Progress comes in many forms. There are the big movements, industrial revolutions that fundamentally changed the world as we know it. Now in the midst of the fourth, these tectonic movements shift the very basis on how we live our lives. No less earth shaking are the narrower, targeted advances within a specific area: think the progression from muskets to automatic weapons, from propellers to jet engines, from flip phones to smart phones. And there are broad-based attitudinal shifts, as much about the acceptance of a change as the advances underlying them. You see that in everything from the move to credit cards from cash, and the growth of remote work and schooling.
Then there are the incremental changes. These tiny little shifts may not even be noticed by most, just accepted. A new button here, a shift on a screen there, a different shape of a handle or knob. None is earthshattering, but rather move the needle a fractional amount in terms of ease or efficiency. It might be an adjustment to a recipe or a redesign of an app, a retooling of a car dashboard a better backpack strap. No one knows the name of the person who figured out that the last few laces on your boots don't have to go through eyelets but can use little tiny cleats to make it easier to get them on and off, but we all owe them a debt of gratitude.
Those kind of changes are all but invisible until they're not. Often they get put into service, and no one even notices them. But eventually someone encounters them because of circumstance or station, and it's as if the angels sing and the heavens part. If that seems like an awfully strong reaction, perhaps it is. Unless you need it at the second. In that situation. And then the solve is so on point, so ingenious, so elegant, that you wonder how mankind survived without until now. And so it was with me an extension cord.
More specifically it was a power strip. You know the object: a sliver of metal or plastic about 8 to 10 inches long that has several outlets on it and a snake-like tail, turning a single electrical connection into many. They come plain and fancy, some with switches, some with surge protectors, some with indicator lights and fuses. In our modern world where everything has to be plugged in or charged, they are as utilitarian as a hammer, as unsexy as a screwdriver, but as necessary as air.
But they have a major flaw. In olden days, when everything had its own individual power cord, they were just fine, allowing you to multiplex as many pieces of gear for which you had room. But times change. As we moved to battery powered devices, where the power pack was at the end of the cable rather than built into the device, those wires terminated not in a plug but a box. All well and good. But plug one of those into the strip, and the power pack covered the adjoining outlet and maybe even the one after that. What was designed to power 8 or 10 devices could now handle just 2 or 3. Many was the time we all played some Tetris-like game, moving one plug to another and turning the power packs around and around trying to bend space and time to free up just one more outlet.
That was the situation I was facing on a recent project. I had a lot of hardware that needed juice: a USB power block, a computer power pack and several ancillary pieces of gear whose chords terminated in bulbous flat plugs several inches long. Laid end to end it was a solid foot of plastic which more than covered an entire power strip without allowing access to the outlets. I was just about to try and scare up another strip when I realized a simple design tweak in the one I had been given. Rather than the outlets being oriented parallel to the strip, they had been turned 90 degrees AND had been spaced further apart. The result was that I could plug not just the four packs I had into the strip, but several more. I was gobsmackced. I would have sooner believed dogs could talk than I could get the power I needed out of a single strip. Yes, I am easily impressed, but impressed I was.
It has been said that change comes in two flavors: traumatic and trivial. This was certainly not the former, but it all but defines the later. When the history of the world is written, there will be chapters on Edison and Ford, on Jobs and Marconi. But lost will be the name of the anonymous engineer at ACME electric who said in a staff meeting "what if we turned them THIS way?" Sir or Madam, I thank you for your contribution to progress: rest assured I will not forget you.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford can find wonder in the smallest things. His column appears weekly via email and online http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/ and https://marcwollin.substack.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
