A Shaker woman, Sister Tabitha Babbett, watched two men laboriously sawing wood with a straight blade as she worked her spinning wheel. She figures that the job would be easier if saw teeth were cut into the edge of a wheel.That's how the circular saw blade was invented.

Alastair Pilkington

Alistair Pilkington, Production Chief of the British glass making firm Pilkington Brothers, had been working for years on developing a way to rid glass of distortion. One evening in 1952 Pilkington was washing dishes in his home and he daydreamed as he watched a bar of soap float in the greasy water. He visualised glass floating like a bar of soap and suddenly conceived of an idea that revolutionised the glass industry. He made a connection between two dissimilar concepts – floating soap and distortions in glass – and invented float glass process.

Float glass is a ribbon of glass made by floating the melted raw materials at high temperature over a bath of molten tin. It took seven years and more than £7 million ( £80 million in today's money ) to develop the process. The float glass process became the universal process for the manufacture of high quality flat glass.

George de Mestral

Hook and Loop fabric fasteners were invented in 1941 by George de Mestral after a day of hunting in the Jura Mountains in France. Carefully inspecting the burs in his wool pants and his dog's coat, he found hundreds of little hooks engaging the loops in the material and fur. De Mestral made a machine to duplicate the hooks and loops in nylon. He called his new product Velcro ® Fasteners, from the French words VELours and CROchet. Today there are thousands of uses for Velcro ® Brand Fasteners, all thanks to a man hunting with his dog in the mountains.

There is a claim that NASA Engineers came up with Velcro whilst trying to find a fastening device for space suits but I prefer the former story.

Trevor Baylis

In 1993, Trevor watched a TV program on Africa showing that in many regions radio was the only available media, but the need for batteries or electricity made them too expensive or difficult to access. There was a need for a radio that did not rely on electricity.

Trevor picked up on the word 'need'. and in his workshop at home began experimented with a hand brace, an electric motor and a small radio. He found that the brace turning a motor would act as a generator that would supply sufficient electricity to power the radio. The addition of a clockwork mechanism meant that a spring could be wound up and that as the spring unwound the radio would play. His first working prototype ran for 14 minutes on a two minute wind. Trevor had invented a clockwork (windup) radio!

But, it was a fraught time getting the thing recognised and his break came in April 1994 when the invention was featured the BBC program 'Tomorrow's World'. The product's potential was only then realised by the key individuals required in the innovaton chain, culminating in 1995 of the set up BayGen Power Industries in Cape Town using disabled people for radio assembly.

Soichiro Honda.

Soichiro Honda was a small town boy with an intuitive mechanical genius who created a business empire that still bears his name.

Soichiro Honda established the Honda Motor Company in 1948. The sweeping world wide popularity of Honda products - beginning with engines and continuing with motorcycles, automobiles, power equipment and light trucks - was stimulated by Honda's consistent upgrading of its product lines with scores of technological innovations.

Steven Jobs & Steven Wozniak

Jobs was the marketeer and Wozniak the technical power behind Apple Computers

Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They apparently started the business in a garage! In 1976, Wozniak designed what would become the Apple I. Jobs, who had an eye for the future, insisted that he and Wozniak try to sell the machine, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was born.

Apple did not begin to take off until 1977, when the Apple II debuted at a local computer trade show. The first personal computer to come in a plastic case and include color graphics, the Apple II was an impressive machine.

Today Jobs is still around - his latest project the iMac. Apple will never dominate the market but will continue to challenge the market, to innovate where the larger companies can't.

Edwin Lands

Inventor of the polaroid camera launched in 1948. It is said that his small daughter provided the inspiration. When he was taking pictures whilst on a family holiday she asked how soon she could see them; he explained that it took time to get them developed. He thought something was basically wrong with photography if people had to wait hours or days to see pictures and started doing experiments. By 1947 he had an answer. But it took an outstanding general manager J.Harold Booth to promote them successfully.

Clive Sinclair

A great inventor who couldn't match technical innovation with business acumen. In 1972 he launched a cheap pocket calclator and became the UK market leader. From there he produced the world's first pocket television set. Then the ZX81 computer.

The C5 electric buggy was his crowning mistake - a risk too far- it flopped in 1985 !

...but, a businessman Maurice Levensohn from Liverpool made a fortune out of the ill-fated Sinclair C5 electric buggy by marketing it as a collector's item selling nearly 7,000 of the trikes at up to £700 each after buying up unsold stock.

Akio Morita

One of the founders of Sony was Akio Morita whose interest in electronics and sound reproduction began as he listened to Western classical music on his mother's Victrola.

With Masaru Ibuka, Akio formed Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Company, in January 1947. Morita realized that the English translation of his company's name was too clumsy, and its shortened Japanese version, Totsuko, was difficult for English-speaking people to pronounce. The company needed a new name. Ibuka and Morita came across the Latin word sonus for sound. They considered using "sonny" but this could be misinterpreted in the Japanese language so they dropped one "n" and changed the "o" sound. The result was "Sony," a word with no meaning, but one that was easy to pronounce and easy to remember.

Throughout its history, Sony has created the first transistorized TV, the portable stereo player - the Walkman, the small hand-held flat television - Watchman, and the compact disc player - the Discman. In addition, Sony built the world's very first video cassette recorder - the Betamax, invented the TV tube - the Trinitron system. and evolutionized television news gathering and broadcasting with its hand-held video camera and small videotape players.

Spencer Silver & Art Fry

Known best for the originators of 3M Post-its Spencer Silver, was a chemist searching for a stronger adhesive who broke the rules and concocted one that didn't stick at all well.How do you use something that works poorly?

Silver's colleague, Art Fry, who sang in a choir and was constantly annoyed when the markers he put in music books fell out, came up with an idea. By associating his problem with Silver's weak adhesive Fry dreamed up Post-It notes.

Silver's adhesive was novel, but the creative act was in finding a way to make it worthwhile- this became the Post-it - glue that was not very good.

Malcolm McLean

In the mid-1950s, Malcolm McLean created the concept of containerized shipping, an idea that later became the basis of the Sea-Land Company, the first shipping company to ship goods in containers. The breakthrough idea came when McLean realized that it made little sense to pack objects into crates and later to unload the crates from a truck at dockside prior to putting them aboard a ship. He reasoned that it would be far easier if the entire truck container were put on the ship. There would be less breakage and less theft and the handling costs would be lower.

Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell By Catherine MacKenzie pp.72-73

"It struck me that the bones of the human ear were very massive, indeed,as compared with the delicate thin membrane that operated them, and the thought ocurred that if a membrane so delicate could move bones so relatively massive, why should not a thicker and stouter piece of membrane move my piece of steel. And the telephone was conceived."