Page 5 | To wonder how some things were invented?

malificent7 · 2023-02-17T06:46:07+00:00

I love knitting and crochet but who looked at a sheep and thought to spin the wool into yarn and then use hooks/ needles to create clothes?! I know the process evolved rather than being the brainchild of a single person but still. Also tv/ internet. How do pictures end of on thesescreens seemingly out of nowhere?! Care to add any more?

HitTheRoadJackAndDontYouComeBack · 17/02/2023 20:32

neverknowinglyunreasonable · 17/02/2023 07:00

It was my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother who invented knitting. Wonderful lady. Not sure about the TV.

Right.

MistressoftheDarkSide · 17/02/2023 20:34

The “seeing people die from things” theory though…..

If I watched somebody die after eating kidney beans, I’d probably write kidney beans off as “just don’t go there”.

It takes a particular kind of persistence to be so determined to make them edible and non-toxic.

MrsTerryPratchett · 17/02/2023 20:34

R0ckets · 17/02/2023 07:06

I often think this about food. Thinking about how complex the process for making so many staple foods is, how did people stumble onto mixing just the right ingredients in the right quantities and selecting the best cooking methods.

Also who the fudge first saw a chicken lay an egg and decided to not only cook it but then eat it...

Eggs are easy, everything eats eggs.

Mushrooms? Some taste nice, some make you high, some kill you. Must have been a teenager playing Russian roulette with that one!

ThreeLeggedCat · 17/02/2023 20:37

And who first looked at a cow and thought “mmmmm, milk”.

pussycatinfluffyslippers · 17/02/2023 20:38

Toast.

Who first thought of burning already baked bread and covering it in butter?

flowerycurtain · 17/02/2023 20:39

Numbersarefun · 17/02/2023 20:16

I always wonder how people found out they could get flour from wheat. That to me is really odd.

If you bite a wheat kernel you can taste flour and see white stuff

cunningartificer · 17/02/2023 21:05

The 'Earth's Children' series by Jean M Auel is great if you are interested in this kind of thing... Clan of the Cave Bear is fascinating about Neanderthals, and lots of what she describes is based on recent archeology. After a while I did get a bit tired of her heroine inventing pretty much everything but it's a good story!

Worldgonecrazy · 17/02/2023 21:43

pussycatinfluffyslippers · 17/02/2023 20:38

Toast.

Who first thought of burning already baked bread and covering it in butter?

An absolute bloody genius - that’s who!

GordonShakespearedoesChristmas · 17/02/2023 22:17

neverknowinglyunreasonable · 17/02/2023 07:00

It was my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother who invented knitting. Wonderful lady. Not sure about the TV.

Erm,no!
I hope that's just a joke? As knitting's been around longer than that!!

Ggggggoooo · 17/02/2023 22:22

GrumpyInsomniac · 17/02/2023 11:13

That’s the kind of thing my grandad did. In his case, he invented - among other things - the machines that cut your Mars bars, and your dolly mixture, or indeed roll your Swiss rolls.

When my parents were courting, my father was amazed to come into this house where there were slabs of dolly mixture waiting for grandad to solve the problem. And my grandmother made many a Swiss roll so grandad could sit there and watch how she started the rolling process so he could replicate that with a machine and not break the cake in the process.

He designed a fair number of machines that are still in use today, and as far as I’m aware they’re still sold with just minor adjustments by the company that eventually bought out his some years after his death. He was one of life’s problem solvers, but his genius was very much in not over-complicating things purely because the technology existed. I truly wish I could have met him, but he died a year before I was born.

His commissions often came from companies who wanted to resolve a problem, whether it was automating a repetitive task - cupcake cases used to be put on conveyor belts by hand, for example - or resolving the issues caused by humans being less accurate than machines, like cake mix being squirted onto the belt if the cupcake case wasn’t put in precisely the right place. I don’t know who invented the machine to wrap different shaped chocolates with foil, but it’s the kind of challenge I suspect he’d have enjoyed.

Would he have gone ahead and invented such a machine on spec? I don’t know. Perhaps if he already worked with the company and spotted an issue he thought he could help with. But sometimes we should perhaps also give some credit to the person who thought “there has to be a better way to do that, so I’m going to find someone who can help” because honestly, we need those people as well if we’re to progress.

Sorry. This ended up way longer than intended!

He sounds like he was a fascinating person!

Ggggggoooo · 17/02/2023 22:28

This is a great thread OP, thank you! I love thinking about this kind of thing

LavenderHillMob · 17/02/2023 22:36

Grumpyoldpersonwithcats · 17/02/2023 12:46

Another vote for meringue.

How the bloody hell did someone come up with the idea of separating the egg white and yolk then manually whisking the white - presumably before the egg whisk was invented. Then work out how to cook it.

