The audio cassette was designed at Philips' factory in Hasselt, Belgium, by Lou Ottens's team; he sized it with a wooden block that fitted his jacket pocket. Unveiled in Berlin in 1963, it was licensed to other makers for free.
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📍 Sun Valley, Idaho, USA
The world's first ski chairlifts opened in 1936 at Sun Valley, Idaho. A railroad engineer, Jim Curran, designed them by swapping the hooks of a banana-loading conveyor for chairs.
📍 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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📍 Stroud, England
Edwin Budding of Stroud, England, invented the lawn mower in 1830, patenting it as a better way than the scythe to cut grass on sports grounds and large gardens.
📍 Genoa, Italy
Jeans goes back to Genoa (Gênes in French): English merchants called a hard-wearing fustian cloth from the Italian port 'Gene fustian', later just 'jean', and were importing it in bulk by the 1500s.
📍 Apolda, Thuringia, Germany
The Dobermann was first bred around 1890 in Apolda, in central Germany, by Louis Dobermann, a tax collector who also ran a dog pound. With dogs of many breeds at hand, he set out to create the ideal dog to protect him.
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📍 Haukadalur valley, Iceland
Every geyser is named after Geysir, 'the gusher', one hot spring in Iceland's Haukadalur valley that could hurl boiling water 60 metres high. Geysir is mostly quiet now, but its neighbour Strokkur still erupts every few minutes.