10 student inventions that took the world by storm

History is full of students who made groundbreaking discoveries during their university years. More than one of these discoveries changed the world. Some inventions students came up with still haven’t found their way into everyday life, while others we could not live without.

Smart headphones

Smart headphones were invented by Parth Gaggar and Vijay Jain of India’s IIT Roorkee university. And how can you tell the difference between smart headphones and the „dumb“ ones? Smart headphones can filter out sounds you don’t want to hear, so you’re not being disturbed while listening to music.

HBV vaccine

The hepatitis B vaccine was developed thanks to the collaboration of the University of Pennsylvania and Fox Chase Cancer Center, one of the first hospitals dedicated to fighting cancer. It was the sixties, and the field of virology was still in its infancy. The virus that causes hepatitis B was discovered by researcher Baruch Blumberg when he tested an Australian Aboriginal blood sample. Because of this, the protein on the surface of the virus was originally called the Australian antigen. A few years later, Blumberg also developed an effective vaccine thanks to this discovery.

E-reader

If you’ve ever read a book on a modern e-reader, you can thank Joseph M. Jacobson and Barrett Comiskey. Jacobson, a graduate student at Stanford University, dreamed of a device that can hold countless texts from around the world, so that readers would no longer be limited to library catalogs

Jacobson joined forces with a student of Mathematics Barrett Comiskey and together they developed electronic ink, or e-ink. It is a collection of black and white pixels that appear as text on the screen of an e-reader without eating up energy from the device.

Non-toxic fire extinguisher

A device that uses low-frequency sound waves to fight fires. Yes, this thing really exists! Two engineering students from George Mason University, Viet Tran and Seth Robertson, came up with the idea while working on their final school project. It cost them six hundred dollars of their own savings to create the prototype. By using sound waves instead of harmful toxins, they created a safer alternative to conventional firefighting.

A super cell phone charger

Eighteen-year-old Eesha Khare managed to fund her studies at Harvard thanks to her invention. She came up with the idea of a miniature super charging device that can store huge amounts of energy and recharge a phone battery in just 30 seconds!

A dual function pacifier

A young father and a freshman at Cornell University Anthony Halmon was trying to juggle both his studies and parental responsibilities. His situation inspired him to create a special pacifier. It serves not only its original purpose but also works as a thermometer. Parents can immediately see changes in the baby’s body temperature, which can show that something is wrong.

Motorized skateboard

Purdue University nuclear engineering student Joe Carabetta has invented the next best thing to the flying skateboard from the cult sci-fi trilogy Back to the Future. He’s come up with a device that you attach to a skateboard, turning a conventional board into a motorized one. Thanks to Carabetta’s invention, skaters might no longer have to buy expensive skateboards with motors built inside.

Google, Facebook and YouTube

Google was founded in 1998 by a pair of Stanford University students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The creator of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg, who created the social network in 2004 while studying computer science at Harvard.

Finally, there is the trio of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees, who created YouTube, the largest audiovisual social network, while studying at the University of Illinois and the University of California.

Sources: Buzzfeed, CollegeDekho, Halo, Quora