What every country gave the world

The first glasses for reading were made in central Italy, most likely in Pisa or Florence, around 1290. A friar preaching in 1306 said the art was not yet twenty years old and that he had met the man who discovered it.

From Italy.

Merchants in Italian cities recorded every sum twice, as a debit and a credit, so the books always balance. In 1494 the friar Luca Pacioli published the first detailed printed description of the method, in Venice, and it is still the basis of accounting today.

From Italy, by Luca Pacioli.

Bartolomeo Cristofori from Padua, keeper of musical instruments for the Medici in Florence, built a keyboard whose hammers could play both soft and loud. A Medici inventory shows that one existed by 1700.

From Italy, by Bartolomeo Cristofori.

In Florence, Torricelli filled a glass tube with mercury, turned it upside down in a dish and showed that the weight of the air holds the column up. His tube became the standard way to measure air pressure, and so to help forecast the weather.

From Italy, by Evangelista Torricelli.

Volta, from Como, stacked discs of copper and zinc separated by cloth soaked in salt water, and got a steady electric current. He described his voltaic pile, the first true battery, in a letter to the Royal Society in London dated 20 March 1800.

From Italy, by Alessandro Volta.

Angelo Moriondo of Turin patented a steam machine for bars in 1884 that pushed water and steam through coffee, though it brewed in bulk rather than cup by cup. Luigi Bezzera of Milan patented a machine that made single servings in 1901, and Italian bars have been making espresso ever since.

From Italy, by Angelo Moriondo.

The first high-speed rail line in the world, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka, opened in 1964. Italy, France, Germany, Spain and later China followed its example.

From Japan.

The first low-cost personal stereo, a portable cassette player with light headphones, launched by Sony in Japan on 1 July 1979. It made it normal to listen to your own music while walking or travelling.

From Japan.

The square black-and-white code read by phone cameras, developed by Masahiro Hara and one colleague at Denso Wave to label car parts in factories. QR stands for "quick response".

From Japan, by Masahiro Hara.

Small picture symbols in text messages. The first emoji sets were made by Japanese electronics and mobile phone companies in the late 1980s and the 1990s, long before they spread worldwide.

From Japan.

On 15 October 1951, the young chemist Luis Miramontes, working with Carl Djerassi and George Rosenkranz at the Syntex laboratory in Mexico City, first made norethisterone, a hormone that became one of the main ingredients of birth control pills.

From Mexico, by Luis Miramontes.