--- title: 2007 Best Inventions of the Year | TIME description: Lev Grossman talks about the long process behind the TIME Best Inventions list canonical: https://time.com/video/a2AImrv8/ og:title: 2007 Best Inventions of the Year og:description: Lev Grossman talks about the long process behind the TIME Best Inventions list og:url: https://time.com/video/a2AImrv8/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/a2AImrv8/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 2007 Best Inventions of the Year twitter:description: Lev Grossman talks about the long process behind the TIME Best Inventions list twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/a2AImrv8/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # 2007 Best Inventions of the Year > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: 2007 Best Inventions of the Year [Watch (HLS stream): 2007 Best Inventions of the Year](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/a2AImrv8.m3u8) (3:46)  _Published 2007-10-31. Lev Grossman talks about the long process behind the TIME Best Inventions list_ --- Jul 27, 2023 12:34 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Best Inventions of 2013](/video/2dst8HeQ/) ### The Best Inventions of 2013 [Five Worst Inventions](/video/gRxkKHj1/) ### Five Worst Inventions [2008 Best Inventions of the Year](/video/4SLz7ij8/) ### 2008 Best Inventions of the Year --- ## Transcript My name is Lev Grossman and I'm a staff writer at TIME Magazine. I also write a blog here, that's called, " Nerve World ", on our website TIME. com. And I'm the person in charge of Time Magazine's Best Inventions Issue. The process begins every September. Early in the month, we have a meeting of our best inventions team and we have extremely violent arguments about what inventions were the best inventions of the year. And this goes on for hours. It's probably the longest meeting that I go to every year. It's the best inventions meeting. But we create what we call a Long List which will have-- I think this year we had 120 items on it. And we just sat down, we hammered on them and we talked to the inventors and the companies that sponsored them. And we figured what we really felt were the most important inventions of the year. Somebody really had a new idea which filled a new need that had never been met before. And they put together the engineering, and they build the prototype, and they made it really work. They made a device that made people's lives better. And that's really what goes into the Best Inventions Issue. Once we come up with a-- not a short list but a medium- sized list of inventions we're considering, we go ahead and call the inventors. We call the people who actually built the device. And we talk to them. What we really wanna know is what stage is this thing at. Clearly, they've had a good idea. They've had some buzz and trade journals or blogs or gotten a tip about it. But sometimes the thing isn't actually built yet. So, we'll do an initial round of interviews with inventors just to make sure that this thing is actually-- it's for real and it's not smoke and mirrors. One of the items we really bickered over was a new kind of optical fiber offered by Corning. Optical fiber when you lay it down, it's what connects people to the internet but it has to be run straight. You can't bend it around corners because it's this glass- like substance that will shatter; which makes it intensely difficult to wire up some buildings which just require a lot of sharp angles. This year Corning came up with something incredibly simple: Optical fiber that bends. And that is gonna change so many people's lives. But this is the kind of thing we are looking for. Just those subtle advancements that are just simple and brilliant, and make the world a little bit better. I'll give you another example. We like to look for a design solutions, also. Not necessarily high- tech, but, there's a new umbrella this year. An umbrella is a thing that has been around for, you know, hundreds of years. You wouldn't think to fix it. But somebody invented an umbrella that is shaped differently. It's sort of a-- it's shaped like a bat's wing. It's almost oval- shaped or teardrop- shaped. And it could stand winds of up to 70 miles an hour without turning inside out. How fantastic is that? Here's a problem that nobody would ever have thought to rethink. Somebody rethought it, and they finally did it right. We've been doing this Best Inventions Issue every year for eight years now. And one of the things that is fascinating about it is watching the way the news every year, kind of affect and changes and impacts the inventions we get. This year for example, the war in Iraq certainly changed the landscape. We have a fascinating new prosthetic, for example, which will be immensely useful for wounded veterans. We also have a lot of green, ecologically- friendly inventions-- some hybrid cars and a lot of products actually on that front. And that's really, you know, what makes this Inventions Issue interesting for me- year to year is watching the new promise that come up and the new solutions that people come up with to help deal with them. So, we'll be here next year. Solving next year's problems, whatever they are. 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