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There are many South Africans who drove innovation forward and provided the world with new products or services.
Some of the well-known South African IT innovators include Mark Shuttleworth (Thawte and Canonical), and Elon Musk (Paypal, Tesla Motors, and SpaceX).
Musk’s SpaceX, for example, was the first privately developed and owned spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station.
Doctor Chris Barnard’s first heart transplant in 1967 and Sasol’s oil-from-coal refinery are well known, but here are some of the lesser known inventions which came from South Africans.
Mayhew-Ridgers and van Jaarsveld developed an antenna based on phased-array principles, providing omnidirectional coverage but also blocking the RF transmissions along a single direction (that would correspond with the bearing of the SKA core site).
In November 1996, Vodacom was the first network in the world to introduce prepaid airtime on an Intelligent Network platform, which made it possible to debit customers’ accounts while they were speaking.
In 1998 Vodacom won a Global Mobile Award for the “Best GSM Service” for its VodaGo prepay system.
South African inventor Michael Suttner developed “The Lightie” solar bottle light, offering a low cost, solar powered light.
“The Lightie” is built into a durable, ruggedized acrylic housing and uses Lithium battery technology. It offers 40 hours of light when charged from 8 hours of sunlight.
South African engineer Henri Johnson is credited with the invention of the speed gun and other technologies used to measure the speed and direction of sports balls.
The South African-made speed gun was formally released at The Oval during the 1999 World Cup.
The world famous Pratley Putty was invented by George Pratley, a South African engineer who developed innovative products for the mining sector.
Pratley invented his famous putty in the sixties while looking for glue that would hold components in an electrical box.
Dolosse
Anybody who has visited harbours around the world would have seen large concrete blocks with a complex geometric shape, used to protect hardbour walls.
These large concrete blocks, known as dolosse (plural) or a dolos (singular), were invented by South African Eric Mowbray Merrifield in 1963, and are used around the world to protect harbour walls from the erosive force of ocean waves.
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