Superman's Super-Gadgets?

[MatterEaterLad]

Its never been clear exactly how Kandorians could survive with human metabolisms at tiny size, or even if their systems or cells are miniaturized so that common nutrients or oxygen can't be used by them...

[JulianPerez]

Its never been clear exactly how Kandorians could survive with human metabolisms at tiny size, or even if their systems or cells are miniaturized so that common nutrients or oxygen can't be used by them...

Hmm, interesting observation. Maybe this is why enlarging the Kandorians was a nut that took decades for Superman to crack: it wasn't just that they had been made tiny, but also that they had been fundamentally altered in a profound way to allow them to exist at their size.

Though at least the portion about them being able to think and reason normally even at their size makes sense. The history of 20th Century computers is the history of miniaturization - nowadays they have tiny chips that fit on a person's thumbnail that can do all the work of a computer that in the 1940s took up rooms. If human (and Kryptonian) brains can be thought of as circuits, they haven't gotten dumber, they've just been "miniaturized."

Although Superman had to check the air nozzles into Kandor, so they do breathe something resembling oxygen - albeit of a very filtered kind.

I always thought the Kandor thing made sense. Their city was shielded from a hostile environment. Any would they were on would be gigantic to them, so existing in the bottle was the next best thing to being "normal". Even on a yellow sun world they would have to contend with "gigantic" creatures.

Can't argue with this reasoning. And also, if they leave, they will still be tiny next to everything else, really, without a place in the world of giant crickets and daffodils and overly curious hound dogs. Having heat-vision is no consolation next to that. At least in Kandor they are normal sized, at least to each other.

Suddenly the plight of Kandor comes into focus: they are isolated from everything else by their size, and the bottled city is the one place they can be normal.

[Uncle Mxy]

I like the idea of Kryptonians as "status quo" obsessive.  They'd achieved a near-nirvana lifestyle as far as they were concerned and their great torment was change which would inevitably deviate them from paradise.  Of course, would the deviants -- the criminals in the Phantom Zone and who survived by travelling abroad in space -- have more in common with Superman than the peaceful ones who died or lived in Kandor?  Oh man...  there could be a ton of stories here.  Perhaps the -El line was the only one who had "gumption genes"...  that'd explain all those stories where it was the -El family line who made every useful innovation on Krypton?  

Once super-powered, the Kandorians didn't need air and could easily have dealt with the "giant" world around them...  set up shop on the moon (or create their own tiny "moon") or any number of places.  It wouldn't be  hard for them to protect themselves against human intervention if they wanted to stay on Earth.  Even a tiny Kandorian is significantly tougher than the world around them.  Keeping them in an envirionment that makes them as fragile as eggshells only makes sense if they're being held as prisoners in a zoo, or they didn't know how powerful they'd be under the right light.

[Captain Kal]

Superman's inventions:

- The Zone-o-Phone for communicating with Phantom Zoners without opening a door to let them out.

- The friction-proof chemical he treated Clark Kent's clothes with so he could use super-speed while wearing them. They also dyed them all red, white, and blue in a bizarre bit of American flag-waving.

- The special material he made his Kent clothes and shoes from that he could super-compress into tiny wafers.

- The supercomputer in the Fortress.

- The Superman robots.

- The Supermobile.

- The indestructible alloy of the Fortress door and key.

- The ray that re-enlarged Kandor.

[Uncle Mxy]

The ray that re-enlarged Kandor.

Given the side effects, I wouldn't rank it high on his list of accomplishments.

Besides what's been listed, he invented:

- Supermanium (which I don't think the Fortress key was said to be made of)
- Jimmy Olsen's signal watch
- A Time Scanner to look back through time
- Blue Kryptonite

I'm sure the list goes on.

[RedSunOfKrypton]

Superboy's time telescope could see into the future too.

[Captain Kal]

Just recalled a few obscure inventions:

- Yellow sunscreen lotion that blocked yellow sun rays and only permitted weakening red rays to penetrate his skin.  (He developed this to reduce his seeming 'power boost' to normal super-power levels.)  This lotion did not seem to have a decay life esp. since he had to shower to deliberately wash the stuff off.

- Wristband form energy gauge that measured the percentage of energy in a living body (based on a device of Jor-El).  Using this gauge he was able to determine that using the lotion above had actually removed half his powers instead of reducing his supposed overpower-level.

- Red sunscreen to temporarily retain his powers under Lexor's red sun.  This transparent, ultra-reflective coating had a limited lifespan so when it started decaying Superman's powers started to wane.

- Kryptonian revitalizer that could bring a humanoid back from the dead.  It must be noted that this wasn't really his invention but his recall of how a previously invented revitalizer worked.  It also was used to revive an artificial lifeform not a natural one in the story "The Metropolis Monster".  I suppose that Kryptonian rescuscitation techniques are just that much more advanced than Terran ones so what is truly dead and gone for our tech is still potentially salvageable for their tech.  But even their tech has a point of no return.  On a related note, the concept of death has morphed over the centuries on our own world, so the concept of death being well and truly final is a bit of a human conceptual construct.