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27 Brilliantly Handy Inventions That Solve Problems You Didn’t Know You Had

If your life could be easier, you’d take steps to make sure it could happen, right? That’s where these 27 nifty products come in. They’re here to solve problems you didn’t even realize you had until you laid on the cool, stylish solutions to them.

This Water Flask That Fits in Your Bag

Do you ever not bring a water bottle with you because you’d have to carry it separately and you’re not about that life? BOOM. Problem solved. A flat water bottle! What genius came up with this?

These Spaghetti Forks That Will Hold on to Your Noodles

These forks are specifically for trapping spaghetti noodles. They will no longer fall off your fork while you’re twirling and make you look like a fool!

This Cocktail Layering Tool That Makes the Prettiest Drinks

This cool tool will help you create layered cocktails and impress everyone at the party. Also good for solo fancy drink nights.

This Rolling Toothpaste Squeezer That’s Good ‘Til the Last Drop

You are probably aware of the toothpaste struggle. It’s hard to get to the last drop. That is, unless you have a rolling toothpaste squeezer just like this one, of course.

This Food Vacuum Sealer That Will Presserve Your Goodies

This vacuum sealer will help you save and preserve food for seven times longer than traditional storage methods. It has moist and hard modes depending on what type of food you’re sealing.

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This collapsible water bottle that’s perfect for trips.

This collapsible water bottle extends into a sturdy bottle that’s easy to drink from. But once you’re done, you can roll it up and store it easily in a backpack. Perfect for hiking!

These Wireless Bluetooth Headphones That Are Also Noise Canceling

If you want to switch from music to pure silence, these headphones allow you to do just that. They connect to your devices wirelessly to play music or podcasts but flip a switch and they become noise-canceling wonders.

This Can Cooler That Will Keep Your Beer Cold

No more loose cans banging around in your cooler. This cooler is can-shaped and perfect for portable use.

This Military Grade Pen That Will Make You Feel Fancy

This solid brass pen will make every word you write feel important. As it should. It’s got a classic, timeless look, and you deserve a nice pen!

This Hot Dog Toaster That Will Make the Perfect Weenie

Listen. You need a tiny, retro toaster that only cooks hot dogs. I don’t make the rules. It’s adorable, and you need it.

These Smart Bike Tail Lights That Will Mark Your Lane

This bike tail light and brake light comes with a wireless remote control. Laser mode delineates your very own bike lane and ensures that you will stay safe while biking on the road with cars, especially at night.

This Ottoman That Also Stores Your Stuff

This adorable ottoman will also store your floor lemons. Or are those apples? In any case, when you have company, this ottoman is perfect for stuffing things into!

This Pocket Fan That’s Perfect for Selfies

This tiny fan actually fits in your pocket. Especially if you’re wearing overalls and have a large pocket. The fan is perfect to help you cool off on a hot day or to achieve the perfect flowy locks for a selfie.

This Side Table With a Built-In Storage Basket

Tables with drawers are OK, but tables with baskets woven into them are  so much better . You don’t have to flatten everything to close a drawer over it. This table could be where you keep all your dog’s toys! Or your floor lemons. I’m kind of committed to this idea of floor lemons.

This Sea Salt Hair Spray That Will Give You the Beachiest of Waves

This Sea Mist Hair Spray has the same salinity as salt water from the ocean, so it is guaranteed to give your hair those natural beachy waves you’ve always wanted!

This Photo Lens That Fits on Your Phone

This mobile lens attaches to the front and back of your iPhone 7 or 8 and gives you crazy zoom and wide angle options. You can become a professional photographer using just your phone!

This Combination Water Bottle Pill Box That’s Super Convenient

Now you’ll never forget to take your pills again, and you’ll have a bottle of water right there and no excuse not to take them! What more could you need?

This Cookbook for Those Hungover Mornings

This is not only a cookbook full of perfect recipes to help you overcome a hangover, but it also includes graphics tests and quizzes to assess your progress as the day goes by. You’re not alone in the hangover struggle with this book by your side.

