Northern Ireland is known for a number of things - building the world's most famous ship and our undeniable charm but to name a few.
But did you know that some of the greatest inventions were the brainchild of some incredible Northern Irish minds throughout history?
From the penalty kick to milk chocolate to viagra of all things... NI inventions have revolutionised the world and the list only continues to grow.
Read more: NI coastal route ranked in top 10 for UK summer road trips
Here are a number of notable inventions to have come from Northern Ireland:
Milk chocolate
Hans Sloane, from Killyleagh Co Down, was a Royal physician who went to Jamaica in 1687 to spend 15 months as the governor’s physician and catalogued hundreds of botanical species including the cocoa bean.
Locals mixed it with water to form a concoction Sloane described as “nauseous and hard of digestion”.
He boiled the cocoa with milk and sugar, inventing milk chocolate. Back in England, Sloane used his milk chocolate recipe to treat digestion and consumption.
More than 60 years later, Cadbury produced ‘Sir Hans Sloane’s Milk Chocolate’.
Streetcars
John Stephenson from Armagh was just 22 years old in 1833 when he designed the world’s first omnibus and streetcar.
He emigrated to New York with his parents aged two and went on to open his own omnibus and streetcar manufacturing business.
He successfully designed, built and exported streetcars until the Great Depression forced his company’s closure.
Undeterred, Stephenson bounced back and repaid loans with interest, earning him the nickname ‘Honest John Stephenson’. His designs graced such cities as London, Lima, St Petersburg, Paris and Rio.
Discount department stores and mail-order business
Born in Lisburn in 1803, Alexander Turney Stewart moved to New York aged 20 and spent a $3,000 inheritance on Irish lace and linens.
He established a small store in Manhattan and built a retail empire on wholesale prices.
Fashion shows and full-length mirrors lured women to his second ‘Marble Palace’ store.
And an innovative mail order business solidified his wealth. In 1847 during the Irish famine, Stewart sent a shipful of supplies to Belfast and returned it filled with immigrants whom he employed.
Stewart became America’s third-richest person, accruing the largest individual fortune over a single lifetime.
Milk of Magnesia
Sir James Murray from Co Derry was an Irish physician, whose research into digestion led to his creation of the stomach aid Milk of Magnesia in 1809.
Murray developed the foundations of a fluid magnesia with a base ingredient of Magnesium sulfate, which had long been known for its benefits in digestion and as an aid for constipation.
Murray named his recipe Fluid Magnesia and set up the company Sir James Murray & Son in order to successfully market it.
Fluid Magnesia was later sold as a solution and recommended as a palatable laxative and as a remedy for acidity, indigestion, heartburn, and gout. He set up a factory in Belfast to produce the medicine commercially.
Artificial fertiliser
Sir James Murray also discovered that by-products of the process of making his stomach aid included sodium, potassium bicarbonates and silicates.
He treated them with sulphuric acid and invented an artificial fertiliser.
Murray conducted trials in 1817 and continued to develop and produce synthetic fertilisers we know today.
Safety lamp
William Reid Clanny was born in Bangor, Co Down, and trained as a physician at Edinburgh, and served as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy.
In 1812 the Felling colliery disaster in Gateshead prompted him to deal with problems of underground lighting. He completed his first lamp consisting of a candle in a glass surround.
Below the glass was a trough containing water through which air was forced by a pair of bellows. Fumes bubbled out through another water chamber above.
Clanny won medals in 1816/17 for his invention from the Royal Society of Arts.
The Ulster overcoat
Sherlock Holmes' garment of choice.
James Getty McGee had a shop in High Street in Belfast and owned the Ulster Overcoat Company and designed the voluminous double-breasted coat cut from heavy Donegal tweed.
Pleats, pockets and a belt complete the sartorial standard, with the optional cape – made famous by Conan Doyle’s fictional detective – appearing briefly in the 1880s.
The premises were later expanded and named the Ulster Overcoat Company in honour of his famous creation.
Absolute Temperature Scale, later renamed the Kelvin scale
Farmer’s son William Thompson, born in College Square East in July 1824, determined a lower limit to temperature - absolute zero - as −273.15 degree Celsius or −459.67 degree Fahrenheit.
He was presented with the title Lord Kelvin in 1866 after he helped to calculate the required thickness of the world’s first transatlantic telegraph cable.
