Just Genius (2009)

Why are inventors suddenly seeing the light? Is there such a thing as a eureka moment? Is it true what Edison said: an invention consists of 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration? Everything is always invented by someone. Our daily life is full of curious finds and inventions. Even though the objects come from modern laboratories, on closer inspection there is always a human story behind every decisive inspiration. In Simply Genial, Marcel Grauls traces the origins of a hundred everyday objects. From post-it to pamper, from mp3 to sms, from gore-tex to tampax, from www to usb, from tefal to lego…

Pneumatic tyre

There are very nice pictures of the old John Boyd Dunlop in 1920, when he is eighty years old. He sits upright on his bicycle, dressed in a stylish black suit. He wears a strangely flattened hat and his long white beard is parted in two halves by the wind. This is how the Dubliners got to see the inventor of the pneumatic tire in those years. He had been wealthy twice in his life and was now poor again. He ran a small fabric store in town. His only son, for whom he had designed the pneumatic tire at the time, was long dead. And he knew that many would make a fortune with his brand name. Knowing that, he died a few months later.

Adi Dassler was born Adolf Dassler in 1900 in Herzogenaurach in Franconia, northern Bavaria. The town was best known for its production of felt slippers. The largest factory had more than seven hundred employees. One of them was Christoph Dassler, Adolf's father. Father Dassler had already trained one of his sons as a shoemaker and insisted that Adolf learn the baker's trade.

In the company album of the Lego company there is a strange snapshot showing the desolate bogs of the Danish Jutland. In the foreground, five men are busy cutting peat. The youngest, at the back, cuts the sods, three others pry them loose, and the fifth, at the front, leaning on one knee, makes the piles. It's war, the Germans have occupied Denmark. There is no fuel available for private individuals and the population is forced to meet its energy needs with peat. The man kneeling is Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of the Lego toy factory, one of the largest in the world. In 1942, Ole Kirk is fifty years old. His life has been one of poverty and disaster, and new calamity is yet to come.

Led light

How the son of a power plant maintenance man in a remote Japanese fishing village became a researcher in a small company that had a laboratory with two employees, and how he outran all major electronics companies with the invention of the bright blue LED light, after which he quickly credited 200 related inventions, including the Blu-ray laser, got into a fight with his old boss's son-in-law, and left for California because his wife and three daughters found that place the most attractive, and where he is now , after receiving 25 international awards, if only a modern Edison can be surprised by the Nobel Prize - for Chemistry or Physics, that is not clear.

"The lava lamp," its inventor once said, "has a cycle like that of life itself: it grows, wears out, decays, disappears, and then starts all over again." Edward Craven Walker himself lived to be 82 years old, so he was allowed to experience it all: he introduced the strange lamp in 1963, by the end of the 1970s it faded away, in the 1980s it had completely disappeared at one point. She was there again at the end of the nineties.

The first time a wide audience was introduced to a laser beam was in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964). In a famous scene, Bond, played by Sean Connery, is tied to a table of gold. A laser beam that cuts the table in half lengthwise crackles its way between Bond's spread legs.

Bond first uses his phlegm as a weapon and says to Goldfinger, "Thank you for the demonstration." As the beam approaches his crotch, the secret agent gets short of breath and asks, "You expect me to talk?" To which Goldfinger replies, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.'
In reality, the table had first been sawn in half and then painted over. Then someone from under the table melted the glue with a torch. The beam looks like the flame of a welding machine; it also crackles, while a real laser in this case would have produced hardly any heat and no sound.

'A crown cap', says the Dikke Van Dale, 'is a metal bottle cap with indentations all around, making it reminiscent of a crown.' The lid is dirt cheap, can easily be mechanically applied to a bottle and removed again, it seals a bottle perfectly so that the sting, the carbon dioxide, cannot escape and the used cap can be reprocessed without any problems. But the thing didn't come into the world that completely perfect. There were 150 crazy and less crazy closures in the United States alone, when one William Painter came up with a 151st version more than a hundred years ago. An incorrigible copy, as it turned out later.

Melitta Liebscher was born in 1873 in Dresden. She was married to Hugo Bentz, manager of a local department store, and had two sons, one aged nine and one aged four. On a Sunday afternoon in early 1908, together with some friends during the 'Kaffeeklatsch', she came up with the idea of banning the coffee grounds from her favorite drink.

snapshot

Few Dutch people have been immortalized so beautifully in one word as the Leiden photographer Kiek, after whom 'het kiekje' was named, an occasional photo by an amateur photographer. But because 'kiekje' looks like a dialect word for 'look', the surname has become almost invisible. Leiden honors him with a simple Kiekpad and since 2001 also with a small-scale Kiekmonument. Kiek deserves better; as the (forced) founder of occasional photography, he is entitled to national recognition.

Kevlar

Stephanie Kwolek was born in 1923 in Pennsylvania, on the east coast of the United States. Her father was a nature lover, who traveled with her through the fields and the woods; together they collected leaves and flowers and seeds, which they stuck in large books. From her mother she got the love for sewing and fabrics. She drew all kinds of clothes and sewed them together with her mother. She thought of becoming a fashion designer. Her father died when she was ten, in the depths of the Great Depression that ravaged America. Her mother had to work in the factory and little Stephanie's future did not look so bright.

Pneumatic tyre

Running shoes

Lego

Led light

Lava lamp

Laser

Crown cap

Coffee filter

snapshot

Kevlar