The Best Inventions of All Time, according to me

by Barbara O'Neal

In the days since Steve Jobs died, I have been thinking a lot about the impact of his brain on my own personal life. It's big, I gotta tell you.  Originally, I was resistant to the lure of the Apple Man, but he seduced me with a tiny gadget, the Shuffle.  What walker could resist a machine the size of a half dollar that could be loaded with hundreds of her favorite songs and clipped to her collar?  Not this one, that's for sure. 

It was the gateway drug.  A Shuffle led to a Nano, so I could mix up the playlists a bit. Then an iPhone, because who could resist a whole computer in your pocket?  And it was such a dream machine that I fell to a Mac for my desktop, this enormous, HD lovely screen and no clunky beige box to have to find a place for; and then….hey-sanna, ho-sanna, sanna-sanna, hey: the iPad.

This all started me thinking about great inventions, and which ones matter the most to me, personally.  This is my list. 

CamelBak hydration systems.  For the uninitiated, this is basically a backpack with a water bladder inside, attached to a tube from which you drink.

This is the first thing on my list because I live in Colorado and it is DRY here. Before the invention of Camelbaks, a long hike required a silly number of water bottles in the backpack, and one always had to carry a bottle in the hand, which leaves only one hand free in case you need to scramble, and you may not know this, but even the weight of a 10-oz water bottle is annoying on the elbows after a few hours.  You feel it, the repetitive bend and fall.  Along came Camelbaks, in a zillion sizes, and hikers round the world rejoiced.  I have many sizes—a big pack for days on the trail, smaller ones for short hikes around town with friends.  The best part is filling the bladder about a quarter of the way full the night before and tucking it into the freezer.  Top it off in the morning with water, et voila! Ice cold water the whole day. 

Modems
This technology has morphed into a lot of things, but my heart-stopping moment was the day in maybe 1988 or '89 when my father, a gadget geek from way back, invited me and my boys to come over to his house to see his new toy: Prodigy, the online service.  He gleefully typed in his information, and the computer made those little noises that later became so familiar to us.  My other said, "The computers are talking to each other!" and a chill ran down my spine.  The world blew open for me in that moment, and even though it was years before the rank and file had access to the Internet the way we do now, the road started for me there, in that dark office, with two modems talking to each other.

 

Pizza cutter
I know.  Silly.  Unless you've baked 90 billion pizzas for 6 hungry boys and had to struggle with cutting them with a stupid knife.  My list, so I'm adding it.

 

 

Electric kettle
It used to be hard to find them in the US, so my first encounter with them was in England. Now, as I have mentioned before, I am a serious tea drinker, and I will not heat water for tea in the microwave because it loses temperature too quickly, so I always had to turn on the stove to heat water for tea.  Entirely inefficient. I love, love, love my electric kettle.  (This photo, thanks to Flickr, is from Ben Templesmith, who titled it, "Behold America. And electric kettle. You push a button and it BOILS WATER. #rarethingsintheusa. I can now work late nights thanks to this brilliant invention.

 

iPad
I'm torn on this one, honestly, because I am an iPhone addict, too.  My phone has a camera that takes amazing photos, which the iPad doesn't do.But I love my iPad insanely. We are best friends. We go everywhere together, upstairs, downstairs, to the local coffee shop, on planes and in hotel rooms. It's my own personal programmable TV, loaded with all my favorite stuff, historical dramas mostly, and some teen shows like Felicity.  It's my food & exercise diary and my bank, and with the addition of the teeny external keyboard, my writing computer, too. I can curl up in my chair and be anywhere in the world and I can do it with my fingers and not stupid mouse. 

 

Other inventions
I asked my beloved, Christopher Robin, what his favorite inventions are. His answers:  microwave ovens, which saved him because he can't cook, and 24/7 stores, which amazed and delighted him, coming as he does from a country where the shops closed at 4, and noon on Wednesday.  "If one needs paper hankies at two o'clock in the morning," he said, "one can buy them."  (What I think in reaction to that is, yes, but you have to get up and get dressed and drive to the store and buy them.  But to each his own.)

How about you? What are a few of your favorite inventions?