List of Taiwanese inventions and discoveries explained

This is a list of inventions by people who were born in Taiwan (officially known as Republic of China) or citizens of Republic of China.

Food, food techniques and cuisine

See also: Taiwanese cuisine and List of Taiwanese desserts and snacks.

Bubble tea
  • is a drink that contains flavored tea and tapioca pearls. It was invented in the early 1980s in Taiwan.[1] Bubble tea vendors serve the beverage cold or hot inside a translucent plastic cup with an oversized straw wide enough for the tapioca bubbles to pass through.[2] The drink has spread from Taiwan and is now popular across the world.[1] [3]
    General Tso's chicken
  • is a sweet deep-fried chicken dish that is served in North American Chinese restaurants. The recipe was invented by Taiwan-based Hunan cuisine chef Peng Chang-kuei.[4]
    Instant noodles
  • were invented by Go Pek-hok, who later adopted the name Momofuku Ando when he immigrated from Taiwan to Japan. Ando created a method for deep-frying and drying noodles that could later be cooked using boiling water. He founded the Nissin Foods company, which in 1971 introduced instant noodles marketed as Cup Noodles that were packaged in Styrofoam cups.[5]
    Mongolian barbecue
  • is a stir fried dish that was developed by Wu Zhaonan in Taiwan in 1951. Meat and vegetables are cooked on large, round, solid iron griddles at temperatures of up to 300 °C (572 °F). Despite its name, the dish is not Mongolian, and is only loosely related to barbecue.
    Pineapple cake
  • is a sweet traditional pastry and dessert containing butter, flour, egg, sugar, and pineapple jam or slices. It likely came into fruition around the 16th century when the pineapple, a fruit native to South America, was introduced by the Portuguese presence in Asia.

    Games and entertainment

    Connect6
  • is a game similar to Gomoku invented by I-Chen Wu, a computer science professor at National Chiao Tung University. The player who obtains six or more stones in a row wins.[6]
    Cat café
  • was first opened in Taipei, Taiwan in 1998, which involves a coffee shop with in-house cats that roam freely and interact with customers. The idea since took off and spread around the world.[7] [8]

    Science and technology

    A universal crossed molecular beam apparatus
  • for studying chemical reactions was developed by the Taiwanese chemist Yuan T. Lee.[9] In 1986, Lee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside Dudley R. Herschbach and John Polanyi "for their contributions to the dynamics of chemical elementary processes."[10]
    Floating gate transistor
  • In 1967, Simon Min Sze and Dawon Kahng invented the floating gate transistor, which provides the foundation for many forms of semiconductor memory devices.[11] [12]
    Discovering HAART Cocktail Therapy
  • David Ho is a Taiwanese-American medical doctor and HIV/AIDS researcher who was born in Taiwan and has made many innovative state of the art scientific contributions to the understanding and technological treatment of HIV infection.
    The integrated laptop projector
  • was first developed and showcased by Asus, a Taiwanese computer manufacturer, in 2008. The built-in projector debuted at Computex Taipei 2008, an annual computer expo.[13] Competitors such as HP in 2010 and Fujitsu in 2011 have since released similar products.[14] [15]
    Refinement of Charged Meltblown Filtration
  • Certain charged filtration media manufacturing processes used in modern respirators, like N95 masks, were invented by Peter Tsai.
    The optimistic concurrency control
  • method was first proposed by Taiwanese computer scientist H. T. Kung and American John T. Robinson in 1981.[16]
    Pop a Point Pencil
  • a stackable pencil or non-sharpening pencil. It is a type of pencil where many short pencil tips are housed in a cartridge-style plastic holder. A blunt tip is removed by pulling it from the writing end of the body and re-inserting it into the open-ended bottom of the body, thereby pushing a new tip to the top. It is pioneered by Taiwanese stationery manufacturer Bensia Pioneer Industrial Corporation in the early 1970s.
    USB flash drive
  • a data storage device, invented by Pua Khein-Seng, a Taiwanese-Malaysian inventor.
    Xiaoluren
  • the walking green man, is the animated traffic light system.
    High entropy alloys
  • invented in 2004 by Jien-Wei Yeh and his team in Taiwan.[17]
    WiMAX
  • a wireless broadband communication standards invented by Tatung Company accompanied with Tatung University.

