Can Openers and the Late Debut of Useful Things

Some of the most useful tools excite little remark. We take them for granted yet validate them through daily use. Consider the can opener. The British Navy first fielded the tin can circa 1810 as a means of preserving military rations on long hauls between reliable food sources. At the time, the can was so handy that its obvious utility overtook as trivial the question of how the user was to open it. Indeed, for some 60 years, bayonets, farm tools, and any implements at hand became the standard means of making a can release its contents. True, the first metal cans were so thick that chisels or rifle fire were sometimes necessary to pierce them. Why would anyone of the time expect otherwise? Lacking the news magazine, self-revealing culture, and safety regulations of today, history hardly did justice in recording the injuries and maiming that resulted from early encounters between can and aspiring opener of same. It is to American ingenuity that the can opener owes its creation (C. Panati, Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, 1987, New York: Harper & Row, pp. 115-116). Thumbs, hands, and limbs formerly threatened by blade and mallet have since been spared enough trauma to surely qualify the invention for some safety award. Where is it, however? The lowly can opener lingers in obscurity, unloved yet at times indispensable.

What about the band-aid? It traces to a need to solve a very specific problem. The problem was that a cotton-buyer’s wife regularly suffered minor cuts and burns in 1920 while preparing meals. These injuries were hardly serious. At the same time, they were difficult to treat on one’s own. To help out his wife with this problem, the cotton-buyer started stretching out adhesive strips over cotton balls and then covering them with a crinoline strip, leaving them ready for his wife’s self-application in his absence, which was when she needed them most. The husband told his employer, Johnson & Johnson, about what he had done, and the band-aid was born. (For additional historical details, see http://www.band-aid.com/brand-heritage.)

Today band-aid is not just a brand name but a generic label for mass-produced, sterile strip bandages. It is also a pejorative term applied to quick fixes, i.e. band-aid solutions, of the sort implied to be inhospitable to nuance. Only recently has a contrarian voice offered an alternative analysis. Says Malcolm Gladwell, “The band-aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost… There are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot out of a little…” (The Tipping Point, 2002, New York: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 256-257).

In the days since the creation of can opener and band-aid, we have cultivated a love-affair with complex solutions. We have concurrently seen the rise of skepticism over the boons of technology. This opposing view can also go too far. When our astronauts noted the difficulty of writing notes while floating upside down in zero gravity, what did we do? We designed and mass produced the space pen. What did Russian cosmonauts do on encountering the same problem? They used a pencil – or so goes the popular myth. In reality, pencils failed cosmonauts and astronauts both. Their tips broke off and pencils themselves were flammable – two undesirable traits for a space capsule. In the end, astronauts and cosmonauts both came to rely on the Fisher Space Pen, and their employers purchased them in bulk at the same discount (Ciara Curtin, December 12, 2006. "Fact or fiction?: NASA spent millions to develop a pen that would write in space, whereas the Soviet cosmonauts used a pencil," Scientific American).

Why do innovations like these lag behind the problem they were designed to solve?

On the one hand, the innovations follow only when inspired by sufficient need. On the other hand, wasn’t the need there to begin with? Perhaps, but even need may be relative. When the metal can made its debut, the driving need was to find a way to feed a navy at sea. That need took precedence over delivering a safe, convenient means of opening the canister. Hungry sailors equipped with weapons could be trusted to figure out that particular challenge. Perhaps, in the pre-band-aid world, one was expected to develop more calluses and either shrug off cuts and burns or call a doctor for whom house calls were routine. The real need for mass produced band-aids came later, in military hospitals, where the advantages of small, sterile bandages paid for themselves in labor savings and infection control. Finally, the space pen’s own performance requirement would have been impossible to specify without first experiencing the frustration and failure of pencils and other writing instruments under zero gravity. The burned hand teaches best. After that, advice about the fire is taken to heart. Sometimes we can think ahead to spare the scars. Other times, we must find ways to learn by doing, accumulating scar tissue, yet also concurrently taking advantage of adverse experience by using it as a way to develop the specifications that will ultimately drive an innovative solution, hence the can opener, the band-aid, and the space pen.

Now, imagine this process in the context of what should and should not be happening for passenger screening at airports. Are body scans working? Are strip-searches of octogenarians effective? Are we overrelying on technology or not getting enough out of it? Are we looking for trauma medicine where band-aids would do? Or are we choosing band-aids to do the work of tourniquets?

-- Nick Catrantzos