We owe these five inventions to the car

Cars have brought us some very unexpected inventions over the years. Unlike other sectors, the automotive industry does not often develop technologies that can be easily transferred to other applications.

On the contrary, the vast majority of innovations that have taken place in automobiles since their popularization were only possible through inventions from other industries. GPS and radar guidance came from the aerospace industry. The microchip and lithium-ion batteries come from personalized computing. Car radios and Bluetooth connectivity came from Telekom. CD players from the record industry.

That’s not to say that automakers haven’t upgraded or fully spawned their own spin-off industries (think vulcanized rubber or the need for paved roads). Suffice it to say that unlike aerospace or personal computing, it is sometimes difficult to see what other cars have given the world outside of themselves. Here are a few things we owe to the automotive industry, including some you might not expect.

The assembly line

This is an innovation everyone knows, and it is certainly the innovation that has had the greatest impact on a number of industries. Before the Ford Model T, car production – and almost all products in fact – was made entirely by hand and was an incredibly slow process. It was correspondingly expensive.

When Henry Ford created the Model T, he also introduced the assembly line for mass production. The concept was simple. Instead of one worker doing a lot of complicated jobs, each worker takes one simple step in the production process. This innovation enabled Ford not only to hire more employees, but also to produce cars faster and more cheaply. The result? Ford sold more than 15 million Model Ts, and the model made up approximately 40 percent of all cars sold in the United States at various times. The equivalent today would be seeing two Ford F-150s on five cars on the road.

This assembly line process has enabled the mass production of a number of consumer products. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is how hand-assembled products have since become a pride and the epitome of quality. Look no further than the contrast to Ford’s mass consumer approach to building cars as a premium brand like Ferrari.

Safety glass

Safety glass, which shatters into small pieces so as not to injure anyone in an accident, has been standard in vehicles for decades. However, ask your parents or grandparents and you will hear stories about how dangerous traditional glass cars were in even minor accidents.

Safety glass owes its existence to the short-lived Tucker Car Company, who invented it for its torpedo model. Anyone familiar with Tucker’s history knows that the torpedo was never able to compete against Detroit’s larger auto industry, but safety glass lives on in modern vehicles as well as in products like goggles, face shields, and sunglasses.

BBQ briquettes

Believe it or not, Ford was a nature lover and then recognized as an environmentalist. After Ford became an automotive success, Ford, always passionate about the outdoors, had two problems. One was excessive waste from his sawmill and the other was cooking fuel for his frequent camping trips.

Ford discovered that he could use scraps of wood and sawdust, pressed into lumps and held together by tar and cornstarch, to make a cooking fire quick and easy. Ford called these lump briquettes, short for charcoal briquettes, and built a production facility next to its sawmill.

In what was actually an ingenious cross-marketing effort, Ford sold “picnic kits” with charcoal and portable grills directly through its dealers, on the assumption that its cars could offer Americans not only a sense of freedom but also easy access to nature. Unfortunately, this marketing campaign was attempted in the middle of the Great Depression. Ford’s charcoal briquette division was bought by a team of investors in 1951. The conglomerate was renamed Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes and still exists today.

Fast food

Drive-through restaurants, where a waiter or waitress takes your order at the car and delivers it to you, were a reaction to the popularization of cars and America’s growing road network. The menu items that we associate with fast food today – hamburgers, french fries, milkshakes and apple pie – were staples of these dining options.

Of course, these restaurants presented a number of business challenges of their own that gave the first fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s an opportunity to engage drivers in new ways.

The driver no longer had to park, place his order, have it delivered and then eat at the stand. Disposable packaging, fast service, and the ability to order and collect your food through a drive-thru window allowed drivers to get back on the road faster and even eat on the go. The concept quickly caught on.

Touch screen

Now the automotive industry did not invent the concept of the touch screen. In fact, the first touchscreens date back to 1965 with innovations in radar guidance. In addition, Hewlett-Packard was the first to release a product in 1983 – the HP-150, also known as the HP Touchscreen – that put touchscreens into the hands of consumers. However, personal computers were still a very expensive niche product in the world in the early 1980s (the Hewlett-Packard HP-150 was $ 2,795, which was $ 1983).

The automobile was the first true mass product to introduce the concept of the touch screen to the general public. In 1986, Buick introduced a touchscreen as an option on the Riviera. Unlike modern LCD screens, the Buick Riviera’s Graphic Control Center uses a green and black cathode ray tube display. It’s out of date by today’s standards, and Buick certainly wasn’t the first company to introduce a touchscreen product, but keep in mind that it was a full seven years before Apple launched the Newton PDA and a whole decade before the Palm Pilot.

Biofilm

If you would like to learn more about the Tucker Car Company, check out the 1988 film “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” available on some streaming services.