This Magnetic Trivet That Can Fit Any Dish

This magnetic trivet is comprised of two bars that can be configured in several different ways, and the best part is they stick to the pot as it moves around. Incredible.

This Yogurt Cup With Built-In Storage

If you save money by buying those large containers of yogurt, it’s hard to portion it out and take it with you…unless you have a perfect and reusable yogurt cup with its very own storage container if you want to bring some granola or fruit along.

This Pet Carrier With a Window to the World

This perfect pet backpack had a ridiculously adorable window for your cat or small dog to peer out of while you’re carrying them. It has all the ventilation holes your pet needs to remain comfortable and calm on long trips.

This Gorgeous Bookcase That Perfectly Accents Any Room

That pile of books sitting on the floor next to your bookshelf that’s bursting at the seams? Now they’ll have a home! This bookcase looks great anywhere in your house and is a perfect home for your leftover thingamajigs.

This Hair and Scalp Tonic That Will Give You Luscious Locks

This hair and scalp tonic will give your locks all the shiny, voluminous vitality of a woman in a shampoo commercial. And isn’t that the goal?

This Portable Milk Frother You Can Bring Anywhere

The power to latté is yours forever with this handheld milk frother. It even comes with a travel case so you don’t have to sacrifice your frothy milky drinks while on vacation.

These Human Face Stress Balls That Will Make You Feel Better

We all need to release a little stress now and then, and stress balls are a great way to do that! Stress balls that look like human faces are even better! $16 for a set of four.

This Mini Pocket Blanket That’s Perfect for Picnics

Believe it or not, this tiny pocket container unfolds into a blanket! It’s perfect to bring with you on hikes or to the beach when you have a lot of other stuff to carry and can’t waste space with a big old blanket.

This Shower Window Squeegee That Will Let You See

This squeegee sticks right on your mirror or your shower door, so you don’t have to go looking for it in the steamy bathroom.

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How to solve problems, from an inventor with 200+ patents

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Robert Fischell invented the rechargeable pacemaker and the implantable insulin pump — not to mention helped create the precursor to GPS. The 87-year-old shares a peek into his creative process.

Perhaps you have a family member who’s alive because of a flexible coronary stent. Or a friend who manages her diabetes with an implantable insulin pump. Or, even more likely, maybe today you used an app on your smartphone to get directions, plotted with the help of GPS.

If any of the above is true, you can thank Robert Fischell, intrepid inventor and winner of the 2005 TED Prize . A longtime satellite engineer, Fischell helped create a key antecedent to GPS before turning his attention to medical devices in the 1970s. Today, he holds more than 200 patents in the US, from the implantable cardiac defibrillator to SpringTMS , a device recently approved by the FDA for the treatment of migraines. This year, at age 87, Fischell received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from Barack Obama. But he doesn’t plan to slow down — in fact, he’s working on his most ambitious idea yet. He shares his best tips on how to solve a thorny problem.

Take your know-how into new arenas . Fischell loved engineering satellites. “It never seemed like work to me — it felt like a game and, you might not believe this, they paid me for it,” he says. But one night about 40 years ago, he was reading a trade magazine when he stumbled on an ad for a pacemaker battery bragging about how it lasted for two years. “I looked at that and said, ‘Wait a minute — this is in somebody’s chest! It lasts two years and they’re proud of it?!’” At the time, people with pacemakers had surgery every other year to replace their batteries. “I thought, ‘What we need is a tiny nickel-cadmium cell on a coil of wire inside the pacemaker that’s rechargeable by magnetic induction through the skin. It’d last the patient’s lifetime.’” Fischell tasked a group of engineers in his Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University to create a prototype. It wasn’t just rechargeable, it was also smaller than existing models. Working with a surgeon at the university’s hospital, Fischell built a company to produce this new device and, within a year, they’d installed the rechargeable pacemaker in 1,700 patients. And the batteries lasted.

