Why Didn't I Think of That? Page 3

  And, we all know a Boy Scout or two.

  Well, in 1917, that’s how the Band-Aid came to be. A cotton buyer named Earle Dickson married a klutz named Josephine Frances Knight who continually wounded herself. Earle would end up patching Josephine up with tape and some gauze from the company for which he procured cotton, Johnson &Johnson. Problem was, the stuff was just too big for her nicks and cuts. Poor Earle felt like he was using a cannon ball to kill a fly.

  So Earle made a batch of little bandages by affixing precut squares of Johnson & Johnson sterile gauze to some little bits of surgical tape. He found some fabric called Conaline, which he used to cover the sticky parts of the tape so the bandages wouldn’t start sticking before they were supposed to. The little devils worked so well that he presented the idea to his boss, James Johnson, who ordered production to begin in 1920.

  At first, sales were slow. Then, somebody had the idea to distribute free samples to Boy Scout troops, which, as you know, are just teeming with adolescent boys running around in sharp, pointy forests wearing short pants. Brilliant!

  The little invention took off and, to date, more than one hundred billion Band-Aids have been sold. Well done Earle, well done.

  A Toilet by Any Other Name Still Smells

  If the word toilet just isn’t titillating enough for you, there is no shortage of other names for it . . . privy, loo, washroom, commode, lavatory, shitter, porcelain throne, potty, dump, black hole, rest room, powder room, john, lav, little boys’ room, little girls’ room, water closet, bog, the oval office, the thinking chair, the reading room, turd pool, porcelain king, Super Bowl, turd tube, and the boom-boom room.

  17 TOILET BOWL

  TAGLINE: Bowl in which one defecates

  PREDECESSOR: Everywhere else

  LESSON: Ya gotta do what ya gotta do, so make it easier for people to do it.

  Latrine, restroom, can, crapper, John, and so on and so on—the number of names for this extremely simple device suggests only one thing: No one actually wants to say what it’s for. And for the purposes of this book I’m not going to say it’s a receptacle for the efficient disposal of adult human feces either.

  Like any good invention, there’s some disagreement over who should be credited with the invention of the modern toilet. Though the controversy continues to swirl about (clockwise here in the States . . . counterclockwise in Australia), I’ve flushed out two main contenders. Most experts agree that J. F. Brondel introduced the first valve-type flush toilet in 1738. However John Harrington is credited with inventing the “water closet” 150 years earlier. But Harrington’s version was not as closely related to our modern toilet, though it did have a flushing mechanism.

  So despite what many people think, Sir Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet. However, Thomas Crapper was issued nine patents; four were for drain improvements, three for “water closets,” one for manhole covers, and one for pipe joints. So, if you think about it, it’s not a huge leap to associate Tommy with the word “crap.”

  Toilets in Outer Space!

  In 1981 NASA developed an advanced waste management system for the space shuttle that utilizes suction to . . . well you get the idea.

  To plop an American Tommy into the invention mix, Thomas Jefferson invented an indoor toilet at his residence, Monticello, by rigging a system of pulleys. Servants (also known as his “slaves” or his “children”) used the device to haul away chamber pots.

  DID YOU

  KNOW?

  Early Romans used porcupine quills as toothpicks.

  18 TOOTHPICK

  TAGLINE: A little pointy stick

  PREDECESSOR: Loud sucking noises

  LESSON: Make it easier for people to do something they already do.

  Food has been getting stuck in people’s teeth for over 400,000 years. Neanderthal and Homo sapiens fossils show clear signs that even early humans picked their teeth with rudimentary tools. So you’d think some caveman would have opened up a little toothpick emporium way back in the d-a-y. Lord knows if the Flintstones taught us anything, it’s that prehistoric man was a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes. But it wasn’t until 1858 that somebody figured out how to take toothpicks all the way to the bank.

