In 1920, Earle Dickson invented the Band-Aid to help his wife, who kept hurting herself in the kitchen.
Necessity is the mother of invention, especially when blood is involved. Case in point: Earle Dickson loved her accident-prone wife, so he hated seeing her repeatedly go into the kitchen to cook, only to come out with a bruised hand. It was the 1920s, so the best remedy at the time was to tie a piece of cloth around the wound and move on.
Fortunately for the New Jersey couple, Earle worked for Johnson & Johnson, so it was easy to come home with duct tape, antiseptic cotton gauze, and get to work on the cure. And voilà, Band-Aid was born. Dickson went to his boss with his invention, and by 1921, the first Band-Aid brand of adhesive bandages were available. It took a few years for people to understand the novelty and brilliance of the product, but soon Dickson’s home remedy became a staple in home medicine cabinets around the world.
The inventive mind:
The man who invented the microwave did so after walking through a radar tube and finding his chocolate bar melted.
The Swiss inventor of Velcro came up with the idea after finding a bunch of burrs stuck to his clothes after walking his dog.
Alfred Nobel created the Nobel Prize after reading the (obviously) false news of his death in a newspaper.