Source: Wikimedia Commons
The object itself is familiar enough. An oak cabinet, brass hinges and a brass latch, a compartment at the top for a block of ice, shelves below, a…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The lamp is a simple-looking object and almost every part of it is doing precise work.
A reservoir of fuel. A flat woven wick running down into it.…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
If you are American and over a certain age, you have slept under one. A heavy cotton bedspread with raised fuzzy tufting standing up off the surface in…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Out in the yard, twenty or thirty steps from the back door, there was a mound.
It had a slanting door set into one side, usually wood, sometimes…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
It looks like a tennis racket made by somebody who had only heard a description of one. A long handle, usually wood or twisted wire, opening into a…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1964 the sound of rain on a tin roof was simply the ordinary experience of being inside a cheaply built American building.
It was not tin. It…