Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1960 household waste was collected by men who walked into your yard, lifted a galvanised steel bin full of warm ash and food waste onto their shoulder,…
Lift the boot floor of a car built in the last fifteen years and there is a reasonable chance there is no spare wheel under it. In its place is…
The mousetrap is the standard example used by patent offices and inventors' organisations when they want to explain that a better idea is not the same thing as a better…
The painted stripes across a pedestrian crossing are so familiar that they look like the obvious solution. They were not the first attempt.
The original crossings were marked by rows…
There is a wire coat hanger in almost every house, and nobody bought it. They arrive with dry cleaning, they accumulate, and they are the only household object most people…
Postal codes feel like infrastructure - something that was always there, like street names. They are not. Most of them arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, they were introduced against…