  Charles Forster of Strong, Maine, is believed to be the first person to manufacture toothpicks. And it wasn’t as easy as you’d think. He had to go all the way to South America to figure it out. In his travels, Forster watched natives use little pieces of wood to clean their teeth. Impressed by the technology that had been under our collective noses for 400 millennia, he sent a sample box home to his wife who showed them around. “Check these out!” she said to the people of Maine, who stared back at her dumbly and made sucking noises in an effort to dislodge the food from their teeth. After a quick and disgusting, demonstration, Mr. Foster had more orders than you could shake a tiny little stick at—especially from hotels and restaurants.

  Foster’s first few batches were handmade; the Model T of toothpicks you might say. But by 1860, he had to devise machines to keep up with the growing demand. The genius of the toothpick-making machine was that it allowed sticks to be cut into, uh, much smaller sticks.

  Today, there are toothpicks-a-plenty in nearly every household and eating establishment in the world. Their dental applications aside, without them our club sandwiches would be completely unmanageable, our fingers would be all over those free samples at Costco, and our tropical drinks would be lackluster in the absence of tiny paper umbrellas.

  OVER 100,000,000,000,000 PAPER CLIPS HAVE BEEN SOLD.

  19 PAPER CLIP

  TAGLINE: The staple for people with commitment issues

  PREDECESSOR: A straight pin stuck into stacks of paper

  LESSON: Most people are unorganized. Organize them.

  We have all reverse engineered a paper clip at one point in our lives, only to discover that our suspicions were correct: It’s a wire.

  Wire was invented as early as 1500 B.C., so why did it take so long to make this mental leap? Lots of reasons . . . steel wire was still new, machinery had to be introduced to manufacture it, and so on. But mainly, it’s because you, or someone like you, didn’t think of it until the 1860s when Samuel B. Fay made millions from the idea. It’s this type of tiny, cricket-sized mental leap that separates the everyday entrepreneur from the billionaire. All you have to do is get out your tiny mental cricket and give him a little shove.

  “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

  —THOMAS EDISON

  Fay patented the paper clip in 1867. The original patent listed its primary purpose as attaching tickets to fabric, but it did make mention that it could be used to organize papers. A subsequent flood of paper clip patents was issued beginning in 1868 as hundreds of would-be inventors were audibly heard striking their foreheads and saying, “D-oh!”

  Nowadays you can’t sit at your desk without seeing at least one paper clip, which to date have sold over 100 trillion units. It’s amazing to think that people have purchased that many pieces of bent wire. But it goes to show that a great idea will go a great distance.

  20 WHEEL

  TAGLINE: A round cylinder

  PREDECESSOR: Dragging stuff

  LESSON: You may be looking at the greatest invention ever without realizing it.

  I get it—the wheel is probably the most important mechanical invention of all time. But come on! How hard was it to figure out? I mean even during the Stone Ages stuff rolled, didn’t it? Some caveman must’ve noticed a log or a rock rolling down a hill. Hell, it probably happened all the time! However, it took quite some time to work out the principle that round things roll. And for many cultures it eluded them entirely until nearly modern times!

  Because the concept behind the wheel appears to be so simple, one might assume that people would naturally pick up on it. But incredibly, this is not the case. The Inca, Aztec, and Maya cultures were highly advanced, yet they never used the wheel. In fact, there is no evidence that the wheel existed in Western civilizations until after the Europeans came over to decimate them.

  The very first wheel was most likely made of a section of wooden log. Later, more advanced tools made it possible to carve wheels from stone. The first flat tire followed shortly thereafter.

  Today the wheel is so commonplace it is barely noticed. However, aside from the obvious applications for transport vehicles such as cars, trucks and trains, etc., we are dependent upon the wheel in many less obvious ways. In fact, nearly every piece of machinery created uses a form of wheel in its mechanisms. From watches to turbine engines, modern society would grind to a halt like a rusty gear without this simplest of contraptions.

  “Perhaps imagination is only intelligence having fun.”

  —GEORGE SCIALABBA

  21 BIKINI

  TAGLINE: Wearing your underwear in public

  PREDECESSOR: Wearing your underwear in private

  LESSON: Being first isn’t everything. And sex sells.

