5 Inventions That Came Out of the Great Depression

Old car radio

The Great Depression began in 1929 and lasted for an entire decade, affecting nearly every aspect of daily life for people all over the world — and hitting the United States especially hard. U.S. unemployment soared to nearly 25%, businesses shuttered, and families lost their life savings. Food became scarce in many communities, especially as a severe drought hit the Great Plains, leading to the agricultural disaster known as the Dust Bowl.

This difficult era also impacted innovation. Independent inventors found themselves with less funding, and many businesses shied away from risky initiatives, but big inventions also helped keep companies and innovators afloat during the hard times. Some inventions were successful specifically because of the economic downturn, such as the groundbreaking new adhesive that could repair just about anything. For others, success came in spite of the crisis. Here are five inventions that came out of the Great Depression that are still shaping our lives today.

Photo credit: Popovic Dragan via Getty Images

Sliced Bread

A century ago, people had to bust out a bread knife whenever they wanted a sandwich or slice of toast. That changed in 1928, when a bread slicing and wrapping machine invented by Otto Rohwedder made its debut at a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri. The machine proved to be so popular that Rohwedder had trouble keeping up with demand from other bakeries. After the Depression hit, economic realities forced him to sell his patent to a larger manufacturing company — but the story has a happy ending. The owners hired the inventor as the vice president and sales manager of a new division formed just for his machines. In 1930, Wonder Bread started advertising its own sliced bread, and, although Wonder Bread used its own machines, Rohwedder’s bread-slicer sales exploded as the trend grew. By 1933, sliced bread accounted for 80% of all bread sales. The invention was so influential, it led to the phrase still used to praise new wonders today: “The best thing since sliced bread.”

Photo credit: INTERFOTO/ Alamy Stock Photo

Nylon Stockings and Toothbrushes

Before the Depression, the DuPont chemical company had a “fundamental research” program — a team of scientists tasked with increasing scientific knowledge rather than developing specific projects. But with the economic downturn, the division became more focused. It was already working on synthetic textiles and had invented neoprene, although the material wasn’t particularly useful at the time. They’d also worked with rayon, which didn’t make a great substitute for silk, and was only partially manmade. Nylon was the first entirely synthetic fiber developed by DuPont that was actually useful — and its invention in 1937 was a very bright prospect after the agricultural woes of the era.

Nylon started appearing in toothbrushes in 1938, and DuPont showed off its new fabric to the world as hosiery at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The first day nylon stockings became available to the public, around 800,000 pairs flew off the shelves. DuPont’s Depression-era investment in fiber technology paid off; by 1937, 40% percent of its sales came from products that didn’t exist before 1929, including freon, neoprene, and lucite.

Scotch Tape

Richard Drew, the inventor of Scotch tape, cut his teeth as an inventor by creating masking tape in his spare time. In his first job as a lab tech at 3M (known then as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing), he delivered sandpaper samples to auto manufacturers, and after hearing many an auto painter curse over their DIY masking solutions, he decided to design the perfect tape. He worked on it at 3M at first, but after he was scolded and told to get back to work, he continued the project at home. Drew eventually made his masking tape from crepe paper, cabinetmaker’s glue, and glycerin in 1925, and got a big promotion.

Another industrial problem came to his attention soon after: Bakeries had started using newly invented cellophane for packaging, but had nothing attractive to seal it with. So Drew started experimenting with a clear tape. The adhesives he used on the masking tape looked brown, so he had to invent a new type of adhesive to make sure the tape stayed clear. The result was a cellophane tape with adhesive made from oil, resins, and rubber. As the story goes, the name “Scotch tape” was inspired by an early version of Drew’s masking tape, which had adhesive only on the edges, causing one auto painter to ask why Drew was so “Scotch” — a slang term for “cheap” at the expense of Scottish people. Scotch tape debuted in 1930, right at the start of the Great Depression, and as more and more households had to be thrifty and resourceful to survive, the product came along right in the nick of time. People used Scotch tape for everything from mending clothing to capping milk bottles — and even repairing cracked eggs.

