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British writer Colin Wilson has been challenged time and again and many of his theories have been disputed, disproved and discarded on the rubbish heap of dubious philosophy. Yet the author of The Outsider and The Occult did come up with some interesting concepts. One of the more thought-provoking is his idea that we all have an inner robot which takes over our actions once we have mastered something.

To illustrate this, Wilson uses driving as an example – we struggle to learn how to drive, but once we do, our inner robot takes over to drive more efficiently, in the process giving us the illusion that such processes are simple. It is only in the event of an emergency that we take over from the robot and are reminded how complex driving really is.

There are other things which the robot does for us, like typing, tying our shoelaces and grocery shopping – all simple things which our robot does without breaking a sweat.

But then, other processes of modern life are simple because they are just that – simple. Yet there is genius in their simplicity.

Take the ring pull, for instance. When we open a can of soft drink or beer, we pull the ring and drink. It’s so simple that we wouldn’t even see it as a form of technology. But it’s not that obvious – which is why the ring pull is a relatively recent invention. Until the late 1950s, all cans required a separate opener tool or a key.

Then in 1959, Ermal Fraze devised a can-opening method that would revolutionise the way we drink. His invention was the pull tab – by attaching a ring pull lever with a rivet to a pre-scored pattern on the can top, cans could be opened with just one movement.

Born in Indiana in 1913, Fraze founded the Reliable Tool and Manufacturing Co. in 1949. Although he was the only employee for many years, he managed to register a number of successful patents, including improved gun barrels for warplanes. His clients included General Electric, Ford and even Nasa.

In 1959, while out on a picnic with family and friends, he realised that he had forgotten to pack an opener for canned beverages. He had to make do with a car bumper and the result was messy – back home, he reasoned that there must be a better way to open cans and several months later, he came up with a design for the ring pull.

This was to be his most successful invention. He received a patent for his invention and sold it to Alcoa, one of the world’s largest producers of aluminium. The first company to use the ring pull was the Pittsburgh Brewing Company – after introducing the ring pull on the market, the company saw sales of its Iron City Beer soar.

There was just one issue – many people would discard the tab, thus creating a littering problem. Then in the 1970s, another inventor, Daniel Cudzik came up with the non-detachable ring pull, which meant that the tab would remain attached to the can.

Nowadays, the worldwide production for beverage cans is approximately 475 billion cans per year. And it’s only a very small percentage of those that come with a faulty ring pull, which goes to show what a great invention this is.