Impolitic is the art of invention Analysis/Commentary Inventing the 20th Century, 100 Inventions That Shaped the World tells the short strange history of technological progress over the past hundred years. The book's author, Stephen Van Dulken, presents a terse catalog of gadgets and gizmos, illustrated with their original schematics. Oddly, many important inventions took a long time to gain currency, while others, intended for one purpose, turned out to serve another. Air conditioning, for example, patented in the United States for the purpose of controlling temperature and humidity, first served to cool cotton spindles in factories or to help speed macaroni cooling and drying. Only later did a/c go mainstream. Also consider the strange story of the ballpoint pen, patented in 1943: Lazlo Josef Biro, a Hungarian living in Argentina, wanted to create a permanent, resilient pen with fast-drying ink. His early models sold for a price comparable to that of a fountain pen. First attempts at mass production, however, encountered major problems: the ink skipped. Finally, in 1953, another entrepreneur, Baron Bic, introduced the disposable ballpoint in Europe and in 1954, the Parker Company, introduced a similar item in the U.S. Television was slow to reach prime time. Its mechanical version was invented by a Scot, John Logic Baird, in 1923, with Americans added important electronic enhancements during the '30s. England produced the first televised broadcasts in 1936 under the aegis of the BBC. The United States led the electronics revolution in 1948 with the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs. In 1959, Texas Instruments developed the microchip. Also in 1959, Fairchild Semiconductors created the integrated circuit. Almost stealthily, the first photocopier rolled its cylinders in 1938, but only gained wide use in 1958. The first Polaroid camera appeared in 1948, but sales didn't take off until the '60s. Dulken also chronicles the appearance of familiar but irrelevant elements of local color: the parking meter, the Monopoly set, the Mecano, and the Rubik's Cube. Missing are more important developments like the laptop, Palm Pilot, Walkman, CD-ROM, and DVD. Dulkin's book does mention neon lighting (patented in France in 1910), stainless steel (patented in England in 1915), bar codes (patented in the U.S. in 1949) and genetic fingerprinting (patented in England in 1984). All told, Inventing the 20th Century digs up enough patents to spice up several hours worth of reading, but doesn't always seem to have much of a plot. Who's responsible, for example, for the flush toilet that gurgles deep into the night? or that annoying little help munchkin in IBM and Microsoft software? Who? Sometimes the world could use a little better shaping. February 28, 2001