Delighted By Design

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One day, walking down the hall by our receptionist, I cheerfully announced, “If ever I’m a time traveler stuck in the past, I will make some money by inventing the paper clip…” Given that there aren’t any accidental time portals in my neighbourhood, I have no idea why I would be worried about making a living. I don’t suppose my dumbfounded receptionist had any advice.

Recently a writer I e-correspond with, Scott Berkun, published a book How Design Makes the World. After he wrote it, he went on twitter to ask for examples of “things so well designed they go unnoticed.” Someone suggested the paperclip, other ideas included aglets (tips of shoelaces) washroom entrances without doors, safety pins and safety matches. 

(I remember we would light a match by striking it on the bottom of our shoe, or on our zipper—I’ll never forget the traveler in that H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine who is trying to use fire to hold back some Morlocks in a dark tunnel, and suddenly finds out his matches are of the infernal type that could only be struck on the box!)

Berkun’s list grew to 60 things before he put it on his blog and got a few more nice ideas. Because I have contributed on Scott’s blog before, I felt safe making a comment, something like:

“Historians wish they knew how the armour of the Roman legionaries were fastened. Stone carvings only show the outsides of the armour. So when that movie with the colonial space marines came out, Aliens, I perceived an historian’s joke: As the troops are putting on their greaves and breastplates the camera shows the design for fastening—a plastic buckle that goes click.”

There is a military design that I am still delighted with after all these years, something about the army’s so-called “respirator,” what we lower ranks would call a “gas mask.” Whenever we heard the cry of “Gas-gas-gas!” we would snatch it from the pouch on our belt, stick our chin in the bottom, and pull it over our face by the straps. Don’t get the straps twisted! Did it really work? Yes, you could cover the inlet and inhale, only to have the rubber compress against your face. To prove your confidence, you would go into a hut filled with tear gas, hold your breath, pull your mask off, and then replace it. You could trust your life to the mask, like trusting science. 

Unlike in the first world war, the gas mask did not have a hose to a box on the chest. Instead there was a screw-on canister holding a charcoal filter—don’t wash the canister! The canister angled left, of  course, so your right cheek could rest on your rifle. The little coin shaped eye pieces, which could be unscrewed for cleaning, were quite small—not like ski goggles— so the mask could be folded in half, and so the lenses would be less likely to crack in battle. 

The big drawback of wearing an airtight rubber mask around your face, besides the discomfort of sweat running down, was the lenses could fog up. And so we would be issued anti-dim to rub on them—try not to put on too much or too little! 

As a lad I was, to quote an old South African army recruiting poster, “a man among men.” It was queer to see us wearing modern synthetic clothing, but with masks still as prone to fogging as they were back when our grandfathers were standing in the trenches watching folks in triplanes droning overhead. I served while folks above us in fighter jets were wearing oxygen masks of the orinasal (mouth nose) type.

Some years later I was in college, playfully remarking to my outdoor pursuits teacher: “I wish I could spend my summer doing high altitude mountaineering. Like on Everest. Because then I could come back to school without any suntan around my mouth and nose.” As he started to proudly agree mountaineering was really cool I continued, “so people could think I was a jet fighter pilot.”

Short seasons after enlisting I was issued an improved gas mask that delighted me. After decades of innocent soldiers suffering, some engineer had at last come up with a new design. Inside the big mask was now an inner orinasal mask. When you exhaled a one-way valve directed your cloudy breath, confined within the orinasal, to the outside. Sparing your lenses from your breath, but not from your sweat. 

But wait, it gets better: A different one-way valve allowed fresh air, through the canister on the left, into the outer mask. The fresh cold air came up and over the orinasal, behind the eye pieces, then back down to the right and finally into the orinasal via a one-way valve. 

In other words, we were no longer issued anti-dim. Just by breathing we were cooling and defogging our lenses. Shameless pun: How cool is that?

I am delighted at how history teaches us to stay hopeful: Surely more design surprises are to come.

…

…

Sean Crawford, deeply respecting anyone brave enough to comment,

In sight of the snow capped Rocky Mountains,

November 2020

~Scott blogged about “my new design hero,” a person of colour who grew up in the 1940’s in a U.S. racist state. …

~Here’s a transcript and podcast interview of Scott Berkun regarding his design book.