Missing our chance at fame and fortune

Just Passing Through

I’d be rich today if I’d just paid attention. That is, if I had paid attention to the biology teacher instead of paying attention to that good-looking guy at my table — who did pay attention to other girls and later went on to be a rich doctor. I’d be rich if I had paid attention to what was going on around me and then used that knowledge to make something everyone needed. Duh. That’s what we all say, “wow, that was simple, but …”

Of course, people who work in laboratories have a better chance of coming up with a new invention. The man who invented the microwave oven noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket was melted after standing near a new tube they were working on. He quickly grabbed some popcorn and as they say, “The rest is … money in the bank.”

The microwave didn’t save lives like penicillin did back in the time of World War II, but it did save a lot of marriages, many a lunch hour, and the whole frozen food industry. I’m afraid the guy who invented it was probably melting more than his chocolate bar — standing so close to a magnetron. I remember the first one I saw. It could bake a potato in a couple of minutes and vaporize a biscuit in about thirty seconds. Later models were safer.

What if he hadn’t had that candy bar in his pocket? What if the inventor of the pacemaker had not been trying to warm up his patients who were suffering from chills? What if Georgia hadn’t outlawed alcohol? The pharmacist who started mixing cocoa (cocaine) with wine for a headache relief wouldn’t have switched to carbonated water — and later started using coke flavoring in his syrup. And we all thought prohibition was bad.

Not all inventions have lasted. The lady who invented White-Out from shoe polish probably thought it was going to be on the market forever. However, few offices even own a typewriter any more. We just make the corrections on the computer and run another copy. I guess there are a few bottles on the shelves, but there are also a few jars of Tang somewhere, and many an old music lover is still spinning a turntable, fumbling with cassette tape kinks, and dusting off those eight-track players.

Many of our most useful inventions came about because of mistakes. However, when my mother picked up a bowl of cake batter she’d just stirred together and poured it on top of the browning barbecued wienies in the cast-iron skillet which were waiting on a can of cream-style corn, she did not become famous or rich. The idea of a wiener cake just didn’t catch on like the chocolate chip cookies in the 1950s. We ate the cake for supper with a side of corn, but it just wasn’t marketable at the time.

Of course, if my ancestors had invented the printing press or the steam engine, or even the computer and internet — but they didn’t. I’m not sure what my bunch was doing when that “light bulb” first came on in Edison’s lab, but they were obviously in the dark. Likewise, they swore by their old “ice box,” and didn’t trust frost-free refrigerators. So, when Turing was putting together computers in England, my dad had one of those adding machines with fifty buttons on his counter at the hardware store. While Ford was developing the idea of an assembly line, my ancestors were back home complaining about how to get to town after the horse broke her leg.

I guess my ancestors were too poor to get rich.