17 Inventions You May Not Know Were Created in Brazil

Everyone knows that Brazilians are smart and hardworking, but what many people don’t know is that some of the great inventions we use in our daily lives were created in Brazil or in Brazil.

In this post, the awesome.club shows 17 inventions originating in Brazil that will surprise you and perhaps increase your hope for the future of our country. Check the list below.

The Italian-Brazilian Sebastião Comparato, who lived in Brazil since he was six months old, graduated from the first medical class in São Paulo and alternated his routine as a doctor with that of an inventor. He loved cinema, produced several short films and was the first to show films outdoors at Praça da Sé, in SP. Comparato spent much of his life dedicating himself to inventing a 3D film and even released two films in the former República and Ópera cinemas in São Paulo. Comparato even refused to move his invention to the US after an offer made by Warner Bros. in 1951.

The Brazilian Aron de Andrade is a mechanical engineer specializing in biomedical engineering who invented an artificial heart in 2000. The invention can be connected to the patient’s heart, without the need for a transplant and can save many lives.

Hercules Florence (1804-1879) was a Frenchman with a Brazilian heart. He lived in Campinas (SP) and invented a way to print photos on paper sensitized with silver nitrate; he is not known as an inventor because while he was studying the method in secret, in France researchers were already trying the same method and patented it first. Hercules is even credited with creating the term photographiephotography in French.

Anyone born after the 2000s probably doesn’t know what it is unless you’ve seen it in a museum, but before computers this was an item that almost every home or office owned. The typewriter was designed by Father João Francisco de Azevedo, in the 19th century he adapted a piano and used 24 keys to print letters on paper. The priest entrusted the idea to a businessman who disappeared. Later, the Remington company bought the idea from an American named Christofer Sholes.

Brazilian Alberto Santos Dumont was an inventor and mechanical engineer and created many things that we use today. Although part of the world attributes this invention to the Wright brothers, their work was not an airplane, as it used a catapult to launch it. Dumont’s plane was powered by a combustion engine and had its maiden flight in Paris, France in 1906.

It was created by Santos Dumont also in France and named ‘Brazil’. Although Dummont was not the first to think of this type of project, his invention revolutionized the type of construction of this type of balloon.

Dummont found it difficult to control his flying inventions and see the time he spent in the air with the pocket watches used at the time, so he decided to ask his watchmaker friend Louis-François Cartier to adapt a bracelet in place of the watch chain. With impressive speed, the invention took over the entire world. The invention, in fact, would have appeared with Napoleon, but Dummont was certainly one of the main responsible for its popularization.

Dumont was also one of the pioneers in the history of airships when he decided to put an oil-powered engine in a balloon. He even flew over and around the Eiffel Tower in 1901, flying at 22 km/h. With that, he won the Deutch prize of 11,000 francs, a handsome sum for the time.

In the year 1900 Dumont decided to place the hangar doors, where he kept some of his inventions, on top of bearings to be able to open them more easily. This hangar was 11 meters high, 7 meters wide and 30 meters long. The Brazilian genius is also one of the pioneers in this invention.

The inventor of this type of aerostat was Father Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão. He was born in colonial Brazil and was the first Brazilian inventor. Bartholomew produced the first aerostat (a type of balloon) and was an important figure in world aeronautics.

Also invented by Bartolomeu de Gusmão, several prototypes were made and the invention was discouraged at the time for not having control and not seeming useful.

The ultralight was Santos Dumont’s latest invention. The first prototype was about 115 kilograms, 5.5 meters in wingspan and 5.55 meters in length and was nicknamed the Demoiselle (dragonfly) and had a bamboo structure.

Father Roberto Landell de Moura in 1914 had already managed to transmit a human voice by radio, but the church accused him of witchcraft and his invention was viewed with suspicion. Although the invention of the radio to the Italian Guglielmo Marconi, the priest is considered Patron of Radioamadores do Brasil. He is also considered a patron of the Telecommunications Research and Development Center (CPqD), a center of technological excellence in Campinas (SP).

Another case of a non-Brazilian researcher, but in love with Brazil. It was the German Andreas Pavel, naturalized Brazilian, who revolutionized the music market by replacing those huge and heavy devices with a portable radio and cassette player, which was later produced by Sony in 1979, the walkman.

Electoral judge Carlos Prudêncio, realizing the difficulty of voting manually and counting votes, started to develop, still in the 80’s, the equipment that we now know as Electronic Ballot Box. He and his brother, a computer researcher, developed the first prototype in 1989 — the first models worked through a manual ballot vote, which was then scanned. The urn as we know it today was developed in 1996 by a group of companies in the technology sector.

In the last century, people who had a landline phone suffered from constant prank calls, and electrical technician Nélio José Nicolai, in 1980, saw this problem as a good idea for an invention. Enle created a device that allowed him to identify the number of all the devices that called him. Many people call it Bina which is the original name and means B identifies number A.

Before the Cellphone Era, public telephones were very popular. However, in the beginning, to make a call, tokens similar to coins were needed – hence, by the way, the expression ‘falling the plug’ came up, since, while the plugs are dropped on the inside of the phone, the call could not to start. But in 1978, engineer Nélson Guilherme Bardini created a card made of PVC that allowed people to accumulate credits to make calls. The invention took the world by storm, but only in 1992 was it implemented in Brazil.

Did you like the list of surprising things invented by Brazilians?

Is there anything we forgot to mention?