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Canberra Today 13°/17° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Griffiths / Tin-can theory of the lost technologies

AS technology hurtles down the rails to an uncertain future, it’s worth considering the things humanity is no longer capable of making. The lost technologies.

John Griffiths.
John Griffiths.

The mighty Saturn V rocket that took men to the moon is possibly the most famous example.

With all the technological development since the 1960s how can it be that we’re unable to make these things?

It’s enough to give moon-landing conspiracists credibility.

The answer has to do with modern materials and certification, and complexity, and that in the time it would take to re-create those moon rockets we could make better rockets.

More prosaically, in my kitchen we’ve got some problems with can openers.

Most people reach for a tin opener so rarely these days they might not realise it’s damn near impossible to get a reliable one in 2016.

The majority of tins come with ring pulls now.

When I moved into my current place I bought a Big W home starter kit, which came with a rudimentary can opener that worked okay the couple of times I needed it.

But a change in my dog-feeding arrangements meant a need to open a big tin on a daily basis and this led me on a death march through hell.

The cheapo, starter-pack tin opener burst into pieces three days in.

A trip to the supermarket for another low-cost opener gave me another three days before also expiring.

The best opener in the supermarket lasted a mere four days.

I’d had enough. I was going up-market. A boutique homewares store sold me a sculpted, ergonomic tin opener for an eye-watering $45. One can buy quite complex electronics for this kind of money.

The elegant sculptural opener endured a mere two operations before ceasing to function although, to its credit, it didn’t fall apart. It just stopped opening tins. It remains beautiful.

An electric tin opener from Aldi offered a solution at the price of much coveted, counter-top real estate and a kitchen power point (not to mention $25). I was lured in by the promise of a built-in bottle opener and knife sharpener.

Four tins later and, it too, was no longer performing its primary function. To be honest, opening bottles was spilling an unconscionable amount of beer, too.

In desperation, I bought a mid-range tin opener from Big W, one of the type that cuts the whole top off the tin rather than opening the top.

This one, alone of a plethora, appears to be capable of opening multiple tins.

But it does go to show, as technology marches on, how our stores are filled with legacy products that we use so rarely we don’t even realise they’re no longer fit for purpose.

The factories keep stamping them out, increasingly poorly, the trucks and ships distribute them around the world, we pay money for them and take them home, and the whole industrial chain is making a useless piece of junk. Intriguingly, one for which price has no bearing.

Protip though. The Big W $10 opener is the only one worth a damn.

 

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