What inventions are now obvious but somehow eluded people for a long time? I’m talking about things that could have been made for centuries before they actually appeared.
Gunpowder is the traditional one. It’s an easy to make product and its ingredients are common. Other simple products would be stirrups, hot air balloons, and windmills. Anyone think of other examples?
Can openers
The cat flap (in doors)
Chimneys
Anti-grav platforms
Scissors
Moveable type
Evaporative coolers
How many years were people stuck opening cans with sharp rocks and hacksaws before someone thought to design the canopener?
Granted, they came around pretty quick, and a type of opener was introduced with canning itself. I’m talking about the super easy to use one with a circular blade that you lazily crank arounr the top. The other kind was a straight edged type of device that is considerably harder to use.
giggle
“Gentlemen! Behold! I have invented… The Can!”
"Great… ummm… what is it for?
“You can store food in The Can!”
“And then…?”
"Well… err… I mean… You can eat it later!
“Uh huh. How? Exactly?”
“You open The Can!”
“With…?”
"… … God Damn It!
That’s funny!
I found the proper name for the device I had in mind: Safety can opener.
Which brings up the question: what the hell is a safety can?
Genius!
NCB, I must respectfully disagree. I’ve kept a P-38 can opener on my keyring for years. It’s pathetically easy to use, about as much so as the rotary kind to which your other link leads.
Perhaps you are thinking of the bladed kind where you basically had to jam it in the edge of the lid, then lever it up repeatedly as you went, literally tearing a gash around the top of the can, as seen in the Popeye cartoons. I have used these, and they are hard as hell on the wrists.
As to inventions after their time: I’d vote for Liquid Paper and the Garden Weasel, myself. Two very simple things that became very popular and very profitable for their creators and marketers.
I believe Napoleon’s soldiers were the first to use canned food in warfare (not as a weapon).
Jaques: I am so hungry. Ve need food!
Pierre: I have ze latest innovation in food. Ze can! There ees food in here that ees as fresh az ze day it was placed in the can!
Jaques: Mercie! Ve can share ze food.
Pierre: Oiu! How do remove ze food?
Jaques: Alaz, ve are thwarted. Ve shall starve!
The US postal service finally decided to use self-sticking stamps a few years ago, decades after the sticker was invented.
The little slit in the ketchup packets that make them easy to tear open. Where were these in the 70s?
Maxi pads with wings. Maxi pads with adhesive in a wide strip, not the little narrow slip that inevitably broke free and allowed the pad to wander.
Scrunchies
Kethchup squeeze bottles.
The new type of seal on the mustard bottles that has a little flap that makes it easy to remove in one peice.
According to Michael Palin’s documentaries, Napoleon’s armies were in fact the first to use canned food in the battlefield.
They were, however, not the first to use tinned food; their food wasn’t tinned. It was, in fact, bottled, using the techniques our grandmothers would later use “Mason Jars” to achieve.
If Palin is to be believed, Napoleon’s armies had to pour their pickled meals out of old wine and liquor bottles.
The handle on toilet paper packages!! Honestly, why did it take so long for the packaging people to realise that carrying those is a chore? Especially the big family sized ones. All the packages should have the handle!
Wang the popeye kind was what I pictured in my mind, but I couldn’t find a pic, so I chose a (apparantly ((in hindsight)) not so similar) type that wasn’t rotary bladed.
This site (finally!) has the points I was remembering about can openers and canned food.
The cotton gin. The original model was terribly simple, and people had been carding wool and combing burrs and such out of hair and fur for centuries. There were apparently lots of people around the world working toward such a device when Eli Whitney filed his patent, but why hadn’t someone come up with something so simple 50 years before? Cotton was just as unprofitable, people need cloth as badly, and the technology required was there. So why then, and not before?
Buttons as fasteners didn’t appear until the 14th century or so - they had them as decoration but not to hold their clothes together. Granted, they didn’t really need to - my understanding is that the fashion became so much more tightly fitted at the time because scissor technology advanced, also. But surely there were plenty of applications before the cotehardie where a nice button or two would have come in handy.
Upside down kethcup bottles. I’ve only started to see them recently and have always wondered why they weren’t the original design. I guess whoever invented the ketchup bottle didn’t actually know anything about ketchup.
The wheelbarrow. It didn’t appear in Europe until the middle ages—almost 1000 years after it was developed in China.
The Stirrup.
The phonograph.
Think about it: We were making arbitrarily complex clockwork mechanisms back in the Middle Ages, and we had needles and wax since the stone age. There was no fundamental reason in terms of materials or mechanical technology that precluded the phonograph for almost five centuries before its invention. A primitive Edison model (with a wax cylinder and almost no amplification) could have been invented significantly before the Jacquard loom, simply in terms of relative mechanical complexity.
The only reason I can think of is that the theory was so far behind. The same thing happened with penicillin.
Moveable type is actually pretty tricky, because you need to develop alloys that don’t shrink. And the romans used evaporative coolers to make ice in the desert.
But anti-grav platforms? You got a few lying around that I can borrow next time I move?
