Sitting on a flight one day, Chavannes noticed that the clouds seemed to be cushioning his plane as it descended for landing. The experience gave him the idea of using air sealed in plastic for packaging instead. And so in , bubblewrap was born.
The packing material is one of 36 household objects about to go on show at the Science Museum in London in a new exhibition which gives star billing to the "hidden heroes" of daily life, from egg boxes to umbrellas, ring binders to rawl plugs. We take them for granted. And yet somebody had to think them up. Like the objects, so ingrained in the fabric of modern life they have almost disappeared from view, many of their inventors have faded from memory, only to feature occasionally in pub quiz tie-breakers.
Who knew, for example, that the coffee filter was the brainwave of a Dresden housewife, Melitta Bentz, who lined a perforated metal cone with blotting paper back in ? Or, indeed, that the six-pack carrier was invented by one Ougljesa Jules Poupitch in Illinois in the early s?
All of the objects in the show combine apparent simplicity with seamless functionality, and even beauty, but the tales behind their invention vary wildly.
Some are the products of chance. The tea bag apparently came into being when the American tea trader Thomas Sullivan shipped samples in small silk packages to a customer who dipped them in water to test their quality.
Others, such as the lines drawn in the sand which inspired Norman J Woodland to invent the barcode, have a classic eureka! As with bubblewrap, a false start is often the first step on the way to enduring genius. The Post-it Note came out of Spencer Silver's failed attempts to create a super-strong adhesive. When an experiment yielded a super-weak adhesive by mistake, his colleague, Arthur Fry, sick of his markers falling out of his hymnbook during choir practice, spotted its potential and used the discarded batch to create a temporary page-marker.
It's about having a ready mind. A ready mind is not always enough. As many a hapless victim of the Dragons' Den knows, a head for business helps. Take the tragic tale of Charles Goodyear and the elastic band. In the s, the American inventor came up with the idea of vulcanising rubber adding sulphur to rubber to make a more stable product.
At the same time, Thomas Hancock was developing similar processes in the UK. Goodyear got there first but failed to patent his idea and Hancock beat him to the paperwork by just eight weeks.
A year later, one of Hancock's licensees, Stephen Perry, brought the first rubber band to market and their fortunes were assured. It's about being first past the post and having the commercial nous to make a go of it. Sometimes the people who make the fortunes aren't the ones who should. You don't often get entrepreneurial skill combined with inventive skill. Those people are very rare indeed. In the late 19th century, Citoplast was the universal sticky fix-all — for bleeding fingers and bicycle punctures alike.
The Band-Aid was born. The manufacturers of Citoplast, Beiersdorf, launched their version, Hansaplast around the same time. How can I get more sleep? Is it better to be an evening person or a morning person? I would like to know how can i build muscle faster and what are the things I'm doing wrong when weight lifting?
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