Hidden World of Everyday Objects

Look around you. On your desk, in your kitchen, in your pocket, there are dozens of ordinary objects: a pencil, a zipper, a paper clip, a ballpoint pen, a fork. We know them so well that we hardly see them anymore. We pick them up without thinking and put them down again without a second look.

看看你的周围吧。书桌上、厨房里、口袋中，到处都是普普通通的小东西：一支铅笔、一条拉链、一枚回形针、一支圆珠笔、一把叉子。我们对它们太熟悉了，以至于几乎视而不见。我们不假思索地拿起它们，用完又随手放下，连看都不再看一眼。

Yet each of these things has a story. Behind even the simplest of them lie years of trial and error, lucky accidents, rival patents and inventors whose names most people have never heard. Their histories show how the world we take for granted was put together, one small invention at a time.

然而，这些东西每一件都有自己的故事。即便是最简单的物品，背后也有多年的反复试验、幸运的偶然、相互竞争的专利，以及大多数人从未听说过名字的发明者。它们的历史告诉我们，那个被我们视为理所当然的世界，是如何靠一项项小发明一点点搭建起来的。

In 1958 the American economist Leonard Read published a short essay called “I, Pencil”, told by the pencil itself. Its main claim was surprising: not a single person on Earth knows how to make a pencil from start to finish. In Read's account, the graphite came from Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, and the cedar for the wooden case from Oregon and Northern California. The eraser was made mostly from rapeseed oil and Italian pumice, and the metal band that holds it was brass, made from copper and zinc mined in different countries.

1958年，美国经济学家伦纳德·里德发表了一篇短文，题为《我，铅笔》，由铅笔本身来讲述。文章的核心观点出人意料：世界上没有任何一个人知道怎样从头到尾独自做出一支铅笔。在里德的描述中，石墨来自斯里兰卡，当时叫锡兰；做笔杆的雪松木来自俄勒冈州和加利福尼亚州北部。橡皮主要由菜籽油和意大利浮石制成，固定橡皮的金属箍则是黄铜，由在不同国家开采的铜和锌制成。

Huge numbers of people who have never met work on these materials, and nobody gives them orders from above. Prices and trade connect them. Read wanted to show how complex an economy is, but his essay also shows how closely we are all connected. As for the pencil itself, its story in Europe begins in the 1560s, when people in Borrowdale, in northern England, found a large deposit of unusually pure, solid graphite. Local shepherds first used it to mark their sheep.

为这些材料工作的人多得数不清，他们彼此从未见过面，也没有人从上面给他们下命令。把他们联系在一起的是价格和贸易。里德想说明经济有多复杂，但他的文章也说明了我们所有人之间的联系有多紧密。至于铅笔本身，它在欧洲的历史始于16世纪60年代：当时人们在英格兰北部的博罗代尔发现了一大片纯度极高的块状石墨。当地的牧羊人最初用它在羊身上做记号。

The zipper does its job so well that it seems as if it must always have existed. In fact, it took several inventors more than sixty years to make one that worked. The first was Elias Howe, the man behind the sewing machine, who patented an “Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure” in 1851 but never put it on the market. In 1893 Whitcomb Judson showed his “Clasp Locker” at the World's Fair in Chicago, but it was hard to make and often came open on its own.

拉链用起来如此顺手，让人觉得它仿佛一直就存在。事实上，几位发明者花了六十多年才做出真正好用的拉链。第一个尝试的是缝纫机的发明者伊莱亚斯·豪，他在1851年为一种“自动连续衣物扣合装置”申请了专利，却从未把它推向市场。1893年，惠特科姆·贾德森在芝加哥世界博览会上展出了他的“扣锁”，但这种装置很难制造，而且常常自己松开。

The breakthrough came in 1913, when Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American engineer at Judson's company, designed the rows of small interlocking teeth that we still use today. Even then, the zipper caught on slowly. It first appeared on boots and tobacco pouches, and only in the 1930s did tailors start putting it in trousers and dresses. The name did not come from the inventors either. In 1923 the B.F. Goodrich Company called its new rubber boots “Zippers”, and the word soon passed to the fastener itself. Today the Japanese company YKK makes billions of zippers a year, and you can often find its three letters on the pull tab.

