Treasures with a history

Did Romans invent army knives? These things are way older than you think

Jell-O, Swiss Army Knives, roller skates, lighters… It’s hard to picture these items existing hundreds of years ago, isn’t it? And yet, some of the treasures that make modern life easier have indeed been around, in some cases, for millennia. Read on to learn when these 11 items were actually first invented!

Gelatin desserts existed centuries before Jell-O! Medieval cooks used boiled animal collagen to make shimmering molds for banquets. The brand Jell-O came in 1897, when Pearl B. Wait in New York flavored powdered gelatin with fruit syrups.

It’s hard to imagine the video game giant existing before electricity. But Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto as a playing card company. For decades, it produced hanafuda cards, then toys, and only entered electronics in the 1970s.

Long before disco rinks or inline blades, a Belgian inventor named John Joseph Merlin assembled the first roller skates in 1760, skating into a London ballroom (and famously crashing). Early versions had fixed metal wheels and very poor steerability.

Famously, lighters predate matches. But do you know exactly how long lighters have existed? The first usable one appeared in 1823, invented by a German chemist. The first friction match only appeared 3 years later.

That’s what we call the famous red multi-tool standardized by Victorinox in 1891. But archaeologists discovered a Roman folding tool from around 200 AD made of silver and iron, with knife, spoon, fork, spike, and spatula. It might not have been mass-produced or standardized, but it certainly was there first.

We may associate dishwashers with mid-20th-century suburban kitchens, but the first one dates to 1886, when Josephine Cochrane built a hand-cranked model to save her fine china from clumsy servants.

The 20th century was still far away when the first working escalator was patented. The year was 1859, yet it was introduced at Coney Island only 30 years later—as an amusement ride!

It’s not a thing of the 90s! Its roots go back to 1969, when ARPANET connected four U.S. universities for military-funded research. The web’s 1991 debut by Tim Berners-Lee made it public and visual, hence the illusion that the "Internet" appeared overnight.

Do you associate concrete blocks with modernity in your mind? Think again! The Romans used advanced volcanic-ash mixes to build huge, durable structures (like the Pantheon dome or aqueducts). The Ancient Roman techniques even give clues on how to make longer-lasting concrete today.

We are not talking about electronic printers. Think about the movable type technology: It goes back in history way, way farther than Gutenberg’s system.

Printing with woodblocks and even early movable type existed in China long before the 15th-century European printing that Gutenberg perfected and popularized.

The great ancestor of GPS was probably the magnetic compass used for navigation. The discovery that magnetic force could be used to calculate the position of the poles occurred over 2000 years ago during the Han dynasty, in China.

Making up language

Words that were invented by fiction writers, and now we all use them

Image: yeonhee

Sometimes, preexisting words just don’t cut it for writers. So they invent new ones. That was the case for terms like utopia, robot, and nerd. Whether they grew to be used in philosophical texts or on playgrounds, they have certainly entered our vocabulary. Let’s take a look at 11 examples!

Image: Jamie Street

The word has been many things, from a schoolyard insult to a badge of honor for having certain interests. It first appeared in Dr. Seuss’s 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo, where a strange creature called a "Nerd" appears among other fanciful beasts.

Seuss didn’t define it as brainy or awkward, but within a few years, the word was popping up in slang to describe socially inept people or bookworms.

Image: Shahrooz Shekaraubi

Today, when we say "cyberspace," we mean the intangible digital world we enter when we go online. But the word was coined by sci-fi writer William Gibson in his 1982 short story Burning Chrome.

Gibson later famously described cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination" shared by billions of connected users. The term predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade, yet it foresaw the immersive, sometimes overwhelming, reality of living digitally.

Image: Markus Winkler

Today, when we say we have "debunked" a myth, we mean that we have exposed it as false. The word itself, however, originated as a literary invention in 1923, coined by American writer William E. Woodward in his book Bunk.

Woodward used debunk to mean stripping nonsense, or "bunk" of its dignity, a definition that closely aligns with how the word is still used today.

Image: ThisisEngineering

Today, we picture robots as everything from Roombas to humanoid androids, but the word itself dates back to a 1920 Czech play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Karel Čapek.

The term comes from robota, meaning "forced labor" or "drudgery." In the play, however, the "robots" were not mechanical but biological constructs, closer to what we might now call clones. Both the term and the concept spread quickly across Europe and the United States, reaching the vocabulary of more and more writers.

Image: Miguel Valencia

When we say something is "utopic," we mean it’s impossibly ideal. The term "utopia" was coined by Sir Thomas More in his 1516 book Utopia, where he described an imaginary island society with perfect laws, harmony, and equality.

But the trick was in the name: in Greek, ou-topos means "no place" while eu-topos means "good place." The word took off quickly, giving us not only "utopia" but also its darker twin, "dystopia," which would dominate much of modern literature.

Image: Michelle Baker

Few words sound as delightful as what they mean, and "serendipity" is one of them. It refers to a happy accident, a lucky discovery made while looking for something else.

The term was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, a British writer and politician, inspired by a Persian fairy tale titled The Three Princes of Serendip. In the story, the princes are constantly making discoveries "by accident and sagacity."

Image: De an Sun

Fans of Harry Potter know Lumos as the spell that lights the tip of a wand. J. K. Rowling coined the word by drawing on Latin roots, such as lumen, meaning "light."

"Lumos" has since slipped into everyday use to the point that some smartphone voice assistants recognize it as a command to turn on a device’s flashlight.

Image: Andres Iga

The word hobbit instantly evokes images of small, hairy-footed inhabitants of the Shire, thanks to J. R. R. Tolkien. A trained philologist with a deep fascination for languages, Tolkien coined numerous terms, including hobbit and mithril, that have since entered popular culture.

The word became widely recognized even beyond The Lord of the Rings fan base. While hobbit originally referred to a fictional race in Tolkien’s legendarium, it is now sometimes used informally to evoke something small, cozy, or diminutive in character.

Image: Gaelle Marcel

Today, we use tween to describe the awkward stage between childhood and adolescence, typically covering ages 9 to 12. The word itself, however, traces back to J. R. R. Tolkien, who first introduced the idea of "tweens."

In The Fellowship of the Ring, hobbits in their "tweens" were those between 20 and 33; no longer teenagers, but not yet considered fully adult in hobbit society. Marketers later borrowed the catchy term to describe human preteens, and it stuck.

Image: CHI CHEN

The word "gossip" feels inseparable from modern life. Yet it began as the Old English term godsibb, meaning a "godparent" or a close, trusted companion. It was Geoffrey Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, who helped nudge the meaning toward talk and chatter.

Over time, the term drifted further, shifting from "companion" to "idle talk" and, eventually, to its modern association with rumor and speculation.

Image: Sarah Kilian

We all know what it means to be a butterfingers: clumsy, prone to dropping things, with hands seemingly as slippery as if coated in butter. This playful insult is often credited to Charles Dickens, who used it in his novel The Pickwick Papers to mock a character’s poor grip on objects.