So I'm watching breakfast TV...
and they're discussing which inventions would make it into the top ten inventions of all time. Imagine that for a brain mangler at 8 in the morning? So they have two experts and they ask the first. He seems fairly smart but is floored by limitations of the question and the enormity of the potential answers. "Where do you start?" he asks "maybe the double helix, penicillin, the theory of relativity...but then what about the computer, the internet?" He looked genuinely perturbed. Then they asked the other expert. I noticed that the caption underneath her name stated she worked for a gadget magazine. I remember wondering if she was a last minute replacement for a historian or scientist of note. Unlike the first expert she seemed completely unfazed by the question. "The microwave oven," she said without a pause. "Everyone's got one and they've changes our lives." Jesus, I thought , that wouldn't make the other guy's top ten thousand. "or" she carried on "the smoke detector" for the millions of lives it has saved. Suppose penicillin had already gone.
photo: London 2008