"Everlastingly ingenious, ...humble products that made life better". Has the much-vaunted Indian R&D (with its "third-largest pool of scientists and engineers in the world" and all that rot) done anything like this????
(From an article) :
Let us now praise paper clips. 20th century manufacturing produced all these elegantly simple, everlastingly ingenious, often humble products that made life better...
Ten standouts:
PAPER CLIPS -- The century wasn't even a year old when Johan Vaaler, a
Norwegian then living in Germany, solved the age-old problem of corralling
fly-away papers by squeezing them between the concentric loops of a couple
of inches of bent wire.
ICE-CREAM CONE -- At the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, food venders Arnold
Fornachou (ice cream) and Ernest Hamwi (sweet, rolled wafers) collaborated
in a way that seems inevitable now. There are other versions of the
ice-cream cone's origin. Italo Marconi received a 1903 patent for pastry
cornets to hold ice cream he sold.
NEON LIGHT -- Two English chemists had discovered neon 11 years earlier, but
in 1909 French physicist Georges Claude captured the gas in a glass tube
that glowed orange. Within a year, his ''liquid fire'' was used to
illuminate a Paris building and soon after to advertise everything from car
dealerships to hairdressers.
CELLOPHANE -- When comedian Mel Brooks' character, The 2000-Year-Old Man,
had to pick the greatest invention in history, he didn't hesitate. ''Saran
Wrap,'' he said. Well, before Saran Wrap there was cellophane, developed in
1912 by Jacques Brandenberger, who wanted a film to shed the wine and coffee
stains on Paris cafe tablecloths.
ZIPPER -- ''The Judson C-curity Fastener'' was a forerunner, but in 1913
Gideon Sundback patented an easy-to-use design. ''Z-z-zip,'' it went,
fastening rubber galoshes for B.F. Goodrich Co., which coined the name
zipper. (Note: Velcro was developed in 1957 after a Madame de Mistral's
zipper jammed. The creator: George de Mistral.)
BAND-AID -- Earle Dickson was a cotton buyer for the Johnson gauze bandage
company. Marriage made him an inventor: His bride kept hurting herself in
minor ways, and so he devised a small, ready-made sterile bandage strip.
Since 1921, Johnson & Johnson estimates 100 billion Band-Aids have covered
skinned knees and other cuts and scrapes.
PHOTOCOPIER -- Think about what once was involved in making a copy. Monks
toiling over medieval manuscripts. Smudgy carbon paper. Enter Chester F.
Carlson. In a neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., he used powdered ink and an
electrical charge to create a photocopy. ''10-28-38 Astoria,'' the
reproduced page said, identifying the date and place.
BALLPOINT PEN -- World War II could not stop Laszlo Biro's invention; indeed
it hastened production. Biro was working on a ballpoint when he fled his
native Hungary, and he patented it in 1943 in Argentina. Some 30,000 pens
were soon manufactured in England so RAF navigators could write in
unpressurized cockpits where fountain pens failed.
FRISBEE -- Working independently at mid-century, Bill Robes in New Hampshire
and Frederick Morrison in Los Angeles created the ''Space Saucer'' and the
''Pluto Platter,'' respectively. Whether the name Frisbee derives from a pie
company whose tins Yale students tossed is a matter of debate. (Honorable
mention toys: Slinky, 1946; skateboard, 1958.)
STICKY NOTES -- First came Spencer Silver's 1973 invention of an
indifferently sticky stuff. But what to do with it? His 3M colleague, Arthur
Fry, had the application: He first used paper gummed with the stuff to mark
songs in his choir book. Today, these scraps of square pastel are our
universal reminders.
(Sources: ''Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things''; ''David
Wallechinsky's Twentieth Century''; Utne Reader, The Economist) |
