Ksenia Pixelesse / Unsplash
The objects that surround daily life are so familiar that they have become effectively invisible. A pencil is a pencil. A zipper is a zipper. A fork is a fork. The questions of where they came from, how long they took to develop, who made them, and why they look and work the way they do are questions that almost nobody asks, which is a shame, because the answers tend to be more interesting than the objects themselves.
Most everyday objects have histories that span centuries and involve more people, more accidents, and more contested credit than their finished simplicity suggests. The pencil, which looks like the simplest possible writing instrument, required the discovery of a specific mineral deposit in Cumbria, England, the development of a manufacturing process that took 300 years to optimize, and the work of a Bavarian pencil-maker named Lothar von Faber who essentially invented the modern pencil industry almost single-handedly in the 19th century. The fork, which is now considered the most basic of eating utensils, was condemned by the Catholic Church as an insult to God's natural gift of fingers and was still a novelty in much of Europe as recently as the 18th century. The zipper was invented in 1851, patented several times in different forms, commercially ignored for decades, and finally rescued by the U.S. military during World War I, without whom it might have remained a curiosity.
