Human ingenuity

[davywavy]

One day, literally hundreds of years ago, Og the caveman wandered back to his tribe and said "I say, you fellows, I think I've just invented something. I don't know what it is, but bloody hell it's hot."
And so it was that humanity discovered fire.

Douglas Adams once said that of all Isaac Newton's ideas and inventions, it was the catflap which impressed him the most. Gravity had always been there and it was only a matter of time before someone noticed it, but the catflap - a door within a door - showed a mind of unusual lateral thinking and creativity.

The world is full of inventions and ideas like that - the stuff you look at and wonder what on earth the inventor was thinking. The best known example is possibly the old Calvin & Hobbes joke about milk: "Who was the first person to look at a cow and think ' I'm going to squeeze that and drink whatever comes out'", but there are loads more. For example, take the famously tasty but enthusiastically poisonous sushi ingredient, fugu fish. You have to wonder why people persevered with that one:
"Blimey! This Fugu fish tastes delic- erk!"
"Oh, no! Tanizaki is dead!"
"But he said that the fish was nice. I wonder if I just ate a little bit...erk!"
"Well, it's worth a try for a taste sensation, I suppose."

Some, if not most inventions have been the result of diligent investigation coupled with inspiration with at least a vague idea of an end goal. When he was trying to get a working lightbulb Thomas Edison tried hundreds of possible filaments, including cotton and his own hair to try and find something that would incandesce in the desired way. However, there are the inventions that don't follow this route - and of those some of them have no convievable logic or sense in their discovery. Take the invention of colonic irrigation. I can only assume that someone at a loose end one afternoon found they had only a pair of bellows and several pints of warm water to entertain them and the rest is history. There's so many possibilities like this. The zombie potion of mixed fish and herbs they make in Haiti? I don't even want to think about how they started researching that, let alone what gave them the idea in the first place. People licking toads to get a bufotenin high? Just how desperate do you have to be to go round sampling the wildlife in order to get your fix? ("God, man, I'm jonesin', I'm jonesin', gotta have me a fix man, I need it, I need it, I know, I'll lick that buffalo and see what happens" just doesn't sound likely, somehow. Or, on due consideration, maybe it does).

So that's today's question. Which invention or idea do you look at and think to yourself "Just what the hell were they thinking?".

Comments

[song-of-copper.livejournal.com]

I once saw a bizarre implement advertised in one of those catalogues that fall out of the Sunday supplements. It was like a sort of catapult for Ritz crackers. The idea was that you sent the Ritz crackers flying into the ether and then aimed at them with some kind of non-lethal weapon (I forget what exactly - cap gun, pea shooter, sling shot? Something like that) in a sort of pointless, crumby version of clay pigeon shooting.

My best guess is that this was dreamed up as a way to get people to buy Ritz crackers. Whatever, 'crackers' is definitely the correct word.

[Edited to add... Lordy! It exists!! See here
...]

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

And who doesn't mind their carpet getting covered in crumbs?

[song-of-copper.livejournal.com]

There really is no polite answer to that question.

[fonnparr.livejournal.com]

I have always wondered what the South-Americans were doing eating chillies.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Making their food spicy of course! Ha ha ha!

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

Weasel coffee!. Who the hell thought "Mmm, this rich roast is delicious, but would taste even better after being puked up by a Vietnamese weasel"?

I rekon it's a ploy by those tricksy people from Vietnam to find gainful employment for their weasels.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

There's the Civet Cat poo coffee as well, which is apparently delicious! http://www.firebox.com/product/1077/Civet-Coffee-Kopi-Luwak

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

I think this phrase rings alarm bells: "the most astonishingly different coffee we've ever tasted."

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I can make some of that, but I doubt anyone would want to drink it!

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

You like cheese, right? Most cheese is made with rennet, found in the stomachs of cows or sheep. There is little difference between adding the gastric juices of an animal to foodstuff and eating foodstuff that has been in an animal's digestive tract for some time.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Possibly not, but the thought process that would lead to "Hey, there's some cat poo - I bet I could make a refreshing beverage from that!" escapes me.

[blue-cat.livejournal.com]

Best explaination I heard was that the people picking coffee were too poor to actually get any of the clean stuff so, beggers not being choosers, scrabbled in the droppings for whatever they could find to create their own coffee or sell as 'offcasts'... and then found it was better than the un-digested stuff...

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

One would imagine that the mechanism making the coffee taste different is also responsible for successful germination. Quite a lot of seeds require passage through some animals intestines, one reason why they are usually packed in shiny, colourful and sweet fruit.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

bicycle

I remember all the times I fell off whilst learning, I would have been easily convinced that it wasn't actually possible if it wasn't for the fact that I'd seen other people do it...

how did the first guy to build one even know that eventually it would be possible to ride one?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

The tricycle is certainly the more instinctively logical design, isn't it?

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

also, the Laplander shamans that famously drink the urine of reindeer fed fly agaric

buh?

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I forgot that one. I think I made a post about it about a year ago!

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

It's said to have cut both ways -- the reindeer would also be perfectly happy to drink shaman urine for the exact same reasons as the shaman was happy to drink reindeer urine.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

well that makes me view reindeer in a whole new light...

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

I know, and a google search for "Reindeer watersports" doesn't produce any confirmatory evidence

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

In the Bruce Parry in the Amazon thing last week was a tribe who drink a tea/broth from a certain root to get high and have visions and stuff but to have the desired effect, they need to drink about a gallon of it and throw it up afterwards...

A lot of inventions were incidental while the inventors were trying to create something completely different. For example, the inventor of Western china was Johann Friedrich Böttger who was chief alchemist (against his wishes, a bit like Leonard of Quirm in the Discworld novels) at the court of Augustus the Strong and was supposed to find the Philosopher's Stone/a way to transmute base medals into gold (which he had previously claimed of being able to do, silly man). This is why china is called the "White Gold" as it was the next best thing and actually profitable after they managed to refine the manufacturing process in Meißen.

[ddraiggwyrdd.livejournal.com]

Probably Linen cloth. The process is so involved and lengthy it couldn't have happened by accident. It has to be grown, cut at the right time, pounded to sheds and soaked in water for weeks. Then you are left with lengths of fibre that have to be, washed again, combed, spun into thread and woven into cloth. Someone must have had a lot of time on their hands, but at that time I supose all there would have been was hunting, eating and shagging. Perhaps they had a competition to see who could find something to fill in the rest of the time.

[fonnparr.livejournal.com]

After a whole day of hunting, eating and shagging, I have little time for anything else.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

Where am I supposed to find the time to go hunting?

[ddraiggwyrdd.livejournal.com]

So it was obviously invented by women.
Division of neolithic males day.
10hours sleeping
12.5 hours eating
.75 hours crapping
.25 hours shagging (on a good day)