Elegant Solutions
Recently, when writing a check, it occurred to me that requiring the amount to be given separately in both words and number was a simple and ingenious solution to the problem of reducing error. It is possible, if your handwriting is as sloppy as mine, to write a letter or number that can be misread as a different letter or number. If redundancy consisted of writing the amount of the check twice as numbers or twice as words the same error could appear in both versions. It is a great deal less likely to make two errors, one in letters and one in numbers, that happen to produce the same mistaken result. It reduces the risk of fraud as well, for a similar reason.
That is one example of a simple and elegant solution to a problem, so simple that until today it had never occurred to me to wonder why checks were written that way. Another example of the same pattern is a nurse or pharmacist checking both your name and date of birth to confirm your identity.1
That started me thinking about other examples:
The design of rubber spatulas, one bottom corner a right angle, the other a quarter circle. One of the uses of the device is to scrape up the contents of containers, jars and bowls and such. Some containers have curved bottoms, some flat bottoms at a right angle to the wall. The standard design fits both.
Manhole covers are round because it is the one simple shape such that there is no way of turning it that lets it fall through the hole it fits over.
Consider an analog meter with a needle and a scale behind it. If you read it at a slight angle you get the reading a little high or low. Add a section of mirror behind the needle and line up the image behind the needle. Problem solved.
If you try to turn a small screw with a large screwdriver it doesn’t fit into the slot. Turning a large screw with a small screwdriver isn’t always impossible but if the screw is at all tight you are likely to damage the screwdriver doing it. The solution is the Phillips screwdriver. The tip of a large Phillips screwdriver is identical to a smaller one so can be used on a range of screw sizes.2
Ziplock bags have been around since the sixties. Inventing them was not simple but a new application is: packaging that consists of a sealed plastic bag with a Ziplock below the seal. After you cut open the bag you can use the ziplock to keep the contents from spilling or drying. I do not know how recent an innovation it is but I cannot recall an example from more than a decade ago.
If you look under a sink you will see the pipe going down and then up again. The curve fills with water, keeping sewer gases from coming through the pipe and stinking up your bathroom. The curve is usually designed so it can be separated, making it easy to clean out a blockage or recover the ring you accidentally dropped into the drain.
Before separating make sure you have a bucket under it.
We heat houses by burning fuel in a fireplace or a furnace. The high tech version is a heat pump, which uses electric power to move heat into the house. An automobile heater is even more efficient than a heat pump, since the heat costs nothing at all — just divert some of the heat you are bleeding off through the radiator to warm the inside of the car instead. It’s the obvious solution — once someone thinks of it.
The problem is how to provide water to thousands of customers. The obvious solution is a pump for each customer. The elegant solution is one big pump and a water tower. The pump to get the water to the customers is gravity.
The problem with getting Ketchup, or anything else with similar texture, out of the bottle is that it is at the bottom and the hole is at the top. It finally occurred someone to make squeeze bottles upside down, with the opening at the bottom.
When Winston Churchill visited America, one of the things that impressed him was the design of American sinks. In an English sink, then and for I know now, a sink had two faucets, hot and cold. If you wanted warm water you mixed hot and cold in the basin and washed your hands in that. Some American sinks work that way but many have two handles and single faucet; by controlling the amount of hot and cold going into the faucet you control the temperature of the mixed water that comes out. A simple, indeed obvious, improvement, so obvious that I wonder if the other design dates to a time when hot water was sufficiently scarce that you needed to limit your hand washing to one sink’s worth.
Simple Rules
The rule for evenly dividing a piece of cake, or anything else, between two people: I cut, you choose.
A simple solution to the problem of representing numbers in a computer was using binary instead of decimal. It is much easier to make something with two alternative states, on and off, open or closed, than with ten.
When you are trying to decide where to put something, ask yourself where is the first place you would look for it. Put it there. (A Character in Hot Money by Dick Francis)
The simple system for keeping track of how much a customer in a dim sum restaurant owes is to bring the food in dishes matched to price. When the meal is over, count how many dishes there are of each style. I am told that in Hong Kong in the old days wicked young men would select a table near an open window … . Presumably the solution was to not have any tables near open windows or, if you did, only seat respectable customers at them.
There is a story, apparently apocryphal, about Dwight Eisenhower’s time as president of Columbia University:
The campus was undergoing an expansion, and Ike was presented with two very different plans for laying out new sidewalks. The architects were irreconcilable, each insisting that his plan was the only way to go and that the other guy had it all wrong. Ike, sensible fellow that he was, had grass planted instead, telling the architects to wait a year and see where the students trod paths in the turf, and then to put the sidewalks there.
An even more famous story is the solution of the papal legate to a problem faced by the army of the Albigensian Crusade after taking a city — how to distinguish the Albigensian heretics from their Catholic neighbors.
Kill them all. God will know his own.
That story too appears to be apocryphal, although the evidence is less clear. I take it as an illustration of one of my rules of thumb with regard to historical anecdotes: Distrust any that is a good enough story to have survived on its literary merits.
If Lost in the Woods
Make sure to bring a length of cable with you. If you get lost, you can bury the cable and then it won't be long before an excavator will come along to break it.
Bring a small cast iron pan. If you need help, just start seasoning it, and someone will be along shortly to tell you you're doing it wrong.
A deck of cards is another good option. Just start a game of solitaire and someone will be looking over your shoulder saying, “red 8 on black 9.”
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This one and some of the others were suggested by posters on the web forum Data Secrets Lox.
I am told that the solution is not perfect, doesn’t work for very small screws, which require a smaller size of driver.
For a long time the hot water in English houses was not guaranteed potable.
I first read the Solitaire solution to getting lost in “Tunnel in the Sky” by RAH.
They still have those sinks in the UK and you are faced with a choice of freezing cold or scalding hot water. The solution consists of furiously waving your hands from one stream to the other before your body can register pain.