10 Cool South African Inventions

There are many South Africans who drove innovation forward and provided the world with new products or services. Some of the well-known South African IT innovators include Mark Shuttleworth (Thawte and Canonical), and Elon Musk (Paypal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX). Musk’s SpaceX, for example, was the first privately developed and owned spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. Doctor Chris Barnard’s first heart transplant in 1967 and Sasol’s oil-from-coal refinery are well known, but here are some of the lesser known inventions which came from South Africans.  Here’s a list of 10 cool inventions from our motherland.

Pratley’s putty:

Did you know that Pratley’s glue had a part in the 1969 moon landing? Turns out South African George Pratley invented Pratley’s Putty while trying to create a glue that would hold components in an electrical box. The substance was used to hold bits of the Apollo XI mission’s Eagle landing craft together.

The Computed Axial Tomography Scan or CAT scan:

A Cape Town physicist Allan Cormack and his associate Godfrey Hounsfield won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1979 for their mathematical technique in which an X-ray source and electronic detectors are rotated about the body and the resulting data then provides a cross-section map of the body.

Retinal Cryoprob:

Selig Percy Amoils,created a new method of catarac surgery at the Baragwanath hospital in Soweto. His achievement was widely recognised and in 1975 he received a Queen’s Award for Technological Innovation.

Speed Gun:

There is no denying we’re a sports mad nation. Which could explain how Henri Johnson came to invent the speedball. First launched in 1992, the device measures speeding objects such as cricket and tennis balls, accurately reporting distance, speed and angle.

Smartlock safety syringes:

Conceptualised by a group of designers at the Vaal University of Technology, it is a three-piece single use syringe that provides protection against needle-stick contamination.

Oil from coal:

Sasol is the world’s first, and largest, oil-from-coal refinery, providing 40% of South Africa’s fuel.

Dolosse:

It’s interesting to note those oddly shaped concrete blocks you usually spot along coastal areas such as the Waterfront, were first developed here in South Africa. Eric Merrifield designed the structures to break up wave action and protect harbour walls and they can weigh as much as 20 tonne each.

The First Heart Transplant:

Probably the most well-known of all local achievements. Dr Chris Barnard made history in Cape Town in1967 when he performed the operation on Louis Washkansky.

Kreepy Krauly:

It keeps most pool owners happy, but freaks out little children – and it was invented right here in Springs, South Africa. Ferdinand Chauvier was trying to figure out a way to take the hassle out of pool cleaning resulting in the first one being in 1974.

Q20:

A KwaZulu-Natal resident invented the product to displace water from the distributor caps of his VW Beetle, notorious for stalling in wet weather. Initially he did not know what to call it, but since it had 20 answers to 20 questions Q20 seemed the obvious choice.