This list represents only a small fraction of our contribution to the world, but it is something we can be truly proud of!
1. Helicopter
The inventor of the helicopter was Igor Sikorsky, a Kyiv-based aircraft designer who emigrated to the United States. In 1931, he patented a design for a machine with two rotors—a horizontal one on the roof and a vertical one on the tail. In September 1939, testing of the VS-300 helicopter began, initially on a tether, and on May 13, 1940, the designer took his machine into free flight for the first time. Their success led to the first order from the U.S. Army. Gradually, Sikorsky’s modest firm grew into a powerful corporation that produces hundreds of helicopters for civilian and military use every year. For over half a century, every U.S. president has relied on Sikorsky helicopters.
2. Kerosene Lamp
The kerosene lamp was created by Lviv pharmacists Ignatius Lukasevich and Jan Zech in 1853. At the same time, a new method for producing kerosene through the distillation and purification of petroleum was invented.
3. Postal code
In 1932, a unique system for marking letters was created in Kharkiv. Initially, it used numbers from 1 to 10, but later the format changed to number-letter-number. With the start of World War II, this indexing system was abolished, but it continued to be used in many countries around the world.
4. The Rocket Engine and the First Earth Satellite
Sergei Korolev, a native of Zhytomyr, was a designer of Soviet rocket and space technology and the founder of cosmonautics. In 1931, together with his colleague Friedrich Zander, he established a public organization dedicated to the study of jet propulsion, which later became a state-run scientific and design laboratory for the development of rocket vehicles. In 1957, Korolev launched the first-ever artificial Earth satellite into orbit.
5. Flexible Supercapacitor
Specialists from Lviv Polytechnic National University have invented a flexible fabric supercapacitor that runs on a solar battery and can even charge a mobile phone. The device is a compact energy-saving system that bends and attaches to any surface. This Ukrainian invention was included in the top 100 best research and development projects in the world in 2011, according to the influential American magazine R&D Magazine.
6. Glucose meter watch for diabetics
Petro Bobonych, a scientist from Zakarpattia, invented a glucose meter in the form of a wristwatch. With its help, diabetics can check their blood sugar levels at any time. No blood sample is required.
7. Environmentally Friendly Fuel
Vladimir Melnikov, an engineer from Slavutych, has designed a machine that converts wood waste into fuel briquettes. A furnace heats the sawdust to 300 degrees under ultra-high pressure, causing a natural plant-based adhesive to form. Next, a press compresses the mass with a force of 200 tons per square centimeter. The result is a fuel briquette resembling anthracite.
8. Kinescope
Yosyp Tymchenko—the man who, two years before the Lumière brothers’ discovery, developed the “snail” stepping mechanism together with physicist Mykola Lyubimov. Its operating principle formed the basis for the creation of the kinescope. In 1893, two films shot using the first kinescope were screened in Odesa. Tymchenko was ahead of Western cinema inventors, but his device was not patented.
9. Welding of Living Tissues
The idea of welding living tissues emerged among scientists at the Evgeny Paton Electric Welding Institute. As early as 1993, under the leadership of Boris Paton—the son of the inventor of various methods of electric welding—experiments were conducted that demonstrated the possibility of creating welded joints of various soft animal tissues using bipolar coagulation. Later, experiments began on welding tissues from removed human organs.
10. X-rays
Fourteen years before the German Wilhelm Röntgen, the Ukrainian Ivan Pulyui constructed a tube that later became the prototype for modern X-ray machines. He analyzed the nature and mechanisms of X-rays much more deeply than Röntgen and demonstrated their essence through practical examples. It was Ivan Pulyui who took the world’s first X-ray image of a human skeleton. His only mistake regarding this invention was that he did not bother to patent it. The scientist simply did not set out to claim it as his own.
11. The plaster cast
Nikolai Pirogov—the founder of military field surgery—pioneered the use of anesthesia during surgical procedures and, for the first time in the history of world medicine, applied a plaster cast.
12. Vaccines Against Plague and Cholera
Vladimir Khavkin developed the first vaccines in history against plague and cholera. He worked in Mechnikov’s laboratory, first in Odessa and later in Paris. In France, Vladimir Khavkin invented the anti-cholera vaccine. The government of Tsarist Russia refused to use the invention of a political opponent of the Moscow Empire. After a number of European countries refused to use the anti-cholera vaccine, Khavkin worked in India starting in 1896, where he created the first-ever vaccine against the plague. The scientist’s efforts found support from the British government. Khavkin most often conducted experiments with his invented vaccines on himself. Over 4 million people were vaccinated in India. The eminent scientist was appointed the country’s chief bacteriologist and director of the Bombay Anti-Plague Laboratory. Later, this laboratory was transformed into the Hawkin Institute.
