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.
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