Great innovations

With reference to John's iconic cameras posting and seeing as this is the general chat forum for this site, I was wondering what innovations (not just photographic) that members would also consider to be iconic.

Photographically, such things might be the pentaprism, off the film plane metering, thyristor flash, auto-focus and the birth of digital.

I'd be interested to hear of others too, my example would be;

Some bright spark at Daewoo incorporated a 'page' button on the front of a vcr.
We all know where the video machine is but how often do we misplace the remote?
Pressing the page button causes the remote to beep, signalling it's whereabouts - pure genius