13. Local Immunization
Alexander Bezredka discovered a method of local immunization, developed the theory of receptor cells and antiviruses, and coined the term “anaphylactic shock.” Bezredka is the author of the “local immunity” theory, which was criticized by the scientist’s opponents for his attempt to isolate the phenomenon of immunity from the body’s overall defensive reactions.
14. The First Kidney Transplant
Yuri Voronyi performed the world’s first kidney transplant. It is of paramount importance that, under clinical conditions, Voronyi demonstrated that “kidneys from fresh cadavers are capable of reviving and functioning when transplanted into another person,” and that “beyond any doubt, cadaveric organs do not cause any specific intoxication or anaphylaxis when transplanted into a human.” With his operation, Voronyi was far ahead of the development of transplantology. In most countries around the world, clinical cadaveric kidney transplants did not begin until the 1950s and 1960s.
15. Bloodless Blood Test
Kharkiv scientist Anatoly Malykhin devised a way to perform a blood test without drawing blood. He created a device with five sensors that are attached to specific areas of the human body, after which 131 health indicators are displayed on a computer screen. The device is actively used by medical professionals in China, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Egypt, and Mexico.
16. The antibiotic Batumin
Scientists from the Institute of Microbiology and Virology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine have created a new antibiotic that is highly active against all types of staphylococcus. In terms of its chemical composition, this drug has no analogues.
17. Compact Disc
Few people know that the prototype of the compact disc was invented in the late 1960s by Vyacheslav Petrov, a graduate student at the Kyiv Institute of Cybernetics. At the time, the development was purely scientific and had nothing to do with music. The optical disc was created for supercomputers.
18. Electric Tram
In the early 1870s, Fedir Pirotsky, a native of Poltava, developed a technology for transmitting electricity through an iron wire. In 1880, Pirotsky presented a project for using electricity “to power trains with a current supply.” A year later, the first tram, manufactured by Siemens based on the Ukrainian’s design, began operating in Berlin.
19. A Glove for People with Visual Impairments
Ivan Seleznyov, a young man from Luhansk, presented his project “New Sense: An Ultrasonic Glove for Spatial Orientation of People with Visual Impairments” at the “Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.” Such a device could be quite useful for spatial orientation. The young Ukrainian’s invention made it into the top three inventions in the world in 2013, and American investors have already taken an interest in it and are offering to collaborate. However, Ivan is still waiting for the opportunity to develop the project in Ukraine.
20. A computer’s ability to recognize faces
Kyiv resident Yegor Anchishkin was 26 years old when he became interested in the problem of recognizing video and photo information. Together with his colleagues, he founded a company that set itself the goal of teaching a computer to recognize human faces. For example, the Ukrainian programmers’ development could have quickly found the notorious “Karavan shooter.” But this groundbreaking technology no longer belongs to Ukraine. Internet giant Google bought out everyone who was developing this promising technology.
21. Red lasers in CD and DVD players
Nick Holonyak worked at the General Electric Company’s Semiconductor Research Laboratory in Syracuse, New York, where he made several important discoveries in the field of semiconductor devices, including the first functional light-emitting diode and semiconductor laser. Extremely energy-efficient LEDs began to be used in the manufacture of car headlights, traffic lights, electronic and household appliances, and in the construction of information displays at transportation hubs, stadiums, and other locations. His inventions made it possible to develop red lasers that operate in the visible spectrum and are used in CD and DVD players. Nick Holonyak contributed to the invention of the triode—the device on which computers, televisions, and other modern electronic devices are based.
22. The “Birth” of the Internet
In 1961, while still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Leonard Kleinrock described a technology capable of breaking files into pieces and transmitting them via various routes across a network. The young scientist published his research paper on digital networking, titled “Information Flow in Large Communication Networks.” These ideas formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation, the conclusions of which he published in the book “Communication Networks” (1964). In this book, L. Kleinrock outlined the fundamental principles (along with his subsequent theoretical developments) of packet-switched communication, which underpin modern Internet technology. Kleinrock’s ideas were ahead of their time, so they found widespread application only in the late 1960s, when the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) took an interest in them; one of ARPA’s areas of activity was the development of computer technologies for military purposes, particularly communications.