...of invention

1 Let me mention another fairly important development in the history of the straw. I recently noticed, and remembered dimly half noticing for several years before then, that the paper wrapper, which once had slipped so easily down the plastic straw and bunched itself into a compressed concertina which you could use to perform traditional bar and dorm tricks with, now does not slip at all. It hugs the straw's surface so closely that even though the straw itself is stiffer than the earlier paper straw, the plastic sometimes buckles under the force you end up using in trying to push the wrapper down the old habitual way. A whole evolved method for unwrapping straws - one-handed, very like rapping a cigarette on a table to ensure that the tobacco was firmly settled into the tube - now no longer works, and we must pinch off the tip of the wrapper and tear our way two-handedly all the way down the seam as if we were opening a piece of junk mail. But I have faith that this mistake too will be corrected; and we may someday even be nostalgic about the period of several years when straws were difficult to unwrap. It is impossible to foresee the things that go wrong in these small innovations, and it takes time for them to be understood as evils and acted upon. Similarly, there are often unexpected plusses to some minor new development. What sugar-packet manufacturer could have known that people would take to flapping the packet back and forth to centrifuge its contents to the bottom, so that they could handily tear off the top? The nakedness of a simple novelty in pre-portioned packaging has been surrounded and softened and made sense of by gesticulative adaptation (possibly inspired by the extinguishing oscillation of a match after the lighting of a cigarette); convenience has given rise to ballet; and the sound of those flapping sugar packets in the early morning, fluttering over from nearby booths, is not one I would willingly forgo, even though I take my coffee unsweetened. Nobody could have predicted that maintenance men would polish escalator handrails standing still, or that students would discover that you can flip pats of pre-portioned butter so they stick to the wall, or that tradesman would discover that they could conveniently store pencils behind their ears, or later that they would gradually stop storing pencils behind their ears, or that windshield wipers could serve as handy places to leave advertising flyers. An unpretentious technical invention - the straw, the sugar packet, the pencil, the windshield wiper - has been ornamented by a mute folklore of behavioural inventions, unregistered, unpainted, adopted and fine-tuned without comment or thought.

[The Mezzanine, Baker, N.]