突破出现在1913年。贾德森公司的瑞典裔美国工程师吉迪恩·桑德巴克设计出一排排相互咬合的小齿，这种结构我们至今仍在使用。即便如此，拉链的普及依然很慢。它最先出现在靴子和烟草袋上，直到20世纪30年代，裁缝才开始把它缝在裤子和连衣裙上。拉链的英文名“zipper”也不是发明者起的。1923年，B.F.古德里奇公司把自家的新款橡胶靴命名为“Zippers”，这个词很快就转而指拉链本身。如今，日本YKK公司每年生产数十亿条拉链，你常常能在拉头上看到这三个字母。

In 1968 Spencer Silver, a chemist at the American company 3M, was trying to make a very strong glue. What he got instead was a weak one: it stuck lightly, came off without leaving a mark and could be used again. Silver was sure it was good for something and spent years showing it to his colleagues, but nobody could think of a use for it.

1968年，美国3M公司的化学家斯潘塞·西尔弗想研制一种超强胶水。结果他得到的却是一种很弱的胶：粘得很轻，撕下来不留痕迹，还能反复使用。西尔弗确信它总会有用处，于是花了好几年向同事推介，但谁也想不出它能用来做什么。

The answer came in 1974 from another 3M employee, Art Fry. He sang in a church choir, and the paper bookmarks in his hymn book kept falling out. Fry remembered Silver's glue and made a bookmark that stayed in place and came off cleanly. Even so, 3M was unsure. A first test in 1977 went badly, but in 1978 the company handed out free samples all over Boise, Idaho, and most of the people who tried them wanted more. The Post-it Note went on sale across the United States in 1980 and became one of the best-selling office products ever.

答案在1974年由3M的另一名员工阿特·弗赖找到。他在教堂唱诗班唱歌，夹在赞美诗集里的纸书签总是掉出来。弗赖想起了西尔弗的胶水，用它做了一种能粘住不掉、撕下来又干干净净的书签。尽管如此，3M仍然犹豫不决。1977年的第一次试销效果很差，但到了1978年，公司在爱达荷州博伊西市到处免费派发样品，试用过的人大多还想要更多。1980年，便利贴在全美上市，并成为有史以来最畅销的办公用品之一。

Today it is hard to imagine a Western dinner table without forks, yet the fork was once a scandal. In the early 11th century a Byzantine princess married the son of the Doge of Venice and brought small golden forks with her. The Venetians were shocked to see her eat with a fork instead of her fingers. When she died of the plague a few years later, the churchman Peter Damian described her death as God's punishment for her vanity and love of luxury.

今天，我们很难想象西方的餐桌上没有叉子，可叉子当年却引起过一场丑闻。11世纪初，一位拜占庭公主嫁给了威尼斯总督的儿子，并随身带来了几把小金叉。威尼斯人看到她用叉子而不是用手指吃饭，大为震惊。几年后她死于瘟疫，神职人员彼得·达米安便把她的死说成是上帝对她虚荣和贪图奢华的惩罚。

For a long time forks remained rare luxuries, used mainly by the rich and viewed with suspicion by everyone else. They spread across Europe only in the 17th and 18th centuries, and the four-pronged fork we know today became common even later. In the American colonies most people ate with a knife and a spoon, and the fork did not become normal in American homes until the 19th century. It took about seven hundred years for this ordinary object to become ordinary.

在很长一段时间里，叉子一直是稀罕的奢侈品，主要供富人使用，其他人则对它心存疑虑。直到17和18世纪，叉子才在欧洲普及开来，而我们今天熟悉的四齿叉普及得还要更晚。在北美殖民地，大多数人用刀和勺吃饭，直到19世纪，叉子才在美国家庭中变得平常。这件普通的东西，花了大约七百年才真正变得普通。

The paper clip is a small masterpiece of design: a single piece of wire, bent into a clever shape, with no glue and no moving parts. It costs almost nothing to make and does its job perfectly. Who invented it, however, is a surprisingly difficult question.

回形针是设计上的一件小杰作：一根铁丝，巧妙地弯成一定形状，不用胶水，也没有活动部件。它的制造成本几乎为零，却能完美地完成任务。然而，它究竟是谁发明的，却是一个出人意料的难题。

In Norway many people believe the inventor was Johan Vaaler, who patented a paper clip in 1899. During the German occupation in World War II, Norwegians wore paper clips on their jackets as a quiet sign of protest. But Vaaler's design is not the one we use. The familiar shape with two loops, known as the Gem clip, was already being made in Britain by the 1890s and was never patented. In 1899 the American William Middlebrook patented a machine for making clips of this shape. So the history of this simple object is a tangle of patents and copies.

