by Red Green
Come to think of it, that’s pretty meaningless. But a pacemaker is so reliable, it often outlives the heart it’s helping. And get this: they make you give it back. As if dying wasn’t humiliating enough. But I guess if it can help somebody else, why not?
Personally, if I ever needed a pacemaker, I’d go brand new. Saving a couple of bucks on a reconditioned unit doesn’t sound all that appealing. A few years ago, a guy at the Lodge got a real deal on a pacemaker through a friend of a friend of a really annoying guy. Two days after installation, he found out it was just a small alarm clock. The good news was he could now plan his heart attacks in advance by setting the alarm, but overall, not a good decision.
Other than that, I have nothing but good things to say about the cardiac pacemaker. In fact, they are now so easy to install that—in Ontario, at least—if you have any kind of a heart attack, the first thing they do is slap a pacemaker on ya. They do it in the ambulance while they’re doing eighty clicks with the siren blaring. They just stick it on the outside of your chest, but it still works. One day in the future, you may be able to get it done at a hospital drive-thru, or maybe they’ll cut out the middleman and just include them in every burger carton, like a Happy Meal toy.
The idea of the battery worries me, though. The battery is supposed to last a year, and you have to go back to the hospital to get a new one. So before you commit to a particular cardiologist, I would suggest you go over to his house and ask to go into his garage or his basement, wherever he keeps his tools.
Once you get there, look around in the bottom of his toolbox or in the back of a workbench drawer until you find an old, abandoned flashlight. Hold it up in front of your eyes and turn it on. You want it to temporarily blind you. If it’s just bright but not annoying, or if it’s a little dim—or worst of all, if it doesn’t even go on—this is not the doctor for you. You don’t want a guy who’s casual about replacing batteries.
He may argue that he has a brand new flashlight on top of the workbench with fresh batteries in it, but you have been called a useless tool enough times to know that as a patient, you’re in the back of one of the drawers.
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Now that they’ve pretty much perfected the pacemaker in terms of size and reliability, isn’t it time to take it up a notch? If I can put a dimmer on a light bulb, surely one of these medical researchers could find a way to add some kind of remote-control fader that would allow a person to control the pace of their pacemaker. I think it would be useful to be able to turn up the juice when you need it. Like during a foot race. Or lifting a fridge. Or that often-difficult wedding night of your sixth marriage. It would also be good to turn it down to a slow idle when you’re trying to get to sleep. Or attending a family get-together. Or letting your wife drive.
If you have a life like mine, you could even add a timer that got you to sleep on time and gave you a kick-start in the morning. I would caution you, though, to make sure you keep the remote either on your person or in a secret hiding place. Once your wife gets her hands on it, you’re a dead man. Literally.
If you’d like to see how I made a pacemaker, go to the Book of Inventions page at redgreen.com and click on “Pacemaker.”
Maps have been around for thousands of years. The first maps were of the stars, which is weird because way back then nobody was planning to ever go there. But I guess it was a way of comparing the night sky to a drawing, and if the stars were all in the right place, so were you.
They’ve actually found these kinds of maps from about eighteen thousand years ago. And they still weren’t folded properly.
Eventually people stopped just lying on the ground, staring at the sky, and instead started to move around. This was the beginning of the “paid vacation.” The trouble with travelling was that nobody had a clue where they were going, which bothered a lot of the wives.
This created a job for the map-makers, who up until then had been universally unemployed. They were actually called cartographers, and they started making maps of the world around them so people could travel by land or sea without getting lost, or at least not as lost.
Maps started turning up independently all over the world. Some were small maps of a farm or a village. Others were of large areas, like provinces or countries. As the folks travelling with these maps bumped into each other at service centres, they were able to put the maps together and eventually have a map of the world. There were a few errors here and there, but it was certainly better than nothing, and maps got a lot more user-friendly when the cartographers all agreed to make north up, which led to the classic question, “What’s up?” and the classic answer, “North.”
