Bubble wrap was invented in 1957 in a garage in Hawthorne, New Jersey, by engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes. They were trying to make textured wallpaper; when that flopped, they tried greenhouse insulation before it found its calling as packaging.
📍 Yorubaland (SW Nigeria & Benin)
The shekere, a dried gourd wrapped in a net of beads or cowrie shells, comes from the Yoruba of West Africa; an 1852 Yoruba dictionary already lists it. It later became a staple of Cuban and Brazilian music too.
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📍 Lombardy (Pavia & Como), Italy
The first electric battery was a stack of zinc and copper discs separated by brine-soaked cloth, built by Alessandro Volta in Lombardy in 1799. It grew out of his argument with Luigi Galvani over twitching frog legs.
📍 Kasai, DR Congo (Kuba Kingdom)
Kuba cloth comes from the old Kuba Kingdom in the Kasai region of DR Congo. Men weave squares from raffia palm fibre, then women embroider them and snip the stitches into a soft pile that looks and feels like velvet.
📍 Barbados
The grapefruit is a chance cross of two Asian imports, the pomelo and the sweet orange. It was first described on Barbados in 1750 as the 'forbidden fruit' and only reached Florida in 1823.
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📍 Sonoran Desert (Arizona, USA & Sonora, Mexico)
The giant cactus of Western films grows wild only in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona and northwest Mexico. It grows so slowly that its first arms appear after 50 to 100 years, and it can live for more than 150 years.
📍 Balsas River valley, Mexico
Corn was bred about 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte in Mexico's Balsas River valley. It was domesticated only once, then spread throughout the Americas.