Appreciate Your Local Mad Scientist
Topic: Technology
There's so many machines. So very, very many. And we never think about them. But nearly every item in your home, from the flooring to your ceiling fan, has to have had at least one of its components mass-produced. And someone needed to invent a machine to do it.
Someone invented a machine to roll toilet paper onto the roll and then glue the end sheet in place.
Someone invented a machine to screw caps onto bottles.
Someone invented a machine to mass-produce electronics components.
Someone invented a machine to wrap saltines in sleeves, and then stuff four of those filled sleeves into a box.
Someone invented a machine to make the box.

Submarine sailors have a legend about a certain piece of equipment on board their ship which nobody really understands how it works. According to Submariner Legend,* the inventor wasn't mad before he designed it, but went mad immediately after. By all accounts, the equipment should not function, but it does. And it can be mass-produced. True story. Because if it wasn't a true story, I wouldn't be able to tell it. Whether or not it's factual is completely up for grabs.

But the point is that there's people out there... oh, call them mad scientists, deranged technologists, or, in extreme cases, engineers, that design machines that make our day to day lives possible. Someone invented a mass-produced method of cooking, canning, and packaging chicken noodle soup. That couldn't have been easy.

And yet, these heroes of our society go unsung. Oh, granted, they put a lot of that onto themselves. They have press conferences that go along these lines:
Inventor: "I have developed a device that will revolutionize our society, and make possible our wildest dreams, at almost no cost! All our energy and natural resource worries are over!"
Reporter: "Why are you wearing hip-waders and swim-fins?"
Inventor: "I fail to see how that is relevant to this press conference."

But in large part, the marvels of machinery they construct are simply out of sight, and therefore out of mind. I recently received a unique gift from my daughter... it's a toy lobster with a body made from a plastic slinky. The entire thing is covered in velveteen, including the plastic slinky. Someone made a machine to mass produce that.

And I know a lot of you are thinking "Yeah... sweat shops. Brilliant invention." I'm not talking about that kind of assembly. I'm talking about the machines that put the bottle caps on our bottles of beer. The machines that mass-produce windshields in the exact shape and size needed for a specific make and model of car. Machines that assemble replacement windshield wiper blades. Machines that mass-produce screwdrivers, flash-lights, light bulbs, lamps, wall-sockets, combs, hair brushes... things that can't be made by hand.

Someone invented a machine to do all those things. And they deserve recognition, and congratulations.

Thanks, all you mad scientists. And congratulations.

*which is as reliable as any other kind of legend... that is, it's not.