If I look back on the technological breakthroughs of my life, and reflect on the genius required to make them; none are more impressive than the bottom buttonhole of shirts.
I mean, of course, the idea of rotating the bottom buttonhole by ninety-degrees compared with those above it - to make an horizontal slit, instead of vertical.
The functional benefit is qualitative and decisive - a problem utterly solved: bottom shirt buttons used to come undone all the time, nowadays they never do!
The simplicity of the idea is simply stunning! No technological breakthrough was required - the horizontal buttonhole is pure concept: like the wheel or the arch.
And like all the most fundamental inventions; as soon as discovered, it could be - and was - copied everywhere, and by everyone.
The idea was simple, the method had always been possible: yet it took an unsung, indeed unknown genius to "see" this for the first time, after centuries of blindness.
9 comments:
an unsung hero whose name we don't even know and that i think about a lot is the genius who, more than fifty years after the printing press became a thing in the west, thought to add... page numbers!
I've heard it was invented by the relative of a well-known British racing driver, whose parents were ardent Shakespeareans and met at a production of Twelfth Night. His name was Bottom Button.
@Mal - Aaargh!
(But I smiled.)
Or was it because of Bottom Button's daughter, who married cricketer Stuart Hole, and had a lazy son (named after her father) who was found lying asleep so frequently that he got the nickname: "Horizontal" Bottom Button-Hole.
@Laeth - Certainly another of the ilk.
I prefer that version!!
Whoever figured out to make ladders out of aluminum, so they can be both light and strong, that is another good one.
Wait, why don't my shirts have this? It it a common thing? This post was the first I'd ever heard of it.
@WJT - Even the simplest yet most significant breakthroughs must diffuse, taking time; and those who dwell in primitive societies usually get them latest...
Spare a thought for those of us with short torsos. The reason I've never noticed anything unusual about these bottom buttonholes is that I have to leave this button, and sometimes the one above it, undone, so that I can pull my trousers up properly.
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