  Talk about a no-brainer. If you were to take every heterosexual male who has ever been born and raise them, individually, in complete isolation, each and every one of them would independently invent the bikini . . . about three seconds before they invented the naked lady. But it wasn’t until 1946 that someone cashed in on the male lust for barely there, soaking-wet attire, and did so with a little help from the Atomic Bomb.

  Don’t get me wrong; running around naked at the beach is nothing new. Women have done it for ages. But sadly by 1946, the liberal attitude toward the scantily clad female form had disappeared and bathing suits looked more like nuns’ habits. That’s where two Frenchmen come in.

  Jacques Heim first advertised his two-piece bathing suit over the skies of Cannes, c
alling it the atome (French for atom) because of how small it was. Three weeks later, Louis Reard unveiled his two-piece number. Using skywriters over the beaches of the Riviera, he proclaimed his suit, “Smaller than the smallest bathing suit in the world,” and named it the bikini. Reard spun a story about how the name bikini came from the little islands in the South Pacific where the United States recently tested several nuclear weapons. The bikini, he said, was named so because he had “split the atom.” Very clever.

  Don’t laugh. Take a product that allows women to run around nearly naked, throw them into a post world war society teaming with sexual tension, add a storyline that links the whole thing to the nuclear bomb, stir in a pun or two or five thousand, and voila! You have headlines all over the world and a place in history.

  As Heim found out, you can come up with an idea first, and still get scooped. Besides, “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Atome?” That’s clunky. Okay, now you can laugh.

  THE TURDUCKEN DOES NOT OCCUR NATURALLY IN THE WILD.

  22 TURDUCKEN

  TAGLINE: An ungodly combination of birds

  PREDECESSOR: Eating poultry one species at a time

  LESSON: No idea is too weird.

  A guy walks into a butcher shop with a turkey, a chicken, and a duck . . . . No, this is not a joke—it’s the turducken.

  Not since the “refried bean” has boredom been the catalyst for such culinary delight. Three boned, stuffed birds, crammed into one another: a turkey stuffed with a duck, stuffed with a chicken. The turducken is food gone a-fowl.

  A meal consisting of three life forms, fused, as if by some hideous matter transfer experiment, may seem more like a zoological discovery than an invention, but I assure you, the turducken does not occur naturally in the wild.

  Apparently, one day in 1985, a man whose name has been lost to history, strolled into Hebert’s Specialty Meats in Maurice, Louisiana, carrying three birds and instructed the staff there to build him one turducken. Mercifully, the procedure was performed post-mortem. Once word got out that there was a way to kill, mangle, and then eat three animals at once, the demand went through the roof.

  Since its creation, the turducken has rapidly grown in popularity. The company now sells around 16,000 turduckens a year. They share a friendly rivalry with Paul Prudhomme’s 75,000 turduckens-per-year, retailing anywhere from $75 to $250. And those are only the professionally prepared turduckens—it doesn’t include the thousands of turduckens prepared each year by amateurs.

  If ever you blew a chance to invent something when you were high, this was it. But, hey, it’s not too late. Surely you can cram a Cornish game hen into that chicken and then maybe a parakeet into that?

  Good luck.

  APPROXIMATELY 26,000,000,000 Q-TIPS ARE SOLD EVERY YEAR.

  23 Q - TIPS

  TAGLINE: A stick with some cotton on it*

  PREDECESSOR: Dirty ears

  LESSON: Indispensable, disposable products mean repeat customers.

  Perhaps one of the most blatant examples of corporate denial is this statement on every box of Q-Tips: Do not insert in ear canal.

  Please.

  Despite this warning, people have been sticking these things in their ear canals since 1920, when a Polish-born American named Leo Gerstenzang invented them to prevent his wife from sticking toothpicks (p. 35) in their newborn infant’s ear canal.

  Allow me to explain.

