“Well...here’s another fine mess
you’ve gotten us into.”
- Oliver Hardy
No doubt the inventor had a twinge of pride when he was issued patent number 100,906 back in March of 1870.
He had become, after all, a member of an elite group of ingenious Yankees, a group with less than 100,000 other members at that time. And unlike some rather frivolous entries – of which patent number 556,248 for a self-tipping hat serves as a good example – this one was simple, clever, and had the potential to save lives.
The patent was granted for a new kind of life preserver, an inflatable one that would fit around the user's neck. The illustration in the patent application shows a dapper fellow in a top hat floating gracefully as his paddle-wheel ship goes down behind him. Thanks to the new invention he is not drowning but instead being held in gentle suspension by the doughnut around his neck, his head above the water, his cigar dry enough to puff.
In spite of the patent, the device never quite took hold, which is true for most patents. The most common reason for this is that the majority of inventors, inventive as they may be, rarely have the funds, contacts, or acumen to actually produce their own products. Engineering is not marketing. And what makes a good invention does not always make a good product. But in the case of 100,906 there was perhaps another more significant cause for the lack of success.
It could kill you.
The blown-up collar had to be tight enough so that your head did not slip through but if it was that tight, you would likely strangle while dangling from it in the high seas. What the inventor really came up with was not so much a revolutionary life preserver as a unique kind of floating gallows. But even that stunning application never helped bring it to market.
Well, not exactly.
Every invention, each new technode, is a wee miracle of creativity...a problem defined, a solution proposed, a device devised, a patent applied for, and so on. But each one is also part of this whole synergent system we call technology. There is more in it than was put in, more to it than the pieces, and it has greater impact than any of the parts would suggest.
In this way, as part of a system, dead ends are revisited, great ideas revised, solutions reworked, revamped, reiterated. Two millennia after the Greeks used steam to open temple doors, Robert Newcomen realized that it could be used to power an engine to pump water. Two centuries after the use of punched cards to create fancy patterns on Jacquard looms, the idea was recycled to input information into a computer. And 100 years after the blow-up life-preserver, EMS crews use an inflatable doughnut-shaped brace to save your neck after a traumatic accident.
That is why we can never know what the impact of any particular invention will eventually be. Small attempts to solve local problems can fail miserably but lead to big solutions elsewhere. In this sense, each invention is a parabox.
You know what it is.
The classic example is officially known as the Phantom Box, a black plastic cube roughly six inches on each side. It has a switch on the top that turns it on. When you push the switch, a lid opens and a hand emerges which pushes the switch the other way, turning itself off. One version of it is a big hit on YouTube right now. In other words, the device is a paragon of paradox...a machine that un-machines itself. A device whose sole purpose is to undo the only thing that can be done to it, namely turning it on.
All the devices we create are paraboxes or at least paraboxical because each one carries within it the potential to solve a problem and to create one as well. The airplane can take you somewhere or strand you somewhere you could never be without the airplane. The digital organizer can make your life simpler or more confusing. The cell phone can put you in touch or keep you out of it. The pen can allow you to write something down or prevent you from doing one thing and one thing only...writing something down.
The Rule of the Parabox says that when things work, they work; but when they do not work, they still work...just in the opposite direction. They unwork. You try to send a fax but it does not go through; the machine has become an unfaxing device.
On the other hand, this is one of the frustrations that in an evolving Gizmos can lead to new developments. Inventors thrive on these frustrations and every new whizbang has a parabox somewhere in its ancestry. The life-saver becomes a life saver. In this way every parabox becomes useful in the next round of solutions and you never know how important a failed technode will be.
For example, think about that banged shin in the middle of the night as a new means of finding furniture in the dark. Okay, that may be overdoing it. But the next time you get that sinking feeling when something doesn’t work – or actually unworks – don’t panic. Take the long view. Feel it, know it, be it. It is an important moment. Not just the object failing but rather the system succeeding because it is an opportunity for innovation.
Not to mention another fine lesson in humanility (which see).
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