Photo credit: Steve Cukrov/ Alamy Stock Photo

Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies

In August 1930, amid the early days of the Great Depression, a Massachusetts chef named Ruth Wakefield took a major risk: She decided to chase her dream of opening an inn and restaurant. It was touch and go at first: In the Toll House Inn’s first month, the money on hand dwindled to just $10, a little more than $180 today. But by the end of the year, the business had grown so popular it needed 12 employees to keep up with demand. By the end of the Depression, against all odds, Wakefield had to expand the inn to serve around 1,000 diners per day. Comfort food with complimentary second helpings along a busy road for auto travelers turned out to be a winning strategy.

Wakefield is widely credited with inventing the chocolate chip cookie, after stumbling on a recipe that proved to be a hit with diners at the Toll House Inn. Originally served not as a stand-alone dish but as an accompaniment to ice cream, the cookie became the restaurant’s most enduring creation, and Wakefield appeared in newspapers and radio shows to talk about the trendy treat. In its early days it was called the “Toll House cookie” or “chocolate crunch cookie”; the “chocolate chip cookie” name came around 1939 because the recipe called for literally chipping the chocolate off the bar.

Speaking of chocolate chipping: After Nestle got Wakefield’s permission to use the recipe, the cookie started appearing in ads, and it was so popular that it started influencing product development. Early on, Nestle released a semisweet chocolate bar scored into 160 pieces, and in 1940, the company debuted its “morsel” chips — the chocolate chips we know today.

Photo credit: Martin Bergsma/ Shutterstock

Car Radios

In 1928, Paul Galvin co-founded a radio parts manufacturing company along with his brother, Joseph. When the Depression hit, households stopped buying noncritical items such as radios, so Galvin had to think fast to save his business. He noticed that car sales hadn’t dipped — people had come to rely on their vehicles — and he figured that inventing a car radio could be a good bet. (Car radios had been attempted before by other companies, but were too cumbersome and expensive to be viable products.) After landing on a solid design at a price that would actually sell, Galvin and his team mounted the new radio on his car and drove all the way from Chicago to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to attend the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association Convention. They didn’t even get a booth; they just parked the car and cranked up the radio. It may seem counterintuitive that a luxury add-on would thrive during a time of extreme economic hardship, but the car radio took off. The team called their radio the Motorola, and their company eventually took the same name.

Recommendations For You

5 Visionary Inventions By Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci’s ornithopter

In the history of humankind, there are few people who have rivaled the sheer genius of Leonardo da Vinci. The Italian polymath defined the High Renaissance period at the turn of the 16th century, when his fame grew primarily due to his paintings. His magnum opus, the “Mona Lisa,” which he painted between 1503 and 1506, ranks among the most famous paintings of all time, and no religious artwork has been more reproduced than his masterpiece “The Last Supper.”

But Leonardo was far more than a supremely talented artist. As an engineer, inventor, and student of seemingly everything, he left behind an incredible 5,000 pages of notes and drawings covering everything from human and animal anatomy to astronomy, botany, cartography, and more. His inventions, many of which were designed with military applications in mind, were truly visionary. Few of them were built during his lifetime or saw any practical use, but they were so far ahead of their time it’s almost as if Leonardo was seeing aspects of the modern world long before they came to fruition. Here are five of his greatest creations — designs that display the undeniable genius of the ultimate Renaissance man.

Photo credit: Science History Images/ Alamy Stock Photo

The Ornithopter: Leonardo da Vinci’s Flying Machine

Some 400 years before the Wright brothers took flight in the first successful motor-operated airplane, Leonardo da Vinci was already designing flying machines. He wasn’t the first to do this, but he was the most thorough and inventive. He studied the flight of birds and bats, which he used to inform the design of his ornithopter — a device that flies by flapping its winged appendages. Leonardo never built his design, but his ideas regarding flying machines, bird flight, and the nature of air itself were centuries ahead of their time. His studies, which consisted of more than 35,000 words and 500 sketches, included concepts such as the nature of stalling in flight, the relationship between a curved wing section and lift, and the concept of air as a fluid. Incredibly, he even came close to suggesting the force that Isaac Newton would later define as gravity. Leonardo’s fascination with flight also led him to design a primitive parachute and a device known as a “helical air screw,” which bears some similarities to a helicopter.