  Leo’s wife had rigged up a different device to clean their baby’s ears at bath time—a toothpick stuck into a piece of cotton. Leo decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to insert something into his child’s ear that had the word “pick” in its name, so he designed a ready-made cotton swab that would do the same with a lot less risk. And thus the Q-Tip was born. Well, not exactly. He named his product: The Gerstenzang Infant Novelty Company’s Baby Gays.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “not only could I have invented that but I certainly would have named it differently. I mean, ‘Infant Novelty’? What’s that all about?”

  Well, Leo felt the same way, eventually changing the name to Q-Tips Baby Gays, with the Q standing for “Quality” and the “Gay” standing for “Homosexual.” Kidding, kidding . . .though when the Schwab Company purchased the brand, Baby Gays was dropped along with the product’s exclusive use for infant care. Q-Tips are now one of the biggest selling personal care products on the planet. Schwab sells twenty-six billion Q-Tips per year and remains in denial about the “ear canal” thing.

  * Which under no circumstances (nudge, nudge) should you insert in your ear canal (wink, wink).

  Belgian Embassy: Hello, Belgian Embassy, this is Océane. How can we help you? (She then repeated the former greeting in Dutch.)

  Me: Quick question Océane, who invented the sliced potato boiled in oil?

  Océane (in a cute accent): Ah, excellent question. Belgium has historical evidence that we were eating potato strips fried in oil as early as the seventeenth century.

  Me: You mean, French fries?

  Océane: Ja.

  Me: Ah ha!

  24 FRENCH FRIES

  TAGLINE: Potato slices thrown into boiling oil

  PREDECESSOR: Whole potatoes thrown into boiling water lesson: If you deep-fry it, they will come.

  The French insist that they invented the French fry—the Belgians say it was them. So in the interest of fairness, I called the Belgian Embassy and inquired about its creation.

  Based on my extensive research, which consisted of tricking a Belgian receptionist into recognizing fried potato strips as French fries, I’m going to go with the French side of the story. Plus, the Belgians already have that delicious waffle named after them.

  And on top of my conversation with Océane, our very own Thomas Jefferson backed up the French claim. Now Jefferson wasn’t “Washington honest”—as evidenced by all those slave children who looked like him—but there isn’t any evidence that he lied about fried foods. A menu was found from one of Jefferson’s dinner parties held in 1801, which clearly states that his guests would be served “potatoes, deep fried, and served in the French way.” This was risky because potatoes back then were thought to be highly poisonous unless boiled thoroughly. Jefferson assured his guests that his French Chef, Honoré Julien, would prepare the potatoes in a manner that would not kill them, and they did not.

  Yes, it seems it was a Frenchman who came up with the extraordinarily simple revelation that potatoes taste good after being fried in a vat of oil.

  But then, doesn’t everything?

  “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

  —HOWARD H. AIKEN

  25 WIRE HANGER

  TAGLINE: Mangled and twisted piece of wire

  PREDECESSOR: Wooden hangers

  LESSON: Be careful. Protect yourself and your idea.

  In a pinch, they help us break into automobiles, unclog our toilets, and faithfully serve as old car radio and television antennas. But, mainly, they provide an inexpensive hanging place for nearly any article of clothing, except fancy, little-girl dresses (according to Joan Crawford). And it’s all thanks to Albert J. Parkhouse.

  Like every other morning, Albert arrived to work one day in 1903 at the Timberlake Wire and Novelty Company, a Michigan company that made lampshade frames and other wire items. Flush with excitement at the prospect of making lampshade skeletons and other wire novelties for painfully low wages, he went to hang his hat and coat on the hooks considerately provided by the company. But all the hooks were in use.

  He thought about just wearing his coat, but the prospect of getting a sleeve caught in the machinery convinced him otherwise. After all, maimed workers were sent home early, without pay. Ever the dedicated worker-bee, Parkhouse picked up a piece of wire, bent it into two large hoops and twisted both ends at the center to create a hook. He hung up his coat and began his workday.