Back then, Domino's pizza had developed the standard for pizza boxes. Their pizzas were around 180 to 200 degrees out of the oven, and they aimed to maintain a post-baking temperature of 140 degrees for 45 minutes. Kosar needed to beat that. Domino's boxes were designed to vent steam and prevent a soggy crust, but at the cost of losing delicious heat. Ingrid's first bags retained heat by trapping it behind layers of polyester and nylon. This kept the pizza warm, and the vents on the pizza box kept it crispy. Even more impressive, pizzas in the bag would lose only around 5 degrees an hour. A delivery guy could leave the pizzeria, play Pac-Man, and flirt with some mallrats for 20 minutes and still deliver a piping-hot pizza.

After pestering Domino's to order from her, they finally caved and bought $10,000 worth of thermal bags. Then other pizza chains signed on. And then the U.S. government came knocking and ordered bags for restaurants on military bases. Then she got innovative again and created the HeatWave, a thermal bag with a built-in heater. Domino's ordered 90,000 HeatWaves, every one of them made by hand by her relatively small workforce.

Unfortunately, her patents expired in the early 2000s. At that point, everyone with access to sewing machines and a cheap workforce flooded the market with their knockoffs. She eventually had to file for bankruptcy. But don't feel too bad for her. She came up with another food-industry innovation: large tarps that maintain even temperatures for raising bread dough. She sells a ton of them to Panera Bread. So the next time you find yourself eating a blisteringly hot pizza that 30 minutes before was pale, flaccid, room-temperature dough, thank Ingrid. And while you're at it, also thank Carmela Vitale, the woman who invented that little plastic table thing that prevents the box top from smushing down on the pizza. Then go ahead -- pack another bowl and play some more Smash Bros.

When TV bores you and the pile of unread books on your shelf has gotten so severe it would probably be best to burn the shelf and start from scratch, it's time to turn to the Internet for some mindless video of a cat doing something cold-blooded enough to warrant a stiff punting toward the furthest wall. The words "cat videos" have become shorthand for the frivolousness of the Internet.

Even after thousands of years, cats still haven't been fully domesticated, yet they act like they invented that shit. But we wouldn't have been able to fully appreciate the Internet-ready weirdness of cats without the work of one man -- a man who dreamed of a future in which cats could live and, most importantly, shit inside our homes.

The Inventor:

It was 1947, and Ed Lowe was having a shitty time trying to sell a kind of clay called Fuller's Earth to local farmers in southern Michigan as an alternative material for chicken nesting. He was calling the new product Chicken Litter. No one wanted it.

DrGranny.com
Who can turn down such an exciting product?

Back then, cat owners filled boxes with stuff like ash, sawdust, and sand for their cats to poop and pee in. Since the smell was unbearable, the boxes were always kept outside of the house. Kay Draper, Ed's neighbor, had a cat box outside filled with sand that had been so saturated with piss that it turned into a terrible popsicle out in the freezing January air. When she went to Ed's to borrow some sand, he gave her Fuller's Earth instead.

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"Go ahead and piss on my life's work! See if I give a shit!"

Kay noticed that the Fuller's Earth absorbed the smell of cat piss, so she asked for more. She liked it so much she started spreading the gospel of Ed Lowe's litter. Ed's Fuller's Earth had gained a reputation, so he bagged a bunch, wrote "Kitty Litter" on them, and gave them to a hardware store to be given out for free because the store owner didn't think they would sell. He even toured America's cat show circuit to give live demos. He probably had to force a lot of cats into taking frightened shits in front of large crowds of obsessive cat owners. Eventually, enough people trusted kitty litter that he was able to charge for it.

You've probably heard of the kitty litter brand Ed later created: Tidy Cat. Tidy Cat was sold to Purina after Ed's death in 1995. As kitty litter became ubiquitous across the world (and with the putrid smell of everything that falls out of a cat's back half mostly eliminated) cat owners started moving their cats indoors full-time.

Which leads us to today. Because of the work Ed Lowe put into convincing the world that his pile of piss-dust was better than other piles of piss-dust, cat owners can now point a phone at their cat and the cat can become more famous than the owner.

And the rest of us will watch it, because of course we have something better to do, but we'll be damned if we're going to do it.

It's the Fairchild Channel F. It's one of the most important video game consoles ever made -- and you've probably never heard of it. A year after it was released, the Atari 2600 came out and shoveled dirt onto its corpse. The Fairchild Channel F still matters because of one distinct feature no other console before it had and no console for the next 30 years was without: It was the first to release games on cartridges. Before the Channel F, games came preloaded on consoles. The guy responsible for making cartridges work was Jerry Lawson.

Lawson made an arcade cabinet game by himself in his garage that caught the attention of a company called Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild wanted to get into the home-gaming business and had cobbled together crude prototypes of video game cartridges with parts purchased from Radio Shack. They were massive, barely functional, and ugly. Lawson's job was to make them small, convenient, and affordable, which in the tech world is like asking someone to walk on water and then cure leprosy.

And make a game where there's isn't a cinematic, then you walk 20 feet,
and there's another cinematic.

Lawson's biggest fear was that the constant plugging and unplugging of cartridges would cause the semiconductors on the chips to explode. Imagine how stunted the progress of video games would have been if cartridges were singeing off kids' eyebrows all across America on Christmas morning. So, for the first and maybe only time in world history, someone turned to eight-track tape technology for inspiration.

Sorry, eight-track tapes. Just because you inspired a revolution in video games
doesn't mean you're not a joke technology.

If they sandwiched the high-tech gizmos and doodads within a hard plastic shell, anyone could handle it without worry of dealing with exposed chips.

The system was a commercial failure, but Lawson and his team's innovation made a lasting impression that could be felt as early as one year later when the now-legendary Atari 2600 was released. What was the big, impressive new feature Atari promoted at launch?

Cartridges.