I don't know if it's the reason, but I remember a documentary about Indian sweets becoming a thing because Europeans used egg white to starch their shirts and so there was left over yolks that they found ways to eat.

Not the point of the documentary, but I'm now wondering if leftover beaten egg whites got cooked in the sun. I would like that to be true anyway.

maximist · 17/02/2023 22:44

Alum blows my mind - it was used to make dyes fast, but the process for making it was ridiculously complicated, involving quarrying, burning for twelve months, urine and hens eggs amongst other things....

www.teeswildlife.org/what-we-do/past-projects/alum-alchemy-and-ammonites/alum/how-to-make-alum/

sashh · 18/02/2023 02:19

ohfook · 17/02/2023 09:43

Language baffles me. Like the fact that we call France 'France' but German people call in Frankreich, Spanish people call it Francia etc. So one country can have hundreds of different names.

Also the fact that people in different countries were inventing things concurrently despite being thousands of miles apart and never meeting.

That reminds me of waiting at immigration in Ecuador while the nice immigration lady looked through a list of countries on her computer and then had a conversation with several other immigration people because they couldn't find 'Inglaterra' eventually they found 'Reino Unido'.

Calistan · 18/02/2023 02:32

Anyone who wonders why we drank milk, or ate eggs is a frigging idiot who seems never to have thought about anything. Seriously humans drink milk from humans. Seeing a baby cow or others drink milk from their mothers and grow very big and strong. You think that they would never think to also drink that milk in times of hardship? Glad humans didn't have to rely on your deductive reasoning. Same for eating eggs, seeing animals go to great lengths to steal them? We are also animal, with instinct.

BouleBaker · 18/02/2023 03:18

Original bricks are just dried lumps of clay. They were first chopped and left in the sun to harden before people got a bit more inventive with forming, shaping and baking them.

VictorBaucherOrSomething · 18/02/2023 08:51

Calistan · 18/02/2023 02:32

Anyone who wonders why we drank milk, or ate eggs is a frigging idiot who seems never to have thought about anything. Seriously humans drink milk from humans. Seeing a baby cow or others drink milk from their mothers and grow very big and strong. You think that they would never think to also drink that milk in times of hardship? Glad humans didn't have to rely on your deductive reasoning. Same for eating eggs, seeing animals go to great lengths to steal them? We are also animal, with instinct.

Who pissed in your cornflakes?

LavenderHillMob · 18/02/2023 08:53

Calistan · 18/02/2023 02:32

Anyone who wonders why we drank milk, or ate eggs is a frigging idiot who seems never to have thought about anything. Seriously humans drink milk from humans. Seeing a baby cow or others drink milk from their mothers and grow very big and strong. You think that they would never think to also drink that milk in times of hardship? Glad humans didn't have to rely on your deductive reasoning. Same for eating eggs, seeing animals go to great lengths to steal them? We are also animal, with instinct.

I assumed those posts were jokes, no?

TroysMammy · 18/02/2023 08:58

The person who invented the iron - why the hell they thought that was a good idea I'll never know.

RosaGallica · 21/02/2023 09:28

Interesting trivia, the Vikings had irons!

WinterFoxes · 21/02/2023 09:39

My dad said one very hot summer day his grandpa fried an egg on a sun-heated rock. Maybe that's how they started to cook eggs - an egg drops from a nest onto a hot rock and cooks. Starving cavewoman eats it and thinks - nicer than the raw ones - I'll do that again!

And knitting. I imagine being freezing and wanting to wrap anything around yourself would lead to gathering strands of wool from sheep and realising how warm and waterproof it was, so deciding to get more by sawing it off with a sharp bit of rock then wind it around a stick to keep it in one place (Organised Cavemom TM) and then start fiddling with the stick and teasing the wool between yoru fingers because you have cavewoman ADHD and suddenly realise it has become a long strong fibre you can weave to put on chilblained feet.

But clearly that's wrong because PP's grandma invented it!

EthicalNonMahogany · 24/02/2023 08:33

HowcanIgetoutofthisalive · 17/02/2023 09:39

Who saw the cow's udders dripping fluid and thought, 'i know, I'm going to squeeze one/pull one and drink what comes out'.

but omg this one is the easiest one!!! We all literally did the same thing with our mothers!

EthicalNonMahogany · 24/02/2023 08:36

ha didn't see @Calistan 's post. I think I'm increasingly with the posters who think people are on here either disingenuously practising their lame stand-up routines, going "Knitting! That's mad eh?! How could anyone think that up! Cars! Who thought of exploding some petrol in a tin box?! Hah!"

or...more scarily...are really really lacking in reasoning skills.