Happy Birthday dear zip

You’ve got to love Google and its doodles.

Such little inconspicuous contraptions which make an impressive difference to the quality of our lives- Kristina Chetcuti

On Tuesday, when I logged online, I found a giant zipper running down the centre of my screen. I dragged my mouse to ‘unzip’ it and voila, the screen split and opened up onto a list of search results for this chap, Gideon Sundback – the Swedish inventor of the zip.

This little opus is 132 years old this week. If you think about it, where would we be without the zip today? Just this morning, in a matter of minutes I zipped up my daughter’s school bag and pencil case, my laptop cover and my skirt: everything neat and tight thanks to someone who got the brainwave of making a fastener out of interlocking teeth.

I suspect it all happened one day when Sundback was desperate for a pee and needed to do away with the fumbling of belts and pulling down of pants. So in a fit of urgency he got a pair of scissors and snipped away at his fly.

Later, as he relieved himself, he realised that now his, ahem, package would show through the pants’ hole. The zip is a confirmation that necessity is the mother of inventions.

I found myself thinking about such little inconspicuous contraptions which make an impressive difference to the quality of our lives. To my friends’ agony, I spent the week raving about people who had the presence of mind to sit down, think outside the box and come up with an ingenuity: “It’s not just the zip, take soap for example. Who came up with the idea to start washing ourselves with soap? And what about nail clippers?”

By the end, everyone was telling me about their own favourite non-digital tiny invention (also to shut me up). Here’s what made it to the list: the paperclip, pillows, the sticky-note, soap, the nail clipper, the electric blanket, toothpaste, the wheel, shoes with high heels, velcro, buttons, the lighter, water boilers, condoms, the shaving blade, the broom and car horns.

These are the top five:

Soap
Apparently first used by the bath-loving Babylonians, around 2,800 BC. We don’t know much except that they didn’t call it ‘soap’. It was baptised by the Romans, after the ‘magical’ cleansing properties of the Mount Sapo.

Soap as we know it, was the baby of a French chemist, a certain Michel Chevreul, who got up one morning in 1811 and said to himself: “Let me mix some fats, glycerine and fatty acids and I’ll wash myself with the mushy result.” After that, you know how it is with French belongings (wine, Carla Bruni, kisses the whole world is keen to adopt them.

Buttons
The expression ‘as cute as a button’ is historical. In Roman times, buttons were used as decoration. There were little outlets called ‘Accesoriziamus’ round the corner from coliseums, stacked with shelves of different coloured buttons (impor­ted at ridiculous prices from the far-flung lands of the empire but sold at 300 per cent profit).

People finally got to be as bright as a button in the 14th century when they realised that by putting the button through a little hole, eureka, they had a clothes fastener in hand.

Toothpaste
There are various claims to the earliest inventors of toothpaste. The Egyptians in 4 AD apparently cleaned their teeth with a mixture of crushed flowers. The Romans brushed theirs using a goulash of crushed animal bones and oyster shells. I know.

Toothpaste as we know it began in America in 1892 thanks to Dr Sheffield. He’s also responsible for the creation of the collapsible tube for storing the paste. He is to blame for the millions of arguments and relationship breakdowns over how the toothpaste tube should be squeezed.

Pillow
This is a favourite of a friend who insisted that it should make the list because “there’s even an International Pillow Fight Day” (It’s on April 7 and celebrated by massive pillow fights in cities around the world, bar Valletta).

Whoever invented the fluffy pillow must have been revered in Asia where people for centuries, made do with stones or blocks of wood as cushions. The memory foam pillow was invented by Chiharu Kubokawa, a sleep-deprived scientist working for Nasa.

The high heel (included on the strict insistence of my sister).
According to historical documents the high heel was invented due to military necessity – something to do with keeping the shoes in the stirrups when soldiers were on horseback. This caught on with the French, always a step ahead in fashion, and from there on (see ‘Soap’) became popular till the 1800s. Then for a long time, flats were the in thing. Until someone in the 1900s re-invented the (w)heel.

Whoever that was doesn’t de­serve a Google doodle.

krischetcuti@gmail.com