It’s not often we stop to think about just how all the modern inventions we take for granted came to be, but the stories can be absolutely fascinating.
This Latine Heritage Month, let’s take a look at some of the amazing inventions (and their creators) that came from Latin America. Across engineering, medicine, entertainment, and more, these amazing Latine inventors changed our world for the better.
The patient, a 47-year-old man with severe heart failure, woke up and began to recover, living for 64 hours until a donor heart could be implanted. The patient died of a pulmonary infection 32 hours after the second transplant, but the procedures had been monumental in what is called “bridging”: allowing time for a donor organ to become available in which doctors can keep a patient alive with something artificial. The Liotta-Cooley Artificial Heart is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Color TV today is synonymous with entertainment, but González Camarena helped use his invention for the greater good, hand-building camera equipment for Latin America’s first television station and promoting tele-education via television for medical students. NASA even used González Camarena’s technology to transmit images from Jupiter in 1979.
3.
Oral Contraceptive Pill
Miramontes is credited with the first synthesis of an oral contraceptive in 1951 while he was working at a laboratory in Mexico City under Carl Djerassi and George Rosenkranz when he was just 26 years old. The three scientists are all listed as co-inventors on the United States patent for the oral contraceptive, awarded in 1956. The Pill was selected for the US Department of Patents’ “Inventors Hall of Fame” in 1964, and Miramontes would go on to win the Mexican National Prize in Chemistry in 1986 and be named a Top Chemical Engineer of All Time by the Institution of Chemical Engineers in 2011.
4.
Transdermal Medicine Patch
5.
Balloon-Expandable Stent
6.
NanoPro Water Purification System
7.
Earthquake Sensing and Measuring Technology
8.
Neonatal Artificial Bubble
The device uses a tempered air closed circuit with the neonatal capsule inside, and a continuous ventilation circuit allows “regulated airflow of filtered, oxygenated, tempered and humidified air to the newborn child inside the neonatal capsule,” according to the patent abstract. Castillón Lévano’s patent was awarded in 2003.
9.
Wireless Telecommunication
“It is possible to transmit speech through a luminous axis without the intervention of silenium or of a microphone. Nay, even a receiver will not be necessary. All persons within the radius of reception will be able to hear the message with the aid merely of their natural organs,” Landell told the New York Herald. “I wish to show to the world that the Catholic Church is not the enemy of science or of human progress.”
Latine Heritage Month is here! Join us in celebrating from Sept. 15 to Oct. 15 and support our content celebrating la cultura.