The Self-Propelled Cart: The Ancestor of the Modern Car

Giving motion to otherwise inanimate objects was one of Leonardo’s main interests. “The motive power,” he once wrote, “is the cause of all life.” This interest drove him to create what can be considered the ancestor of the modern car. Using a complex system of springs and a mechanism similar to a differential (allowing the turning angle to be set), Leonardo’s designs for a self-propelled cart were well ahead of their time, though he never actually built his invention. In fact, for centuries, it was generally thought that the device he sketched in 1478 would never work. Later studies, however, found that the cart could function, and the first working model was built in 2004.

Photo credit: Print Collector/ Hulton Archive via Getty Images

The Self-Supporting Bridge: A Design Used in His Own Time

Leonardo designed many bridges during his lifetime. Some, such as his flattened arch bridge, were highly ambitious — had it been built, it would have been about 10 times longer than typical bridges of his day. Others were intricate, perhaps most notably his revolving bridge, with its lattice structure and counterweighted construction. But it was one of his simplest designs that proved the most effective. His self-supporting bridge was a portable wooden construction built from wooden poles with no need for screws or other fastenings. The bridge supported itself and became more stable as more pressure was added. Unlike many of Leonardo’s designs, this one was used in his own time, by the Milanese military.

Photo credit: Endless Travel/ Alamy Stock Photo

The Diving Suit: A Vision Centuries Ahead of Its Time

The diving suit is another example of one of Leonardo’s creations being too bold and innovative for his time, but strangely predictive of future technology. More than two centuries before the development of the first pressure-resisting diving suits, the Renaissance inventor drew up plans for a diving suit that would, in theory, allow military divers to attack enemy ships from beneath the waves. Pipes connected the suit to a floating device, giving the diver access to air. This severely limited the range and depth of the suit, so Leonardo later considered installing bags of air directly on the suit. The suit was never used, but with its face mask and goggles, it closely resembled the diving suits that were designed centuries later.

Photo credit: Heritage Images/ Hulton Fine Art Collection via Getty Images

The Armored Vehicle: The Prototype of the Modern Tank

Leonardo’s military designs included a ludicrously large crossbow intended for launching boulders and a truly terrifying 33-barreled cannon (a precursor of the modern machine gun). But arguably his most forward-thinking land-based weapon of war was the armored vehicle. Often considered a prototype of the modern tank, the crank-powered vehicle was shielded by a conical covering inspired by a tortoise shell. Sixteen light cannons poked out around the vehicle’s perimeter, creating a mobile gun platform that could be driven headlong into the enemy. “No company of soldiers is so great that it will not break through them,” Leonardo wrote to his patron Ludovico Sforza, adding, “And behind these our infantry will be able to follow quite unharmed and without any opposition.” The design was more fanciful than practical, but the concept certainly foreshadowed the tanks of the future that shaped modern warfare.

Recommendations For You

5 Inventions That Came Out of the Great Depression

Sliced Bread

Nylon Stockings and Toothbrushes

You may also like

Scotch Tape

Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies

Car Radios

More on science & technology

Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

5 Fun Facts About Swimsuits Through History

Recommendations For You

7 Surprising Facts About the Age of Dinosaurs

20th-Century Inventions That Changed the World

The Most Popular Things Traded on the Silk Road

The Surprising Origins of 6 Everyday Objects

More Trending Stories

Revealing Facts About 5 Celebrated Painters

5 Facts About England’s Elizabethan Era

Unforgettable Moments in Baseball History

5 Fun Facts About Swimsuits Through History