Have you ever sat back and thought about how things that are ubiquitous today were discovered in the first place? Things we now think we can’t possibly live without didn’t just magically appear out of the ether--someone made a concerted effort (or possibly a mistake, or maybe even lost a bet) to create them for the benefit of themselves and others. Obviously a great deal of the progress of humankind has been centered around great inventions like the wheel, and those are certainly noteworthy, but it’s the random little things that give me pause for thought--the things we take for granted, or at the very least simply don’t think about because in our world they’ve always existed. Some of these things have had a significant impact on the whole of humankind, while others are kind of quirky, but somewhere, at some point, someone had a ‘Eureka’ moment and that’s how we ended up with:
Coffee
Back in the mists of time in the jungles of South America, some indigenous person identified the coffee bean as a food source. Maybe this discovery was made by watching the local fauna feast on the fruit of the plant and thereby deciding that since the birds didn’t drop dead immediately upon consumption that it was probably okay for people to eat the fruit, too. But here’s the kicker--Mr. or Ms. Indigenous took it one step further. Well, I guess it was several steps, really. Somehow it went from eating the beans straight off the tree to roasting them and grinding them up and running hot water over them and turning them into a beverage. How? How did that happen? Who was walking up the steps of the Temple of the Jaguar one day and suddenly said, “Hey, I know what! Let’s take those bean things we like and do all this stuff to them to make them into a drink so that thousands of years from now people can pay $7 for a cup of it and annoy the heck out of the barista with an unnecessarily complicated order”? A true genius, that’s who.
The same goes for tea and chocolate and a lot of other plant-based foodstuffs, really. Corn syrup, sugar, ice cream...and maple syrup? What doofus was running around in the wilds of Canada and stopped to lick a tree?! It was probably the same guy who saw what the bees were making and decided he needed to lick that, too.
Glass
Glass is a BIG DEAL. We use it for tons of stuff, and it made a world of difference in the realms of medicine and sanitation, but who set the damn beach on fire and figured it out in the first place? Sand, limestone, soda ash. What are the odds that those three things were in the same place at the same time and got heated up to the correct temperature to make glass happen?
“Hi, Bob. Whatcha got there?”
“Oh, just a pile of sandy stuff. If you wanna stick around I think I might set fire to it.”
“...Why?”
“No reason, just thought it might be fun.”
I’m sure that’s not how it was at all, but I like this version better.
Gemstones
This is a weird one. I know that humans (and jackdaws) love a good shiny thing, and of course I know that gemstones are Very Shiny Things in their natural state. So who was the guy who woke up one morning and thought, “I think I’ll go try to make the shiny things even shinier”? Someone literally took a hacksaw (or other, probably more appropriate tool) to a purple rock at some point and now we have a rush on amethyst jewelry every February. Obviously some minerals come in a sort of pre-cut shape--geodes and crystals and whatnot--so it may originally have been an attempt to emulate that, but it’s a far cry from what we recognize as a diamond today back to “Oooh! Shiny rock!” This one just feels like putting two and two together and making five.
Jigsaw Puzzles
This one just makes me shake my head. I love jigsaw puzzles. They’re relaxing, you can do them alone or if you do them with other people it’s a nice, non-competitive activity. You can glue them together and frame them when you’re done, or break them up and put them back in the box to do again another time or give to someone else to enjoy. But what goofball saw a picture or a painting and thought, “I know! I’ll bust that up into a bunch of pieces and then put it back together again. It’ll be great!”
I love jigsaws, I do, but if you really think about it, the concept is just ludicrous. Talk about an exercise in futility.
No comments:
Post a Comment