He also invented the reversible heat engine which now forms the basis for refrigeration techniques. He designed the compass which is now fitted to every British Naval ship.
Electric tramway
Co Antrim brothers William and Anthony Traill invented the world’s first electric tramway with the construction of the Giant’s Causeway Tramway.
The three-foot narrow gauge line harnessed hydro-electric power and the first section, linking Bushmills with Portrush, opened on 29 January 1883.
Four years later, a second section connected Bushmills with the Giant’s Causeway. The line closed in 1949 due to reduced passenger numbers and high maintenance costs.
In 2002, the Giant’s Causeway and Bushmills Railway revived two miles of the original line, taking visitors to this iconic attraction ever since.
Pneumatic tyres
Belfast-based John Dunlop’s air-filled tubes are one of transportation’s greatest inventions.
Dunlop’s young son had asked him to make the tricycle’s solid rubber wheels more comfortable for Belfast’s bumpy thoroughfares.
He pumped up a garden hose later and so the journey began. With the tweaked invention, Ireland’s cycle racing elite-dominated with Dunlop tyres before cars drove them to global dominance.
Penalty kick
Willie McCrum from Milford, Co Armagh, was the son of a wealthy linen factory owner and was goalkeeper for Milford FC, conceding 62 goals in the Irish Football League’s inaugural season.
No fan of goalmouth foul play, McCrum devised the penalty kick to thwart such unsportsmanlike behaviour.
The idea, known as the ‘Irishman’s Motion’ and the ‘Death Penalty,’ was proposed in 1890 at an International Football Association Board and approved the following year.
The modern tractor
Harry Ferguson from Growel, Co Down, about 16 miles from Belfast, invented the three-point linkage system elevating himself to agricultural immortality.
Previously, tractors and ploughs were two separate entities making them cumbersome and dangerous to operate.
Harry Ferguson hitched the two together and used hydraulics to move the plough section, making farming safer and more cost-effective.
Aged 25, aviation enthusiast Ferguson also became the first Irishman to fly a plane, and the first UK citizen to both build and fly a plane.
Ferguson died in 1960 and his legacy lives on with the Massey Ferguson agricultural manufacturing company.
Portable defibrillator
Frank Pantridge from Hillsborough, Co Down, was educated at Queen’s University Belfast and became a physician and cardiologist.
During WW2 he was a Japanese POW in Singapore and after the war, he studied cardiology in the US then returned to Belfast and became cardiac consultant at the Royal Victoria Hospital.
In 1966, after seeing the need to urgently treat cardiac patients, Pantridge invented the portable defibrillator.
These devices were used in ambulances and at the scene of cardiac arrest. His ‘Pantridge Plan’ has saved countless lives worldwide. Dubbed the ‘Father of Emergency Medicine’, Frank Pantridge died in 2004 aged 88.
Split atom
Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton left Methodist College, Belfast and changed the world with John Cockcroft in atom-smashing experiments at Cambridge University in the early 1930s.
Walton and John Cockcroft built an apparatus which showed that nuclei of various lightweight elements such as lithium could be split by fast-moving protons.
They were recipients of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on the transmutation of the atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles.
Pulsar
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born in Belfast in 1943, graduated in physics from the University of Glasgow and studied for a PhD at Cambridge University.
She identified four blips in 120m of paper produced from a telescope she helped build.
The first resembled extraterrestrial activity and was dubbed LGM, or Little Green Men. Three more followed and pulsars or ‘pulsing stars’ were discovered.
Her Cambridge advisors, Anthony Hewish and Sir Martin Ryle, won the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics but Bell’s pivotal role was overlooked.
Nonetheless, Bell has received numerous honours, and her first pulse graces Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album.
Earthworm Jim
David Perry from Lisburn, Co Antrim, created the Earthworm Jim computer game.
His central character was an earthworm who was given superpowers when a suit fell on his head.
Earthworm Jim had to avoid flying cows to defeat enemies such as Professor-Monkey-For-a-Head and Bob, the Killer Goldfish in order to save Princess-What’s-Her-Name.
Viagra
Dr Wallace Dinsmore from Belfast gave the world reason to smile when he was part of a team which released research papers in 1999 revealing the side effect of a drug which was intended to treat angina.
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