35 Surprising Inventions That Have Been Around Longer Than You Thought

Humans made animated art tens of thousands of years ago. The 21,000 years old cave paintings in Lascaux, France were made in such a way that flickering oil light would create the illusion of motion on the cave-painted animals. When the cave was discovered in 1940, more than 100 small stone lamps that once burned grease from rendered animal fat were found throughout its chambers. A flickering flame in the cave may have conjured impressions of motion like a strobe light in a dark club.

The check is older than cash. Ancient Romans are believed to have used an early form of check known as praescriptiones in the 1st century B.C. Credit predates the check and it actually predates writing. According to historians, the concept of using a valueless instrument to represent banking transactions dates back 5,000 years, when the ancient Mesopotamians used clay tablets to conduct trade with the Harappan civilization. While still cumbersome, a slab of clay with seals from both civilizations certainly beat the tons of copper each would have had to melt down to produce the coins of that era.

Although the Pythagorean philosopher Archytas of Tarentum (5th century B.C.) is the alleged inventor of the screw, the exact date of its first appearance as a useful mechanical device is obscure. Though invention of the water screw is usually ascribed to Archimedes (3rd century B.C.), evidence exists of a similar device used for irrigation in Egypt at an earlier date. The screw press, probably invented in Greece in the 1st or 2nd century B.C., has been used since the days of the Roman Empire for pressing clothes. In the 1st century A.D., wooden screws were used in wine and olive-oil presses.

Catheters were used as early as 3,000 B.C. to relieve painful urinary retention. In those times, many materials were used to form a hollow catheter, some of which were straw, rolled up palm leaves, hollow tops of onions, as well as, gold, silver, copper, brass, and lead. Malleable catheters were developed in the 11th century. In time, silver was used as the basis of catheters as it could be bent to any desired shape and was felt to have an antiseptic function.

During the 5th century B.C., ancient Greeks ate snow mixed with honey and fruit in the markets of Athens. In 400 B.C., the Persians invented a special chilled food, made of rose water and vermicelli, which was served to royalty during summers. The ice was mixed with saffron, fruits, and various other flavors. A frozen mixture of milk and rice was used in China around 200 B.C. They poured a mixture of snow and saltpeter over the exteriors of containers filled with syrup, for, in the same way as salt raises the boiling point of water, it lowers the freezing point to below zero.

3D printing has burst into the mainstream media in recent years, but in reality, it has been around since the 1980s. Patent for stereolithography process was filed in 1984 and the technology used by most 3D printers to date, i.e., fused deposition modeling was developed in 1988. It has been gaining mainstream attention because most of the patents used in manufacturing them have expired, which has made them affordable.

Dr. Pepper was released in 1885, one year before Coca-Cola. Even before that carbonated lemonade was widely available in British refreshment stalls in 1833. The first company that sold carbonated water was established in Geneva in 1783. Even before carbonated drinks, in the medieval Middle East, a variety of fruit-flavored soft drinks were widely drunk, such as sharbat, and were often sweetened with ingredients such as sugar, syrup, and honey.

Earliest proposed dates for the origin of cheesemaking range from around 8000 B.C. when sheep were first domesticated. Since animal skins and inflated internal organs provided storage vessels for milk, it is probable that the process of cheese making was discovered accidentally by storing milk in a container made from the stomach of an animal, resulting in the milk being turned to curd and whey by the rennet from the stomach.

Music streaming was invented in 1897 in New York. It was called the Telharmonium and took up the entire basement of the Broadway building it was located in. It was 220 feet long and it used different sized/cogged gears spinning beneath a pickup (magnetic coil) to create different tones. These different gears and pickups were connected to an organ on the main floor of the building. Key presses would activate the corresponding tone to play from the Telharmonium and it had pedals and such to shape the sound. It delivered this music via the telephone, and subscribers could have the operator connect them.

Fidget Spinners have been around since 1993, but it wasn't until 2017 when they became a craze, partly because non-autistic children picked up the practice from autistic classmates. They are sold by shops catering to people with special sensory needs, as a calming device. In general "executive pacifiers" like the fidget spinner have been around since the 1920s or earlier, and include Newton's cradle and the drinking bird.