Even as maps got better, it was still somebody’s best guess as to what the continents and oceans looked like until we were able to go out into space and take pictures of the actual shape and size of everything on this funny little planet of ours.
RATING: A fine effort, but I’m sorry, no. Watch for Candidate #3, coming very soon to a book near you.
CAULKING GUN
Thomas Witte
First Caulking Gun
Here’s a Canadian inventor who really was under the radar. His name is Thomas Witte, and in 1894 he invented the caulking gun. We know that much. They say he had been inspired by local cake decorators and the tool they used to put icing on cakes. Witte’s cakes didn’t taste very good, but they lasted for months and were completely waterproof. Unfortunately, his invention was ahead of its time, and it wasn’t until some years later that it caught on. Maybe if he’d waited until somebody invented caulking.
Yet another example of the brilliance of repurposing rather than starting from scratch. My guess is that the engineering for the cake decorator was pretty much identical to the engineering for the caulking gun—or “puttying tool,” as Mr. Witte called it. And although I give him credit for stealing a good idea and avoiding all the cost and frustration of product development, the same lack of imagination that prevented him from creating a truly new invention also kept him from success. It was the name. Maybe the worst name ever. The name hammer sounds like something powerful and persistent. Even the word screwdriver has an aggressive edge to it. But “puttying tool”? Tommy, Tommy, Tommy, if you weren’t so Canadian, you would have realized that every man secretly loves the word gun. Add the word gun to anything and you have a hit: staple gun, nail gun, glue gun, heat gun, potato gun, cap gun, pop gun, water gun, Peter Gunn.
If they had invented a sunscreen gun, no man would ever have a sunburn. Which statement sounds more manly to you: “I will bring my puttying tool” or “I’ll be packin’ my caulking gun”? Even if Thomas felt the word caulking was a little vulgar, he could have gone with “puttying gun.” But puttying tool? No, Tom, it ain’t happenin’.
So what should have been an instant success languished in the shadows for years until some hairy-chested plumber declared, “This ain’t no puttying tool, this here is a caulking gun.” And suddenly every joint in town became safer.
As with many inventions, there is a dark side to the caulking gun. It has to do with finding a way to make a decrease in the quality of workmanship an acceptable option.
In the early days of civilization, men did not have the tools or the talent to make anything other than crude artifacts. (Crude artifacts are still being made today, but mostly of rubber.) As time passed, men got better skills and better tools, and a number of them began to strive for perfection. During this period, many of the world’s great buildings and furnishings were made. There was tremendous attention to detail, and patience was a virtue rather than an annoying delay. It was the birth of the craftsman. When he made something that was to be inserted into a hole, if it was too big, he’d methodically trim it down a few thousandths of an inch at a time until it was a perfect fit. If it was too small, he’d throw it away and start over. Very expensive, but quality never comes cheap.
With the invention of caulking—and, more importantly, the caulking gun—craftsmanship went out the window. It was much more
cost-effective to make the thing too small from the get-go and then fill the gap with caulking. Or duct tape. We’ve now come to the era where it’s better to do ten things okay than to do one thing well.
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On a completely unrelated matter, the early 1950s found Stanley Barber in financial difficulty.
An entrepreneur by choice, but lazy by nature and not particularly bright by any means, Stanley ran the local bakery in Possum Lake. The business was failing, but Stanley hung on desperately, as the store had been in his family for almost seven months. Stanley had tried everything. He went through a series of store name changes, including Muffin Tops, Great Danishes and even McDonuts, but nothing worked.
At one point he contemplated changing his own name because he thought a man named Barber running a bakery was confusing to the locals and made them wary of finding a hair in their apple turnover.
