Inventions: the product, mostly, of thirty-somethings
Over 40, and still not delivered your “great idea”? You may be too late. A sample of the 100 greatest inventions of the 20th century, as compiled by a patent expert at the British Library, suggests that it is in their thirties that men (and it is invariably men) are struck by inspiration. Curiously, happenstance can be just as much the mother of invention as necessity.
Consider the American engineer Percy Spencer, who, trying to help the British develop radar, walked past a magnetron one day with a chocolate bar in his pocket, found it had melted, and conceived of the microwave. Art Fry, an adhesives expert in Minnesota - and keen chorister - was frustrated that the scraps of paper he used as bookmarks in his hymnal would always fall out. One day, a colleague made some weak glue by mistake, and thus was born the Post-it Note.
There is, evidently, an under-representation of women - though it’s not for want of involvement in the process. In 1906, Bess Cary, the soon-to-be fiancée of a little-known American inventor, wanted an ice cream while picknicking on an island in Lake Okauchee. Her beloved was dispatched two miles to fetch one in a rowing boat - and he promptly had the idea for an outboard motor.
The world’s most expensive objects: by weight (II)
The search, it seems, may be at an end. Two months ago, we compared the cost of several high-value objects - the Gherkin, a Trident nuclear missile, truffles, etc - by their weight, and discovered that diamonds, at £34,450,000 per kg, comfortably held off Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks as the world’s most expensive stuff.
So lively was the discussion about what other things we might have included in our list that we decided to do a second round and found, to our amazement, an item more than 100 times as expensive as the world’s most precious stone.
The Treskilling Yellow is a fantastically rare stamp dating from the first issue of postage stamps in Sweden in 1855. It is all the more prized because it was issued in error - a printing malfunction caused a small number of the first 3-skilling banco stamps, which were supposed to be blue, to come out yellowy orange. The only one known still to exist has changed hands seven times since, most recently in 1996 for 2.5 million Swiss francs. (To its great advantage in our calculations, it weighs just 250mg.)
Not even a 1787 bottle of Château Lafite, once owned by Thomas Jefferson, and which sold for $156,450 (around £96,000) at auction in 1985, comes close.
How the Times predicted the World Wide Web in 1968
International Computers' predictions for Britain's digital development
Hindsight can be very unfair.
The above graph - from a 1968 article in The Times - shows the predictions made by one UK computer company about when the nation would hit certain milestones along the way to its bright, digital future.
There are, predictably enough, a few clangers. International Computers Limited (ICL) foresaw a ‘national data bank with central record of the whole population’ as being in place by, at the very latest, the late 80s. (The current Labour Government first proposed the National ID card scheme in 2001; the Conservatives have said they will ditch the scheme if they are voted in next year.)
Cheques, too, are still with us. (They might not be as prevalent as they were, but we’re by no means ‘chequeless’, as ICL said we would be by 2002.) The country’s first searchable database of patents, meanwhile, only came into existence in 1998 - some 10-15 years after predicted.
There’s one stunning projection, though - showing ICL to be as perspicacious as one could have hoped to be in 1968.
At no. 7, they write: ‘1 in 100 homes with terminal to information service computer’. You could happily substitute ‘terminal to information service computer’ with ‘internet’ there.
This service, they said, would be in 1 per cent of homes by the late Nineties, which is pretty much spot on. (Ofcom’s latest report suggests 73 per cent of British households use the internet in some form or other.)
As for ‘Computer control of London underground’, who knows what they meant exactly. Last time we used the tube, though, there were still drivers.
Uganda: a ticking population timebomb
In the Eighties, when his country was at war with Iraq, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, spoke of wanting to create an army “20 million strong”, and implored Iran’s women to reproduce. A decade later, officials realised it may not be wise to have an apparently infinite flow of people into the country’s labour market, and began preaching family planning instead.
Iran has had one of the fastest demographic transitions of any nation in history, reducing its fertility rate to what is called “replacement level”: 2.1 children per woman. India, too, slowed what was a worrying trajectory. It now has a fertility rate of below three.
Uganda has not been as fortunate. Its vehemently “pro-natalist” President, Yoweri Musevini, and a lack of support for contraception, mean it has the youngest age structure of any country. There is an average 7 children per woman in Uganda, and 77 per cent of the population is under 30.
Of course, things can go too far the other way. Japan has a worryingly low fertility rate: a product, population experts say, of government policies that don’t support child-rearing. “Much of this comes down to what we would think of as work/life balance issues,” says Elizabeth Leahy Madsen, a research associate at Population Action International. “Many East Asian countries have no generous policies on maternity and paternity leave, so parents more carefully factor in the projected economic costs of bringing up children.”
Immigration, too, can cause a significant skew. Just look at the United Arab Emirates, and the effect that floods of migrant workers - from east and west - have had on the new powerhouses of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Why we think honey and coffee smell unpleasant
There are two evolutionary reasons for having a nose, runs one theory. The first is to ascertain whether it would be safe to put something in your mouth - to gauge edibility. The second is to advise about whether it would be a good idea to run away - to sense danger, in other words. The above chart, produced by a study at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, shows our reactions to different smells along two axes. On the X is pleasantness, on the Y a spectrum that is best understood as running from things we think are toxic at one end - “Think of the bottles under the kitchen sink,” says Rehan Khan, the study’s lead author - to, at the other, things we could eat. So, strawberry, pleasant and edible, appears at the top right. What about unpleasant edibles, though? “There are many things that smell bad that people will pay to eat: walk into any French cheese shop,” says Khan. And coffee and honey - unpleasant?
“The visual cue for smell is very strong, and when you take that away, things can smell different. The ‘pleasantness’ of molecules also changes depending on their concentration. One, indole, for instance, is redolent of flowers in small doses, but, as it gains in intensity, starts to smell like gym socks.”
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