After doing some repairs to a flight of garden steps in the blazing sun, the Badger settled down in the shade to finish reading a book he’d purchased a few days earlier. The book, a proper hardback from a local bookshop, is Nuts & Bolts, Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (In a Big Way) written by Roma Agrawal. She worked on The Shard in London, and is a structural engineer, author, and broadcaster with a physics degree and an MBE. It’s an excellent book, an easy one to read, and one that makes you realise that a small number of fundamental inventions underpin the world as we know it today. These inventions, the Seven Small Inventions in the title, are the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump. Without them, our modern world full of complex technology that ranges in scale from the tiny to the huge, would not be what it is.
While chilling out reading the book, the Badger’s nephew arrived to return a laptop he’d borrowed recently after his own broke. He’s in the middle of revising and taking exams that determine whether or not he goes to University in the autumn. With video and music from Glastonbury streaming on his smartphone, the youngster sat down and asked the Badger what the book was about. The Badger playfully answered that it was about the fundamental inventions, namely the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump, without which the Glastonbury music festival and his smartphone wouldn’t exist! The disbelief on the youngster’s face was palpable, and a light-hearted discussion on the Badger’s assertion ensued.
The Badger took the initiative and mentioned that without the fundamental invention of a nail none of the festival’s structures would exist, without the magnet there’s no electric guitars or sound systems, and without the invention of a lens there would be no pictures to stream. At first his nephew was unpersuaded, but a glimmer of enlightenment soon emerged as he started to think more deeply. ‘So’, he said, ‘you’re really saying that the internet, social media, and the smartphone are not fundamental inventions because they could not have been produced without the prior engineering invention of the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump?’ The Badger nodded, and said that it’s worth remembering that integrated circuits, first invented in the 1950s and now at the heart of today’s computerised world, could not have been produced without the prior existence of the Seven Small Inventions highlighted in Roma Agrawal’s book.
The youngster, a budding biological scientist, grinned. He said he now appreciated that what we see as routine in our complex tech-dominated modern world is derived from simple, fundamental, and often not very obvious engineering inventions. The Badger sensed that he may have awoken an inner latent engineer in his nephew, and that’s no bad thing…