在挪威，许多人认为回形针的发明者是约翰·瓦勒，他在1899年为一种回形针申请了专利。第二次世界大战德国占领期间，挪威人把回形针别在外套上，作为无声的抗议。但瓦勒的设计并不是我们今天用的那种。我们熟悉的双环形状被称为“Gem回形针”，19世纪90年代就已在英国生产，而且从未申请过专利。1899年，美国人威廉·米德尔布鲁克为一种制造这种形状回形针的机器申请了专利。因此，这件简单物品的历史，其实是一团由专利和仿制品缠成的乱麻。

In 1941 the Swiss engineer George de Mestral came home from a hunting trip in the Alps and found his trousers and his dog's fur covered in burrs, the small seed heads of the burdock plant. Instead of just picking them off, he looked at one under a microscope. It was covered in tiny hooks that caught on the loops of cloth and hair. De Mestral then spent years trying to copy this with different materials, until he had a fastener that could be opened and closed thousands of times.

1941年，瑞士工程师乔治·德·梅斯特拉尔在阿尔卑斯山打猎归来，发现自己的裤子和狗毛上沾满了牛蒡的刺果，也就是这种植物带种子的小果球。他没有只是把它们摘掉了事，而是拿了一颗放在显微镜下观察。原来刺果上布满了细小的钩子，能钩住布料和毛发上的小圈。此后，德·梅斯特拉尔花了好几年时间用各种材料模仿这一结构，最终做出了一种可以开合成千上万次的扣件。

He called his invention Velcro, from the French words velours (velvet) and crochet (hook), and received a patent in 1955. At first the fashion world was not interested: tailors thought it looked cheap and ugly. Velcro became famous thanks to NASA, which used it in the 1960s to stop tools and equipment from floating around inside spacecraft. After that it spread everywhere, from children's shoes and hospital equipment to the International Space Station. A few seeds caught in a dog's fur had changed the way we fasten things.

他把自己的发明命名为Velcro，取自法语单词velours（天鹅绒）和crochet（钩子），并于1955年获得专利。起初，时装界对它毫无兴趣：裁缝们觉得它难看又显得廉价。让魔术贴出名的是美国国家航空航天局，它在20世纪60年代用魔术贴固定工具和设备，防止它们在飞船舱内四处飘浮。此后，魔术贴迅速普及，从童鞋、医院设备一直用到国际空间站。几颗粘在狗毛上的种子，改变了我们扣合东西的方式。

The American engineer Henry Petroski wrote whole books about pencils, forks and paper clips. His main idea was that “form follows failure”: things change shape because people notice what is wrong with them and keep fixing it. Small everyday problems are good teachers, because money and force can't solve them. Only a better idea can.

美国工程师亨利·佩特罗斯基专门写过整本整本的书，讨论铅笔、叉子和回形针。他的核心观点是“形式追随失败”：东西之所以改变形状，是因为人们发现了它们的毛病，并不断加以改进。日常的小问题是好老师，因为金钱和蛮力都解决不了它们，只有更好的点子才行。

These histories also show that progress rarely runs in a straight line from idea to product. There are accidents, failed tests, abandoned designs, ideas borrowed from other countries and solutions that turn out to fit a completely different problem. The Post-it Note began as a failed glue. Velcro started with burrs in a dog's fur. Super glue was a mistake in a lab that was trying to make gun sights. Many of the things we use every day began with something going wrong.

这些历史还表明，进步很少是从构想到产品的一条直线。其间有意外、失败的试验、被放弃的设计、从别国借来的点子，还有原本为一个问题准备、结果却恰好适合另一个完全不同问题的方案。便利贴始于一种失败的胶水。魔术贴始于狗毛上的刺果。强力胶是一个研制瞄准镜的实验室里出的差错。我们每天使用的许多东西，都是在出了岔子之后诞生的。

The objects around us are small pieces of human history. A pencil holds the work of miners, foresters and traders in several countries. A zipper is the result of six decades of trying. A Post-it Note is proof that a useful idea can grow out of a failure.

我们身边的物品，是人类历史的一个个小片段。一支铅笔里凝聚着多个国家的矿工、林业工人和商人的劳动。一条拉链是六十年反复尝试的结果。一张便利贴则证明，有用的点子也可能从失败中长出来。

So the next time you pick up a pen, clip some papers together or peel off a sticky note, take a moment to look at it. Each of these small things has a long story behind it, and there are many more such stories around us, waiting for someone to notice them.

所以，下次当你拿起一支笔、用回形针夹住几张纸，或撕下一张便利贴时，不妨停下来看它一眼。这些小东西背后都有一段长长的故事，而我们身边还有许许多多这样的故事，正等着有人去发现。