In Praise of Anonymous Inventors*

   Until fairly recently, if you wanted to get some ketchup out of the bottle onto your hamburger, you shook the bottle, banged on its bottom and hoped that the result would fall somewhere between nothing coming out and a huge red splash that practically obliterates its target.  No more.  Someone had the wit to realize that the bottom of the bottle did not have to be on the bottom when it stood on the table.  So, if correctly stored, that red stuff is at the ready and will flow out just to the degree desired.

   And so with bottles of a shampoo, sparing struggles in the shower, and no doubt with bottles of many other viscous substances that I know nothing about.  From bottles this invention—for that is surely what it is—has also traveled to tubes.   No longer do I have to shake and squeeze when I use regenerating cream for my skin; the stuff is there to plop out.  And so on.  Once thunk up, the idea can be and has been endlessly adopted.

    My sudden appreciation of the upside down tube led me to realize that our world is full of devices we could not live without that are contrivances brought into the world by Mr. Anonymous.  Prometheus gave us fire; but who invented the wheel?  We say rather contemptuously, “don’t invent the wheel all over again.”  Makes sense if taken literally; the wheel, after all, already exists.  But it’s all wrong if the advice is not to invent something of the magnitude of the wheel.  Don’t just imagine what a wheel-less world would be like in the 21^st century, but mentally remove wheels from 15^th-century Florence or from Caesar’s Rome and realize how primitive would be what remains.

   Fire and the wheel are biggies.  But there are plenty of other anonymous inventions that have had a huge impact on how we live and work.  Think of the many crafts that crucially depend on the saw.  Rather than cutting all kinds of material with a sharp but smooth edge or splitting with force, cutting with sharpened jagged teeth makes severing easier, more accurate, and in some cases possible at all. 

   Think of a world without knots that can fasten one rope-like cord to another or to a solid object like an anchor.  Somebody had to figure out how to do this sufficiently securely so that you could rely on its holding under various kinds of stress.  A version of a knot is also required to secure a belt, a more important contraption than one might first think, since belts do much more than just hold up our pants.

   I invite readers to make their own contributions to this roster in praise of unknown inventors.  If you let your mind roam, you will think of many examples.  But I want now to conclude with what has long been a favorite of mine: the safety pin.  Who, I wonder, first thought of bending a pin into the shape of a horseshoe and then securing the sharp end in a small sleeve.  What results is a case of having your cake and eating it too: the safety pin offers most of the advantages of that sharp tip and spares us of most of the nuisance it can cause.

   So, under the heading of “comment” below, please go to it and make your own addition, signing with your name or with an amusing pseudonym.

   *Note I have done no research for this mini-disquisition—I did not even go to Wikipedia.