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…
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…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There is a seventeen-character string on every car built since the early 1980s - visible through the windscreen at the bottom of the glass, stamped on a plate…
The paper clip is one of the few objects in daily use that is genuinely anonymous. The shape everybody pictures - the double oval of bent wire - is called…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The tin can was patented in 1810. The first practical can opener appeared in the late 1850s. For most of fifty years, people bought food sealed in metal…