The Lemelson-MIT Pro­gram, in con­junc­tion with the second-worst news­gath­er­ing orga­ni­za­tion of all time, recently announced its list of the top 25 non-medical inno­va­tions of the last 25 years. Nat­u­rally I dis­agree with most of it.

For exam­ple, HDTV (#19) and hybrid cars (#16) are ranked above mod­ern hear­ing aids (#24) and the Space Shut­tle (#20). Though HDTV is impres­sive, I still don’t know any­one who has one. I do know one per­son who owns a hybrid car, but it doesn’t even start so I won’t count it. Yet in this time period, hear­ing aids and space travel have been rev­o­lu­tion­ized with wide­spread benefits.

I still don’t even know what nan­otech­nol­ogy (#21) is, other than an inde­fati­ga­ble rev­o­lu­tion in mag­a­zine head­line writ­ing (e.g. “Dr. Nan­otech vs. Can­cer,” Tech­nol­ogy Review, Feb­ru­ary 2005).

Air bags (#13) have saved thou­sands of lives, unlike “mem­ory stor­age discs” (#8).

Num­ber 14 is “ATM.” Do they mean Asyn­chro­nous Trans­fer Mode or Auto­matic Teller Machine? Both are pretty revolutionary.

OLEDS (#17) are included, even though nobody uses them. Blue LEDS were omit­ted, even though they made pos­si­ble a host of products.

The inter­net (#1) is much older than 25 years, so by their own rules it’s inel­i­gi­ble for this list. But these jok­ers prob­a­bly con­nect to it with Dig­i­tal Sub­scriber Line ser­vice or cable modems—very recent inno­va­tions that made pos­si­ble low-cost high-speed data links to homes and small busi­nesses. What about the World Wide Web? I doubt many peo­ple would use the inter­net with­out it.

Where is dig­i­tal video record­ing? It has rev­o­lu­tion­ized both pro­fes­sional video and movie pro­duc­tion (the lifeblood of which is now NLE) and home video dis­tri­b­u­tion and qual­ity (e.g. DVD’s, TiVo).

Another strik­ingly ubiq­ui­tous inno­va­tion is the instant elec­tronic val­i­da­tion of credit card pur­chases. This has com­pletely rev­o­lu­tion­ized retail, first through Ver­i­Fone ter­mi­nals at the point of sale (early 1980′s) and then “online” shop­ping (1990′s). Appar­ently now you can pay for fast food with a credit card. How did they miss this? It’s big­ger than the bar code.

The Sport Util­ity Vehi­cle is another impor­tant, unrec­og­nized inno­va­tion of this period. They’re cheaper to build than nor­mal cars, yet can be sold for more; they are exempt from tra­di­tional crash-safety and effi­ciency require­ments, yet they make peo­ple feel more secure; they are bru­tally ugly, yet they have unpar­al­leled mar­ket appeal. That’s inno­va­tion if I’ve ever seen it.