Stanley Barber, Lodge Member, War of 1812 Re-enactment Guy Credit 14
Not knowing which way to turn, Stan turned up an alley when something struck him. It was a potato. A friend from Stan’s War of 1812 re-enactment club had built a potato gun to help celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. He had been testing it for about an hour in the alley and was refining how far and how accurately it would shoot. His comfort level had risen to the point that he would shout out, “Do you want fries with that?” before firing a potato into the abyss.
Stanley was immediately excited about the concept and design of the potato gun, and once he regained consciousness, he began working on his own version of the weapon.
A potato gun is made from different diameters of PVC pipe all glued together, with a barbecue starter mounted on the side of the combustion chamber and a plug at the end. So you likely won’t find it at Toys “R” Us. For those of you who’ve lived sheltered lives and don’t know how a potato gun works, you sharpen the end of the barrel, which you then use to cut the potato so it fits snugly inside. Next, you unscrew the plug, squirt in some aerosol hairspray, replace the plug, aim the gun and hit the barbecue starter. Blam! That’s what I call a spud missile.
Stan’s plan was to adapt the gun so that instead of potatoes it would fire raisin-bran muffins. His thinking, if you can call it that, was that his bakery was failing because nobody went into it. His solution was to bring the product to the customer. At high speed, and with just a hint of Alberto VO5. Stan figured he could just fire the bran muffins into open bathroom windows if people had been in there too long. Once he built the gun, he spent days figuring out all the variables that would allow him to deliver the muffins to the right customer. His calculations involved the weight of the muffin, the angle of the barrel, the amount of hairspray and the number of raisins.
Sadly, Stanley had used the rent money to fund the muffin gun, and he was subsequently evicted from the store. He was unfazed because with his new delivery technique he could sell muffins from anywhere.
But apparently not his muffins. Stan closed down the business and went back to War of 1812 re-enactments, where he won several battles using only his wits and his muffin gun. Mainly his muffin gun.
CRISPY CRUNCH
Harold Oswin
Crispy Crunch—How Sweet It Is
Can you imagine a better job for an inventor than to be able to create new chocolate bars? I mean, other than the downside of weighing four hundred pounds and losing all your teeth, it would be like being at a birthday party every day.
Well, in the early 1900s, there was this guy named Harold Oswin, who started working as a candy roller for Neilson’s in Toronto when he was fourteen years old. By the late ’20s, he had moved all the way up the corporate ladder to candy maker. How good does that look on a resumé? Harold had always dreamed of making a candy that combined chocolate and peanut butter, and he got his chance when the company had a chocolate bar contest. Harold won and received the five-dollar prize. With this windfall he was now able to buy…several of his own candy bars.
Harold’s chocolate bar was in the shape of a small brown log, but that’s an image that often has a negative impact, so the company flattened it out into a slab. Crispy Crunch was a fairly popular chocolate bar from the get-go, but it really hit its stride in 1988 when the Leo Burnett advertising agency came up with the slogan “The only thing better than your Crispy Crunch is someone else’s.” That appealed to the thief in all of us, and Crispy Crunch went from being number ten to number one on the Canadian chocolate bar hit parade.
In the 1990s, Crispy Crunch was sold into the U.S., but the distributor went bankrupt and that was the end of that. At the same time, Neilson’s tried out a lower-calorie version of the Crispy Crunch, which worked about as well as you would expect it to. In 1996, Neilson’s sold all of its chocolate brands to Cadbury, which still makes the Crispy Crunch bar. It’s a little sweeter and less salty than the original version and has a little more crunch because they took the candy coating up a notch.
I know a lot of people go for fortune and fame, but for me personally, there have gotta be a lot of good things about being in the chocolate-making business. For starters, you are instantly the favourite relative of every kid in your family and the favourite neighbour of every kid on your street. In most factories, when you make a mistake, you can’t hide it. With chocolate, you can eat it. And women love chocolate. Your wife’s never gonna be mad when you bring your work home with you. Plus, it’s a great way to get on your dentist’s good side, which will pay huge dividends when it’s pain management time for your root canal.
