And you should see a great big box and it's within your reach

[austin_dern]

I want to pause the trip report a bit to talk about my reading, 2100 Needed Inventions. It's a book which describes, well, it's right there on the label. It's a book originally published in 1942 and updated a couple times before the edition which I bought, a couple months ago. It may not surprise you to learn that buying the book and browsing around in it inspired that Friday piece about inventions which I at least liked.

It's an intriguing collection of things which at least some intelligent people thought were ideas just waiting to be turned into profit. Some of them are hilariously abstract, the kinds of things that oh, yeah, someone in his garage is just going to get right on, like atomic power or ``economical methods and apparatus for the concentration of lead iron ores''. Some seem like plain old padding of the list of inventions, like, ``a new kind of traffic system with lights for municipal use'', or, ``improvement in six-wheel buses''. Others feel like I'm just not getting why this wouldn't have already existed even in 1942 with the war on, like, ``a method of brewing tea electrically''.

Some are around finally, if belatedly, like the light bulb that puts more of its energy into light than into heat, or devices for giving toys sounds which actually sound like the things the toys represent. That's mostly done by electronics these days, of course, as are a lot of these examples. There's several which sound like they could've been done, but wouldn't ever catch on: ``an electric toaster that would automatically butter the toast from a small reservoir of melted butter would be a winner'', at least if Billy Mays weren't still dead. Otherwise you have to say, ``no, it would not''. The combination salt-and-pepper shaker, pressing a button for salt and leaving it unpressed for pepper, seems to solve a problem I never knew anyone had.

There's a lot of call for doing stuff with selenium cells, and great fondness for the Seeback Effect (in which heat produces electricity at the junction of the right pair of metals) and the Peltier effect (run it backwards to electrically produce cold). And there is the assertion, as a general problem, that ``hotels are in need of an article that will quickly and efficiently peel bananas'', which suggests that mid-1940s hotels were under much more banana-peeling time constraints than I would have imagined.

One that captures my imagination, though, is the observation that every typewriter has a signal that one is near the end of the line, but none has a signal that one is near the end of the page. I can almost envision some approaches for figuring that out, too, at least assuming an electric typewriter. But I suppose the technical details of making it work without fouling the paper-loading and paper-feeding are much harder than they look, or something like what I envision would've been commonplace long ago. And yet, well, maybe I did think of something fresh. Next time I'm in 1946 I'll have to check with the Patent Office.

Trivia: The third, ``C'' meal for Gemini VI's astronauts' first day in flight was scheduled to consist of 246 calories of (rehydratable) salmon salad, 99 calories of cinnamon toast, 117 calories of (rehydratable) butterscotch pudding, 241 calories of brownies, and 83 calories of (rehydratable) grapefruit drink. Source: Gemini 6: The NASA MIssion Reports, Editor Robert Godwin.

Currently Reading: 2100 Needed Inventions, Raymond F Yates.

PS: Hopefully, Saying Something True, which you'd think was a universal goal.

Comments

[notasquirrel.livejournal.com]

And you should see a great big box and it's within your reach

donte evur stope ann opun it upe...thetz mie advise toe u...

kause ule nevur gitt ridd uv ite, ann ite wil problee turne oute bee a kleptomaniak kat withe fiave extraa thumbz ann a reelee badd 'creem' habbut whoe inviatz itz kreepee frendz ovur ate al howerz toe singe bawdee kat songz ate thee topp uv ther lungz ann thin kling toe thee dore jambz withe al thoze extraa toze ann yowle win thee poleese kome toe throwe thim oute, ann thin al yor nayburz wil haite u ann throwe thingz ate u win u goe oute inn thee morninge toe kollekt nutz fore brekfist, whiche ule bee havinge ate thre o klok bekuz u wer upe soe laite thee nite befor.

ore ite wil turne oute toe bee sumthinge kompleetlee kool thet u nevur wante toe gitt ridd uv aneewae, bute i reelee wudnte chanse ite. HTH!

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Or it might just be a box of grebes:

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, that's looking nicely practical.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

You know, it's like you took the words right out of my mouth!

[notasquirrel.livejournal.com]

i kno, riate? ite kud totalee happun!

[xolo.livejournal.com]

One that captures my imagination, though, is the observation that every typewriter has a signal that one is near the end of the line, but none has a signal that one is near the end of the page.

Being old enough to have learned typing on a mechanical typewriter, I can report that the problem was solved sometime before the early 60s (when my machine was made), and quite simply too. The machine had the standard 'rabbit ears' to support your page, but also had a sort of extendable ruler that swung into position behind them. There were marks on that to show how far up a page of different sizes would extend from the carriage. You just glanced at that every so often to see how much of the page you had left.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm actually old enough to have had typing classes on (electric) typewriters in middle school. I didn't learn to type on them, but I did learn to touch-type.

I don't recall the ruler, but I might not have noticed. We never got copy long enough to go over the page's length. But that's ... hm. Tolerable solution except it requires taking your eyes off the original copy. Maybe it doesn't take your eye away much and maybe taking your eye away sometimes is good for one's sanity, but the end-of-line bing is the real model here.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I did that in High school, still on the electric typewriters. I'd been using the computer for most of my papers by that time but I wanted to get better at typing.

I still type all wrong. I only use the right shift key and I look way too much at the keys and my hhand position is just *bizarre*, but I type promptly enough.