Listen to people and let your mind go wild . After the rechargeable pacemaker, Fischell started work on an implantable cardiac defibrillator. He realized that, like a satellite, this device could be programmed by radio waves — and he was in the operating room when the first one was implanted in a patient in 1980. From that moment on, Fischell was hooked on inventing medical devices, and he finds inspiration by talking to people about their medical hardships. “When somebody tells me a problem, my mind begins to see solutions,” he says. As Fischell shared in 2005 , he didn’t realize how debilitating migraines were until he talked to people who experienced them several times a week. He wondered: could electrical current disrupt a migraine? The idea led to the development of SpringTMS, a portable transcranial magnetic stimulator that can be applied to the head at the start of a migraine. The device was approved by the FDA in 2013. “It’s very satisfying to see how it is helping people,” says Fischell. “There’s something very personal about improving the lives of humans.” The most recent clinical trial looked at what happens when the device is used daily, as opposed to when needed. “With two pulses every morning and evening, the number of migraine headaches you get can decrease significantly,” he says.

When something works, look at how it might apply elsewhere, too . Fischell loves spin-offs. The implantable defibrillator worked by monitoring the electrical signal of the heart and delivering a course-correcting burst of electrical stimulation anytime the rhythm changed. Fischell suspected that the same principle could treat epilepsy, and developed the responsive neural stimulator (RNS), a small device implanted directly into the skull to monitor the brain’s electrical signals. When it notes an abnormal signal, it sends electricity to prevent a seizure. The RNS system was approved by the FDA in 2013, after clinical trials showed that patients experienced a 38% reduction in the number of seizures per month. Yet that’s not the end of the story. Fischell now wants to see how scientists might use this technology to treat other brain disorders such as depression or obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Don’t be afraid to think big. Really big . Fischell’s latest idea sounds like science fiction. “I’m working on a method to remove all human pain, with no drugs or side effects, in a ten-minute treatment,” he says. “I know that sounds crazy, but I believe it’s going to work.” He has designed a device to fit on your lower back, knee or neck — anywhere you experience chronic pain — and deliver targeted magnetic pulses. “By Faraday’s law , the pulses turn into an electrical current in the body,” he says, “and we believe they will destroy or confuse the electrical signal from the pain neurons to the brain.” Clinical trials have begun at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. If the device functions as expected, it could help the 100 million people in the United States who suffer from chronic pain — and potentially also decrease painkiller addiction. “When you have a medical device that’s creating a magnetic pulse on your back, the only thing treated is your back. When you take a pill for back pain, that pill goes through your entire body, and there’s a risk as that chemical acts on different cells,” he says. “I’m looking forward to advertising our pain device on television, and while everybody’s waiting for the list of adverse side effects, we won’t have any.”

Think about those who come behind you . Fischell works with three notable partners: his sons, a physicist, a cardiologist and an MBA. The family enterprise wasn’t exactly by design, but it also wasn’t an accident, says Fischell. “The thing with kids is they see that you love what you’re doing, and they get the spirit.” Now, he’s expanding on that idea, having donated the money for Clark Hall at the University of Maryland. Home to the Fischell Department of Bioengineering and the Robert E. Fischell Institute for Biomedical Devices, the building is named after a friend who died of congestive heart failure in 2015. The secret goal of the building? To inspire students to create a product that might have saved his friend’s life. “I believe we can make a device that will prevent deaths from congestive heart failure,” he says. “I’m looking to give ideas to undergraduate and graduate students.”

Innovate for people, not profit . “A lot of people think the purpose of a patent is to make the inventor wealthy, but that’s not why the US created the patent system,” he says. “The purpose of the patent system, as I see it, is to reveal trade secrets so that commerce and technology advance.” That’s why he’s thrilled that tomorrow’s inventors will revise, remix and surpass his work — and save more lives as a result. But Fischell’s real secret for success? Says the still-hard-working octogenarian, it’s all down to the fact that he’s kept at it. “With 60 years of dedicated work,” he says, “anybody could do it.”

About the author

Kate Torgovnick May is a writer at TED.com. She can also solve a Rubik's Cube in less than two minutes. Read more about her work at KateTorgovnickMay.com.

• electronics
• engineering
• medical research
• pain relief
• Robert Fischell

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17 wonderful inventions to solve all your first world problems, 1. a home-made device for not dropping your book in the bath.

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