Which everyday item’s design was perfected earliest? It struck me while eating dinner last night that the fork has been around for hundreds – if not thousands – of years, yet its design has changed relatively little. Walter Ventnor, Portsmouth
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Readers reply
Not the fork but the spoon – another utensil that has not been changed for very many centuries. Geoff Pollock
Forks? Oh dear. Chopsticks have been reliably dated back three millennia, and they’ve barely changed in all that time. Kenneth Quek
Forks are probably not the best example. Forks have existed for a long time, but mostly as cooking utensils. The use of the table fork seems to date to about fourth-century Rome. The number of tines and the size varied dramatically. In the Middle East, Wikipedia says, they became common in the 10th century and they didn’t really catch on in Europe till the 11th century, in Italy, when I think they mostly still had two tines. In the UK, it only became normal to eat with a fork in the 18th century. During the period before this, forks still varied dramatically in size and number of tines. During the 19th century, it was possible to find forks with anything from two to five tines. Even now, services from the 60s will sometimes have three. castaneasativa
Hammerstones – in modern terms, hammers – go back millions of years. These were used in turn to make sharpened, flaked or knapped stones for cutting, or what today we’d call knives. These are likely the first everyday tools still in widespread use today, although using vines and grasses to bind is also thought to be ancient.
The bowl. Earthenware was discovered about 30,000 years ago and even then fashioned into rounded containers to eat from. It’s still in very common use in the same form. SRW647
The riff from Louie Louie? EddieChorepost
And the FBI still haven’t worked out what the words mean. unclestinky
I’m rolling with the wheel. As useful and versatile as it ever was, and perhaps one of the few things that surviving humans will be able to make for themselves, albeit reverting to Flintstone style, when civilisation ends … Clare Hopkins
The axle. Without the axle, the wheel would have been nothing but a coffee table. TazTarr
Even before the wheel was invented, our ancestors must have had invented “roads”. I’ve put roads in inverted commas because I don’t believe proper roads were invented before the wheel. But some idea of a road – perhaps a towpath or a well-trodden footpath – must have preceded the invention of the wheel. GreenTwilek
My candidate would be string or rope, no matter how it is made or the material of which it is made. Could be sliced hide or leather; twisted and spun plant material; sinew or gut from an animal; vines of plants or any woven plant material. It is only a short step once one has string to invent a myriad of devices and even machines. S Anon
The brick. BeanheadMcGinty
The brick wouldn’t have taken them long to discover; when it comes to perfecting a design, the shape and rough dimensions are governed by the human hand. It has to be able to be picked up by one hand without causing undue fatigue – that is to say overspanning the fingers. The other hand, of course, is occupied with a trowel to spread mortar and “butter” each brick, forming the perpendicular joints. The trowel itself hasn’t changed much, either. I’ve no idea if it’s still there, but there was a Roman one in the Science Museum in London that was very similar in shape and size to the worn-down London pattern WHS, which I used for facework. bricklayersoption
The bicycle is essentially the same double-triangle frame, crank drivetrain and steering it has been since the “safety bicycle” was invented in the 1800s. barryroubaix
Surely the hair comb has to be a contender? benangwin
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