Peter Sinclair: Man, the cleverest monkey

By PETER SINCLAIR

If you weren't lucky enough to make the quirky Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies a few weeks ago, you can at least visit a photo-archive of the event and marvel at the gadgets showcased at www.juergenspecht.com.

There is no explanatory text and their function can in many cases be only vaguely guessed at, but whatever they do you will certainly look snazzy doing it.

Man, the cleverest monkey, continues to give his ingenuity free rein in the new millennium. A laser lawnmower has been causing a sensation at German garden shows.

Garden-equipment maker Wolf-Garten (and I hope you speak German) has built a prototype machine fitted with an array of four lasers which cuts grass with Prussian precision to an accuracy of 1mm.

Powerful lasers evaporate water from the grass and then chop the dried residue into tiny particles. A stream of air blends the cuttings with fertiliser before depositing the mixture back on to the lawn as mulch.

Oh yes ... the mower also includes mobile internet access and a CD player to entertain you as you cut the lawn. Why didn't we think of it years ago?

The British Library recently published its own list of the top 100 breakthroughs of the past 100 years, Inventing the 20th Century — "from bar-codes to ballpoints, vacuum-cleaners to Viagra — curated by Stephen Van Dulken of the library's patents information service.

Many of these inventions changed the world — or at the very least, tweaked it slightly. Others radically changed the way we live.

"Imagine your average day without television, vacuum-cleaners, photocopiers and your personal stereo. All of these devices were invented in the past 100 years and have since transformed our daily lives," he writes.

The zip fastener (originally a "hookless fastener"), the Post-it note, nylon, Velcro, Scrabble, Tupperware, Formica, Teflon, and the list goes on.

The author of many books on the history of patents, van Dulken made a highly eclectic choice of 10 discoveries as the most significant of the 20th century.

His subjective selection: snowboard, DNA fingerprinting, waterbed, microchip, supermarket, microwave oven, wave energy, programmable materials, sailboard, Workmate. You can't help wondering if he meant the handyman's friend, Black and Decker's Workmate or the ActiveX software of the same name.

Whichever, that was then. This is now, as we surge towards the future with undiminished appetite for the new, busier than ever making sci-fi dreams come true.

At CEATEC 2000, telecommunications giant NTT DoCoMo, makers of iMode, the hugely successful Japanese version of WAP, demonstrated a prototype hybrid somewhere between a phone and a computer which is worn on the wrist — are you there, Dick Tracey? — and works by using your hand as a receiver.

It is a new concept of the "wearable terminal," which incorporates a sound-transmission method through bone as you speak into a small microphone installed on the back of the wristband.

You've spotted, I take it, the sheer beauty, the sublime functionality, of this concept? The gadget can be controlled (with commands like "connect" and "disconnect") just by snapping your fingers.

And when it rings, you answer it by simply, yes, sticking your finger in your ear ...

Links:

Exhibition of Advanced Technology

www.juergenspecht.com

Wolf Garten

British Library

Black and Decker Workmate

ActiveX Workmate

NTT DoCoMo

E-mail: petersinclair@email.com