From a ball point pen to a skyscraper, everything we make needs one or more of these design wonders
hen I was about five years old, I was living with my parents and sister in snowy upstate New York. It was the 1980s and one day I sat in front of my favourite large rectangular lunchbox, adorned with a picture of the Muppets on the front. This one held my huge collection of crayons – long, short, thick, thin, in every shade available. Like most children, I was continuously curious and I wanted to “discover” what was inside my crayons.
Towards the end of my school years, I had become fascinated by atomic and particle physics, enthralled by the idea that the atom itself, once thought indivisible, was then revealed to be made up of electrons, protons and neutrons – and that these, after having their turn on the podium of “fundamental building blocks of matter”, were supplanted by quarks. Whether or not I understood it at the time, I was on a mission to understand how things worked.
I selected these seven objects during the first 2020 lockdown. Trapped at home, I let my mind roam free, looking around at my possessions and mentally deconstructing them to see what lay inside. I revisited the ballpoint pen and saw a spring, a screw, and a revolving sphere. The blender I used to make my baby’s food relied on gears, which in turn couldn’t exist without the wheel. Before that, when I was breastfeeding, a breast pump allowed my husband to feed our daughter, too.
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