Appreciating Everyday Products That Add to Our Lives

Ideas taking flight also take time.

Source: Frank Winkler/Pixabay

For a moment, consider all of the items that people use in a day. Start with a toothbrush, comb, coffeemaker, refrigerator, and sunscreen before going to the beach. The list—at least to me—is mind-boggling. Slowing down and actually thinking about the items can be fascinating.

In thinking about these everyday marvels, let’s put technology aside. Yes, forget the internet and everything internet-related for a moment. No internet searches, no podcasts, no dating apps, no video games, and no streaming service. Add artificial intelligence to the list, too. The laptop or smartphone that you’re using at the moment … pretend it didn’t exist. And never mind the metaverse.

I understand … conceiving of such a world is almost unimaginable.

Now let me pose a question: What are they? What are common, “never-think-twice-about” products that continue to amaze you? They could be grand things or common items. Perhaps they were created in 2020. Maybe they were invented centuries ago.

Three things come to my mind:

1. Airplanes: Just how do they get off the ground? Airplanes transformed people’s worlds in a relatively short period of time. The Wright Brothers’ flight in 1903 is well known today, but they didn’t get their official credit for transforming travel until 1942 (The Associated Press, 1942). For 28 years, the Smithsonian Institution recognized Samuel P. Langley for his “aerodrome”, then reversed course to acknowledge the Wright brothers for “the first sustained flights in a heavier-than-air machine” at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The secretary of the Smithsonian offered an apology to Orville Wright, who had sent the original plane to England 14 years earlier after not receiving due credit.

2. Contact lens: Plastic covers for the surface of the eyes that help people to see the world? It continues to stun me. The idea for some kind of rounded glass to aid vision difficulties dates back to at least 1827 when John Herschel, an English scientist, proposed that animal jelly placed in a glass capsule could repair an irregular cornea (Engber, 2014).

3. Windshield wipers: This invention comes from Mary Anderson, who thought of the idea during a visit to New York City in the early 1900s. The key ingredient? Snow. Noticing that streetcar drivers either had to open their window to see or stop periodically to clear the snow from their windshields, she patented the first effective precipitation-clearing device in 1903 (National Inventors Hall of Fame®, 2019).

Life surrounds us with innovative ideas—and wonderful stories—that were transformed into products, and it makes me wonder about the exciting and intriguing stories to come. At this very moment, someone or some team of people is refining something new to add to that list of “How did I live without…?”