Zippers, buttons, glue, staples, stitching. Prior to 1955, those were the main ways in which things were fastened together. But inventor George de Mestral’s 1941 discovery led to an easier and often more effective way of conjoining two things: VELCRO. While we’ve all used the substance and it’s a common part of things we use every day, it was an invention that was a long time in the making.

Sandblasting is commonly used to prepare a surface prior to painting and to strip paint from machinery and metal. It is also used to produce the lettering and engraving on most modern cemetery monuments and markers and to clean boat hulls, brick, stone and concrete.

If you use a computer and software every day, you owe much of its operational logic to Claude Elwood Shannon. Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as a “father of information theory.”

Desalination is the process of removing minerals (mostly salt) from seawater through physical and chemical processes to make it drinkable. Desalinated water is used on many seagoing ships and submarines, and water-scarce regions are particularly reliant on the technology.

Roller coasters descended from monumental ice slides — long, steep wooden slides covered in ice — that were popular in 16th- and 17th-century Russia. But historians diverge on the exact evolution of these ice slides into actual roller coasters.