Okay, I guess there are a couple of drawbacks—you take a lot of blame from mothers of fat kids with pimples, and the Easter Bunny sees you as an enabler. But overall, you make people happy, and that’s gotta feel good. The only thing that puzzles me about the Crispy Crunch story is why it didn’t catch on in the U.S. I can’t imagine anyone not liking a Crispy Crunch bar. Maybe it was too expensive to ship, or maybe a lot of Americans have a peanut allergy, or maybe they have developed different taste buds than us after years of drinking really weak beer. Either way, nice to know we’ve been able to keep some of our great ideas to ourselves.
THE CURE
Dr. Ralph Cosgrove, Lodge Doctor Credit 15
In 1923, Lodge member and local physician Dr. Ralph Cosgrove discovered a cure for which there was no known disease.
At his request, Possum Lake Hospital has put six cases of his cure on ice in hopes of one day finding its true use. While no one will go on record, a few nurses admitted, after several drinks at a local pub, that some of the more daring employees will occasionally thaw out a vial to “tie on a Cosgrove.”
Reports indicate that no medical effects have been detected, but the stuff tastes like peach schnapps mixed with Windex.
EASY-OFF OVEN CLEANER
Herbert McCool
Credit 16
Easy-Off oven cleaner was invented by Herbert McCool in 1932. Even though this was during the Great Depression, it’s hard to imagine a man being so depressed that he started cleaning the oven. McCool was actually an electrician who lived in Regina, Saskatchewan. If he had been a chemist, he probably would never have come up with the concept of using a volatile acid to etch the goo off your oven racks. He made the product in his basement and sold it door to door until his death in 1946. His widow later sold the rights for the oven cleaner to American Home Products and Boyle Midway Canada.
For me, the beauty of this product is that ole Herb came up with a formula that was strong enough to clean an oven but safe enough to have in your kitchen. If I had invented it, it would be made out of sulphuric acid and come in a huge can so they had room to print all the warnings. If there’s one thing that’s more dangerous than acid, it’s gotta be acid in an aerosol can. My slogan would be “It gets rid of grease and the ozone layer in one easy spray!” No woman would pay twenty dollars for mace when all she needs is a can of my oven cleaner. But that’s the difference between McCool and me. He knew things and he did tests until he came up with the perfect balance between safety and gettin
g the job done. I tend to focus on getting the job done.
Nobody enjoys cleaning ovens. Nobody enjoys cleaning toilets either, but at least the stuff’s not baked on.
So here I’d come with my nuclear-grade oven cleaner. It’d be similar to Easy-Off. You’d just spray it on and let it sit and then it wipe off. Sure, there’d be a few drawbacks, like having to wear welding gloves to use my formula, and a little over-spray in the wrong direction potentially costing you an eye. And for the next week or so, all the pies would come out of the oven tasting like coal.
So I guess making oven cleaner is just one more line of work I was smart not to get into.
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Local resident Sid Pagano regarded Easy-Off as the starting point for an almost limitless number of similar products that worked in the same way but were just different enough to avoid lawsuits. His approach was simple: take random mixtures of a bunch of chemicals and then package them in brightly coloured, playful pressurized cans. He tried marketing a bee repellant called Buzz-Off, an airplane de-icer called Take-Off and a front-door restorer he called Knock-Off. The local reaction was overwhelming but not positive. Our chamber of commerce started calling Sid’s business Way-Off and eventually forced him to leave town, which they called a Send-Off. Sid was fine. He labelled it a Write-Off.
Sid Pagano, Fearless Dabbler Credit 17
WARNING: There are a few different areas of science represented in this book, but this invention falls squarely in the chemistry category. A lot of people these days aren’t sure whether chemistry is a good thing or a bad thing. One of the big chemical companies used the slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry,” but some folks say that what’s better for one person is sometimes worse for another. They would prefer the slogan “Longer Living Through Chemistry,” which may be a tougher challenge.