Inventive

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but sometime in the 1990s. 

Though only thirty years old, the discussions in this column seem like they come from a different century. Ah, wait! - they do.

Getting irritable with things that don’t do quite what’s expected of them has its advantages. We humans delight in setting to and improving the aforesaid irritable things, or else inventing something altogether new.

I know it sounds chauvinistic to say it, but usually it’s the men who do the improving or inventing. Perhaps this is because they have more of a tendency to tinker.

I’m not trying to be sexist here. I once began writing an article on women inventors but found very little information. There was one American book on the subject, but nothing on New Zealand women inventors. (If anyone can help, I’d still be interested.)

Back to Invention. I’m sure irritation has its place, but I suspect many inventors started out as children who took things apart to see how they were made and couldn’t put them together again.

I’m not an inventor – I can barely take something apart in the first place – but I do have ideas for improvements on things.

For instance, I’ve long wondered why Telecom doesn’t have some way of letting you know that Call Minder has recorded a call. As it works now you have to remember to pick up the phone after you’ve been using it in order to see whether you’ve had another call while you were chatting. Since this takes discipline, calls can sometimes be minded for quite a while.

This obviously irritated some other inventive mind and a company in the US has produced a little piece of equipment called VisuAlert* which notifies you that a call has been recorded, by lighting up its ‘smile.’ (The machine is little more than a white pad with a painted red smile connected to your phone.)

Simple enough, but why doesn’t Telecom just use the red light on telephones for the same purpose? Why buy a VisuAlert when there’s one virtually installed?

Another thing that puzzles me, and which I’m sure I’d do something about if I had the first clue where to start, is this. We hear a lot about water becoming a precious resource – we’re using it to such an extent that we may find it rationed in the next century.

Taking the salt out of the ocean is the obvious solution (desalinisation), but the problem with this idea is the expense. Yet one fishing town in north-west Mexico, Puerto Lobos,** has its own solar still. This produces 3000 litres of fresh water in the summer, and 1000 in the winter. Hardly big time, but a start all the same.

Now here’s a great invention, albeit at this point almost as costly as desalinisation ($899 in the US). A VCR that not only keeps track of the programmes you’ve recorded, their date, channel number and length, but also tells you which tape you’ve recorded them on. That beats flicking through endless tapes to find the one important bit.

I’m not convinced of the value of this next invention, however – a shower valve that ‘remembers’ the temperature you set for your last shower.

Now I know Jeeves always used to run Bertie Wooster’s bath at just the right temperature, and I think I’m right in saying that Bunter did the same for Lord Peter Wimsey, but do we really need the extravagance of a mechanical butler that can drip the water to the right degree?

Dandelion Bones
courtesy Sharon Mollerus

Perhaps more useful on the watering scene is the MoistureSmart Watering Gauge. It tells you exactly how much watering your garden needs. It knows how much water the plants are absorbing, the amount of rainfall and irrigation, and the amount of moisture stored in the soil.   Wow!

Buy one of these and the only other invention we’d need would be the Detect Smart Weed Gauge. This would run round the garden removing weeds from under rose bushes, pulling docks out by the roots, and separating wheat from the chaff. 

Sorry, I haven’t invented it yet.**

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* VisualAlert now appears on the Net as a system invented in Australia, making much use of modern technology. 

**Since this was written the desalinisation process appears to be a much bigger system. 

***But since I wrote this, the idea seems to have taken off in a number of ways! Maybe I'm more of a genius than I thought. Check out Google for variations on the idea; this one, for example.