Taking a closer look at the objects that you take for granted

Colm O’Regan pays tribute to the extraordinary things doing ordinary things

ORDINARY people doing extraordinary things. It’s a bit of a mantra in the inspiration industry. No harm in that — it’s a succinct and powerful phrase. But I’d like to pay tribute to the extraordinary things doing ordinary things.

The objects that you take for granted. It sounds a bit corny but watching a baby be fascinated with an everyday object does make you look at it again differently.

Take your average biro (no, seriously, take it away from the baby, she’ll have her eye out). You don’t think about biros, except when they don’t work, until you start scribbling on something of value. But you try releasing the right amount of non-smudging ink onto surfaces as diverse as paper, plastic, wood, wall, a suit trousers, or accidentally on the upholstery of a friend’s new car. See? Can’t be done without a biro.

Each biro is a little miracle. Right down to the crappiest “Buy Our Intermittent Broadband” promotional pen. Something that small and that cheap can write “milk” on a shopping list or a signature on a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Lazlo Biro — that was handy, that he was called Biro — noticed that newspaper ink didn’t smudge but wouldn’t flow through a fountain pen so he figured out a rotating ball that would draw the ink, by capillary action, no less. His patent was bought by a man called Bich — of Bic pens.

Another point of fascination is the radiator. I never really looked at it before my daughter started staring at it, but they’re mighty things. Its precursor was the hypocaust, a sort of underfloor heating invented by the Romans but disused partly because of the devastating attacks of barbarian tribes pushed westward by the Mongols — but also because people were sick of forgetting to take the butter out of the shopping bags when they’d leave them on the floor. The heating radiator as we know it was patented by a Prussian called Franz Radiator (joke, his name was Franz Van Galli). He is said to have called it a “hot box” and we commemorate his achievement now by using hot box to describe smoking hash in a Fiat Punto in an industrial estate.

The sprayer for surface cleaner — look at it again! One trigger doing two jobs — sending air into the bottle and then forcing it up through the atomiser onto the surface to make the nice lemon smell that tells us that germs are dead and civilisation has been restored. Spray bottles were perfected by the Drackett company who made Windex, or Windolene.

The atomiser which makes it all misty was invented by a doctor who wanted to get medicine to the back of his patients’ throats and used fluid mechanic principles such as the Venturi effect and Bernoulli’s equation (I don’t have room to explain how, but I definitely know).

What does YKK mean to you? It’s not a computer bug threatening all the computers in Kilkenny. Have a look at your zip. Hah! Made you look! Chances are, your zip has YKK written on it. YKK stands for Yoshida K¯ogy¯o Kabushiki geisha or Yoshida Manufacturing Company — the largest manufacturer of zips in the world. How’s business for them? Up and down! The first time (place name-drop alert) I was in Japan, one of my highlights was seeing a huge YKK sign over a factory. It’s like seeing the Guinness harp. And ironically, Guinness has its own causal effect on zips. Nothing can happen without zips. The most powerful men and women can’t sign important agreements or go to war without first doing up their flies.