Senate Reinvents National Inventors Month!

The Senate has deemed it so! In a unanimous May 3, 2011 vote, the U.S. Senate approved an immediate resolution that made May – National Inventors Month! Similar to many inventions, the month-long celebration actually began as one idea, was improved upon and turned into another!

Previously, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the inventing community and the general public had accepted and celebrated August as National Inventors Month. With Senate approval, the move to May allows for greater inventor recognition in schools and more opportunities to inspire and celebrate innovation across the nation! In honor of this creative month, we did some digging and found some fun trivia about some very familiar inventions!

Did you know:

– The British inventor of the World Wide Web never patented his technology, because he was afraid it would become too expensive to use and the Web would never go world-wide!

– The formula for Coca-Cola has never been patented! Only selected company employees know the secret recipe!

– The grocery store owner who invented the shopping cart hired fake shoppers to push the invention around his store, because his customers didn’t want to give up their baskets!

– Long before the iPhone and iPad, the first Apple computer was born in Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage and Jobs had to sell his car to raise funds for his first commercial order!

– Parker Brothers execs initially passed on the Monopoly game because it took too long to play; but, the company president got his hands on a copy, stayed up until 1 a.m. to play it one night and he was hooked! The rest is history!