s. In the 1950s, he got back to his initial dream, producing the lightweight, more motorcycle-sized variety of ski-doo that’s still used today.

George Nissen

In 1930, after watching trapeze artists fall into their safety nets, 16-year-old George Nissen, a high school gymnast, thought it would be cool if the nets allowed the acrobats to bounce back up again and again. So he went out and found a rectangular metal frame, stretched canvas over and created what he dubbed ‘the bouncing rig’. We don’t want to see how the trial and error testing went for this one. Later, in university, his coach, Gary Griswold, helped him perfect his model. While they travelled the Southwest United States together, they learned the Spanish word for diving board, ‘trampolin’, and adopted this word for the invention.

Blaise Pascal

Sure, philosophers might know him from “Pascal’s Wager”, but this child prodigy gave us something the whole world can appreciate: the calculator. In 1642, at age 18, Pascal wanted to help his father calculate taxes, and came up with Pascal’s Calculator, later renamed “Pascaline”. It could add or subtract two numbers, and repeat to produce multiplication or division. He released it to the public in 1645, and four years later, the King gave him the patent. Unfortunately, the calculator was quite heavy, expensive and known for mechanical faults, and thus never saw commercial success. Others created calculating machines before and after, but Pascal is regarded as the father of the mechanical calculator.

Jack Andraka

15-year-old Jack Andraka invented something that may very well save tens of thousands of lives. Because of the lack of funding for the less prevalent pancreatic cancers, ELISA – the detection method – was expensive, unreliable, and hadn’t been updated in over 60 years. With the recent discovery of carbon nanotubes however, Andraka and his mentor at Johns Hopkins University were able to create a more reliable test at a fraction of the cost. His initial idea was reportedly rejected by 199 labs before one professor gave him a chance. He went on to win the youth achievement Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award and $75,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Louis Braille

Having lost his vision in a childhood accident, Louis Braille attended a school for blind people. The books had raised letters so the students could learn with their fingers, but this caused the books to be bulky and expensive. In search of a more effective alternative, Braille learned a military code called “night writing”. By 1824, he had developed a similar but simplified style of code based on 6 dots. He was just 15 years old at the time. Today, there’s an estimated 285 million visually impaired people in the world. Braille’s code has been translated into many languages, making the written word more efficient and accessible for people with visual impairments and low vision across the globe.

Which of these under-20 inventors impressed you the most? Let us know in the comments.