Let’s get one thing straight before we start. South Africans have main character energy, and we have receipts. While the rest of the world was busy arguing about who invented the sandwich, we were quietly inventing things that saved lives, cleaned pools, glued a spaceship together and, yes, even fixed a very specific and very personal problem. So pour yourself something cold, get comfortable, and let me walk you through the absolute chaos of brilliance that is South African innovation.
Let’s start with the big one. The heart transplant. On the 3rd of December 1967, Dr Chris Barnard performed the world’s first successful heart transplant in Cape Town on a man named Louis Washkansky. This was not a small deal. This turned Barnard into an international celebrity overnight, and rightfully so, because swapping out a human heart in 1967 with the medical technology available at the time is the kind of thing that should have come with a cape and theme music.
Not to be outdone, Cape Town physicist Allan Cormack teamed up with Godfrey Hounsfield to develop the CAT scan in 1972, giving doctors a way to see inside your body without cutting you open first. Somewhere out there is a South African who casually helped invent modern diagnostic medicine and then probably went home to complain about load shedding like the rest of us.
Now let’s talk about the invention that actually deserves a national holiday. The Kreepy Krauly. Ferdinand Chauvier from Springs gave humanity the gift of a pool that cleans itself, and honestly, if that is not the single greatest contribution to South African summer culture, I do not know what is. Somewhere, right now, one is quietly doing laps around a pool while its owner does absolutely nothing, and that is exactly how it should be.
We also gave the world dolosse, those enormous concrete blocks that look like giant toy jacks and protect harbour walls from wave damage, thanks to engineer Eric Merrifield. Not glamorous, but the reason a lot of our coastline is still standing where it should be.
And speaking of things that are unreasonably strong for their size, George Pratley invented Pratley Putty in the 1960s, an adhesive so powerful it was used to help hold together the Apollo 11 lunar module. That means a bit of South African garage ingenuity is currently sitting on the moon, which is a sentence I will never get tired of saying.
We did not stop at space glue. South Africans developed the retinal cryoprobe for cataract surgery, thanks to specialist Selig Percy Amoils, giving eye surgery a serious upgrade at Baragwanath hospital in Soweto.
Then there is the Smartlock safety syringe, designed to help prevent needlestick injuries and reduce the spread of things like HIV and Hepatitis. Not flashy, but genuinely life-saving on a massive scale.
Sports fans, this one is for you. The world’s first radar speed gun was invented by Henri Johnson in 1992, and it is now used in cricket, tennis and pretty much every sport where someone wants to know exactly how fast a ball just humiliated them.
More recently, Professor Mulalo Doyoyo invented Cenocell, a cementless concrete alternative that is kinder to the planet, and Dr Sandile Ngcobo built the world’s first digital laser, earning praise as proof of the calibre of scientists coming out of South Africa.
Then there is the Hippo Water Roller, created by Johan Jonker and Pettie Petzer, a barrel designed to make carrying water across long distances easier for communities without easy access to clean water. It is now used across the world, quietly changing daily life for people who need it most.
Add in the Shark Shield, a device that politely tells sharks to reconsider their life choices, and the Tellurometer, invented by Durban’s Trevor Lloyd Wadley to measure long distances using radio waves, and you start to realise this country has been quietly changing the world for decades.
And then, because South Africa never does anything by halves, we close things out with the world’s first successful penis transplant, performed in December 2014 by a team led by urologist André van der Merwe at the University of Stellenbosch. Look, not every invention needs a dramatic backstory. Sometimes the achievement speaks entirely for itself.
So the next time someone tries to tell you South Africa is just braais, biltong and load shedding jokes, remind them that we also gave the world working hearts, clean pools, moon glue and shark repellent. We contain multitudes.
