The Assumption Everybody Makes
Every key in your pocket has a hole punched through the wide flat part at the top. Ask anybody what it is for and they will…
The Thing Everybody Has Experienced
Everybody who has ever assembled flat-pack furniture or taken the back off an appliance knows the sensation. You lean on the screwdriver, the screw is…
The Snap-Off Knife Blade Was Invented by Someone Watching How People Broke Glass to Get a Sharp Edge
A Knife Designed to Be Broken
The snap-off blade is one of the few tools designed on the assumption that you will deliberately destroy part of it, repeatedly, as the…
A brogue is a leather shoe decorated with patterns of punched holes along its seams and across the toe cap.
The holes are now purely decorative, and they go all…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
On the back of a great many shirts, just below the yoke where the pleat sits, there is a small fabric loop.
Most people have noticed it, nobody…
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…