Mortars and Mousetraps: Static Technologies

In both a personal and professional sense, I've never given mortars and pestles too much thought. In fact, I'm pretty sure I forgot these tools existed until a paper written on the topic crossed my digital desk last week. Coincidentally, the Atlantic ran an ode to the mortar and pestle just days after I read mine, prompting a little more consideration.

While the magazine article waxes poetic about its evolving uses, I'm personally more interested in the fact that, in the thick of the Information Age, we still use a small, blunt club, a bowl, and brute strength to grind food and sometimes pharmaceuticals, just as we did 20,000 years ago when these devices were becoming common. I glean that the reason for this is a simple one: for fine grinding of spices and drugs, mortars and pestles are at least as good as modern automated solutions that are tens of thousands of years newer. They're a static technology--one that has changed very little since its invention. Today, in an age when we're encouraged to upgrade our phones and operating systems every year or two, these technologies are a stark contrast.

Consider the mousetrap, the engineering of which gave rise to a quote probably misattributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. The modern spring-loaded bar trap design was patented a little over a hundred years ago and has remained more or less static ever since. It's simple, effective, and relatively safe for the user. When introduced it represented a huge improvement over previous mouse killers: not only biological ones like cats and humans, but also previous designs that mashed, cut, or electrocuted the mouse to death. Yet each year the US Patent Office receives hundreds of applications for "better mousetraps" and has granted thousands of them in the past hundred years. The one "improvement" that seemed like a good idea--the glue trap introduced in the 1980s--is now often decried as inhumane and troublesome for those without the desire to watch a mouse flail itself to death in a sticky mess.

It doesn't take long to spot static technologies today, even if they're not as extreme or long-lived as the mortar and pestle or as unique as the mousetrap. Barbed wire, "gem-style" paper clips, flyswatters, and bubble wrap are long-lived solutions to relatively major problems. Flyswatters and mousetraps, especially, contributed to public health by efficiently ridding human areas of two vectors of infectious diseases.

I'm not a trained engineer, as most of you are, but I can't help but think of the people who invented or patented these things. If the definition of engineering is to apply scientific and technical knowledge to solve problems, shouldn't these guys have received something like the Engineering Triple Crown, or at least be more widely recognized? They came up with devices or designs so simple and effective that improving upon them has been all but impossible, at least commercially. Doesn't that make them legends in their field?

These days it seems we more often idolize public figures like Steve Jobs for providing us with overpriced pocket-sized computers to solve every problem we didn't know we had. But it's high time to recognize William Hooker, for trillions of ethically destroyed rodents; Robert Montgomery for eliminating flies with a mesh square and not a folded newspaper; and Glidden, Haish, Washburn, and Ellwood for the ability to fence in a 30 acre pasture without killing ourselves first.