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IF YOU ALWAYS DO WHAT YOU ALWAYS DID, YOU ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU ALWAYS GOT. 22 + 1 BREAKTHROUGHS THAT SHAPE OUR WORLD

The Spanish Alchemist

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Ferran Adriá, Spanish head chef of the three-star restaurant El Bulli, has revolutionised the kitchen with his chemistry experiments. Just two decades ago, gastronomy seemed to have reached its zenith.

But Adriá’s incurable curiosity prompted him to ­experiment with flavours, textures and most importantly, methods of preparation. The effect has been spectacular. His creations are ground-breaking ­exam­ples of pure genius. His ‘espumas’ is renowned; puréed tomatoes sprayed from a stainless-steel dispenser, producing a splendid pink foam. He deepfries in liquid nitrogen at temperatures of -196º C. His style of cooking has been dubbed ­‘molecular cuisine’. Adriá himself is not a fan of this label, preferring the term ‘culinary research’. He puts heart and soul into his experiments. The restaurant is only open six months of the year. Adriá and his team spend the other six months in the ­culinary lab, perfecting his radical new culinary alphabet.

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Read my semicolons

Punctuation marks have been around longer than anyone can re­ mem­­­ber. In around 200 BC, the ­Alexandrian philologist and libra­rian ­Aristophanes introduced accents and punctuation as a way of ­ma­king texts more legible. At a time when books were mainly read aloud (the printed book had not yet been invented), punctuation marks helped the reader to emphasise the correct intonation and pauses.

True ­acclaim for punctuation as we know it goes to the Venetian humanist, grammarian and printer Aldus Manutius (1449-1515).

This fifteenth-century innovator did not only give us the comma, but also italics and the semicolon. Another of his feats was to save manuscripts written by classic writers by publishing them in print. ­Punctuation continued to evolve, ultimately making texts easier to read and understand.

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DRESS TO IMPRESS Today’s women are free to dress as they like. This is entirely down to one woman; Coco Chanel. ­Cutting her hair into a bob in 1917, she created the typical ‘garçonne look’ that characterised the roaring twenties. Chanel is primarily renowned for her avant-­garde fashions. Her simple, comfortable clot­ hing literally and figuratively released women from their corsets. In her own words: ‘Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury’. It was not until 1954 that she designed the classic tweed twopiece that would go down in history. Another of her designs that still outlives every fashion trend is the little black dress. Coco Chanel died with her boots on at the age of 87, working on a new spring collection. TIME ­Magazine put her on the list of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century with a powerful summary of her impact: ‘The clothes she created changed the way women looked and how they looked at themselves’.

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Sounds like zip The honour of inventing the zip goes to Whitcomb L. Judson. In 1891, he applied for patent on the design of a novel ‘shoe fastener’.

It had hooks and eyes and worked by sliding a small fastener up and down. Although technically inept, this creation heralded the arrival of the zip. Despite his products, Judson’s company (the Automatic Hook and Eye Company) was taken over in the early 20th century by the Swede Peter Aronson. Together with Swedish emigrant Gideon ­Sundback, he turned the invention into the zip as we know it: a row of interlocking teeth with hollow and rounded surfaces. The design ­became a hit: during the First World War, the American army ordered tens of thousands of zip-fastening aviator jackets and life vests. The real breakthrough came in 1923. Benjamin Franklin Goodrich from the B.F. Goodrich Company renamed his flagging rubber Mystic Boots (with zip fastening) ‘Zipper Boots’. The term denoted the sound of a zipper being zipped and unzipped. That winter, sales of Goodrich’s Zipper Boots reached half a million. From 1935 onwards, the zip was embraced by the clothing industry, initially for menswear and later for women’s fashion.

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Lean and mean In 1937, truck driver Malcom McLean (1913-2001) was transporting a truckload of cotton bales in the New York district of Hoboken. He spent the entire day in the port waiting to unload. To kill time, he watched the crates being unloaded from the trucks one by one, before being hoisted onto the freight ship. He was suddenly struck by an idea that would transform the transport world: why not transport the whole container by ship, truck or train rather than moving all the crates separately? Simple yet brilliant: it would save time, money, damage, and space. On 26 April 1956, almost twenty years and countless trials and errors later, his dream was 足fulfilled. McLean set sail from Newark to Houston on an old sea tanker full of containers measuring 6 x 2.44 x 2.6 metres. The first transatlantic consignment followed in 1966. Since then, international trade has grown twice as fast as the global economy. And all thanks to a young peasant boy who started out selling eggs for his mother.

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QWERTYUIOP Where would we be without the ‘at’ symbol? Detached from the world and the delights of digital paradise. In 1971, the American programmer Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (1941) was working on an e-mail ­system for ARPANET (the predecessor of the internet). He ­estab­lished a­ ­basis for a system that enabled users to exchange ­messages between computers. To distinguish the user names from the­ machine sending the e-mail, he chose the ‘@’ symbol on his keyboard.

It was an old symbol that was largely defunct in the 20th century and would not cause problems with names or duplication. It ­probably dates from the Renaissance period when Tuscan merchants merged an ‘a’ with a ‘c’, which meant al cambio (at the rate of). American ­accountants ­later used the symbol to denote ‘at the price of’ or simply ‘at’. Tomlinson gave the symbol a whole new lease of life. The first ­e-mail ever sent ­reputedly read ‘QWERTYUIOP’: the top row of a standard keyboard. This e-mail wasn’t saved as it was not considered ­remotely important. In fact on showing his invention to a colleague, Tomlinson ­modestly whispered: ‘Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re ­supposed to be working on.’

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Game on!

In 1962, members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club spent most of their time in the computer room of the Massachusetts ­Institute of Technol­ogy (MIT). One of them, Steve Russell, ­suggested devising a computer game. The friends worked together on the project in an open source environment. The final result was spectacular to say the least. Spacewar! comprised all the main basic elements of modern games: a virtual world, real-time action, special moves and a personal arms stash. Ten years later, Atari hit the market with the first ever home video game console and video games became a world-wide hit. Spacewar! has been widely copied ever since and is still a source of ­inspiration for designers. What’s more, turnover in the gaming industry now outstrips turnover in the film industry.

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If the people the bank, the go to the people

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people can’t get to the bank must people.

Famine in the mid-seventies prompted Bengali economist ­Muhammed Yunus (1940) to start on a plan for combating poverty. He discovered the huge difference that small loans could make to many of those on the ­poverty line. For this purpose he founded his own Grameen Bank. They were rewarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. This year alone, small loans have helped a staggering 100 million of the world’s poorest people.

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TAKE IT. BREAK IT. SHARE IT. LOVE IT. Sherbet was a popular children’s product at the start of the twentieth century. Shake it into a glass, add water, stir it and hey presto! A glass of lemonade. One winter evening in 1905, the eleven-year-old Frank Epperson (1896-1983) left his glass out on the veranda. The heavy frost that night meant that when Epperson looked out the next morning, his lemonade and the stirrer had frozen in the glass. The image stuck in his mind. In 1923, he applied for the patent on his ‘ice on a stick’, calling his invention an Epsicle Ice Pop. He later changed the name of his ice lolly to Popsicle. Hundreds of millions of these Popsicles were eaten every summer. Epperson himself however wasn’t in a position to enjoy his invention. During the great depression of 1929, he was obliged to sell the patent. The result was another well-known version of the ice lolly: a lolly with two sticks that children could share.

Although we now have more than thirty flavours to choose from, orange has remained top of the pops since day one.

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