    Language and writing system

    Taiwan Sign Language
  • is the sign language most commonly used by the deaf and hard of hearing in Taiwan.
    Taiwanese Braille
  • is the braille script used in Taiwan for Taiwanese Mandarin (Guoyu).

    Sports

    Woodball
  • is a sport invented by Weng Ming-hui and Kuang-chu Young in 1990. In the game, a mallet is used to pass a ball through a series of gates. The Olympic Council of Asia made the sport a program of the Asian Beach Games in 2008.[18] The International Woodball Federation is based in Taipei, Taiwan.[19]

    Weapons and military

    See also: Republic of China Armed Forces and National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology.

    Assault rifle

    Sniper rifle

    Submachine gun

    Machine gun

    Pistol

    Grenade launcher

    Others

    See also

    Notes and References

    1. Book: Martin, Laura C.. Tea: The drink that changed the world. 2007. Tuttle Publishing. Rutland. 9780804837248. 219.
    2. Book: Lovegren, Sylvia. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. 2013. Oxford University Press. 978-0-19-973496-2. 223.
    3. Web site: Carson . Erin . Boba tea shortage explained: Why the bubble drink's facing tough times . CNET . 23 September 2021.
    4. News: Grimes . William . Peng Chang-kuei, Chef Behind General Tso's Chicken, Dies at 98 . The New York Times . 2 December 2016 . 21 February 2021.
    5. Book: Laudan, Rachel. Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. 2013. University of California Press. 978-0-520-95491-5. 310–311.
    6. Wu. I-Chen. Huang. Dei-Yen. Advances in Computer Games. A New Family of k-in-a-Row Games . 2006 . 11th International Conference, ACG 2005, Taipei, Taiwan, September 6-9, 2005 . Lecture Notes in Computer Science . 4250 . 180–194 . 10.1007/11922155_14 . 978-3-540-48887-3.
    7. Web site: Poletick . Rachel . A Brief History of the Cat Café . Mental Floss . 27 July 2020.
    8. News: Lemmin-Woolfrey . Ulrike . Lastoe . Stacey . 'Cats' is a disaster, but cats aren't: The best cat cafes to show your solidarity with our beloved companions . 27 July 2020 . CNN . Cable News Network. . 19 July 2019.
    9. Lin. M.C.. Lin. S.H.. Neumark. D.M.. Y.T. Lee Preface. The Journal of Physical Chemistry A. 4 September 1997. 101. 36. 6339–6340. 10.1021/jp971954n. free.
    10. The dynamics of chemical reactions - a fascinating new field of research. The Journal of Physical Chemistry A. 101. 36. 6339–6340. 15 October 1986. 10.1021/jp971954n. free.
    11. Web site: Taiwan flash memory inventor wins lifetime award. Taiwan Today. Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan). 16 August 2017. en. 25 April 2014.
    12. Kahng. D.. Sze. S. M.. A Floating Gate and Its Application to Memory Devices. Bell System Technical Journal. 1288–1295. en. 10.1002/j.1538-7305.1967.tb01738.x. 8 July 1967. 46. 6.
    13. News: Herrman. John. ASUS Laptop With Built-In Projector Raises PowerPoint Threat to "Critical". Gizmodo. 5 June 2008.
    14. News: Stevens. Tim. HP launching tablets and notebooks with integrated pico projectors this year?. Engadget. 21 January 2010.
    15. Robinson. Mark. Fujitsu Notebook Ditches Optical Drive, Packs Pico Projector. Wired. 22 April 2011.
    16. Kung. H.T.. Robinson. John T.. On optimistic methods for concurrency control. ACM Transactions on Database Systems. June 1981. 6. 2. 213–226. 10.1145/319566.319567. 10.1.1.101.8988. 61600099 .
    17. News: Wei-han . Chen . Taiwanese researcher gets special 'Nature' coverage - Taipei Times . The Taipei Times . 10 June 2016 .
    18. News: MOFA honors inventor of woodball. 6 July 2007. Taipei Times.
    19. Web site: Historical innovation. International Woodball Federation.

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