Do you ever look at something and think, “Now how in the hell did we think of that?” I mean, I can understand how we’d think of a cart, but a tire swing? And don’t even get me started on the tire swing’s ancestor, the wheel.
A lot of inventions make sense. You can see why someone would be interested in having light in their home, or having an iPhone they could use to join their friends’ group chats. But others are mind-blowing in their creativity. Who thought of a camera? Who thought of the internal combustion engine? Who thought of the saxophone?
What I’m saying here is, we give a lot of credit to inventors when we’re kids, but then we kind of forget about them, or at least I do. Start taking things like La Croix and calculators and receipt paper for granted. And that’s why I’m going to go to Wikipedia right now and look up a semi-random inventor (semi because I’m doing this quickly and not purely randomly, random because I’m going to scroll really fast and then click the middle of the screen and hope it works).
*pause*
Otto von Guericke! You made the vacuum pump, the manometer, and the dasymeter. All back in the 1600’s! I don’t know what those things are, but I’m going to hope the manometer is something that was used to settle bar fights by objectively measuring how much of a man each combatant was before punches were thrown. Thanks, Otto. A peacemaker through and through.
