I was thinking the other day…. you know, there was a time in the history of the Universe when Gadgets simply didn’t exist.
I mean really, unless you consider the Universe itself a gadget, the first 99% of our Universe’s history was gadgetless. Then, you start getting these cool little biological gadgets. I would say that the first true gadgets to appear in history were the ones associated with the first organisms. Gadgets for reproduction. Gadgets for motility. Gadgets for energy retrieval.
Once evolution kicked into gear, new biological gadgets appeared. Flying gadgets, swimming gadgets, defense gadgets.
But it wasn’t until humans came around that we really started getting technological gadgets. I suppose that the first human gadgets were the ones used for hunting and fighting. Piercing devices. Not sure if you’d really call those gadgets, since they were so simple. Fire…now that’s a gadget that we discovered…but a pretty damned cool gadget.
Things started to really take off when humans learned how to mechanize the world. Gadgets to farm. Gadgets to track the number of sunlit hours during a day. Gadgets for faster transportation. Gadgets to travel on water….and collect fish.
Then we got gadgets to reproduce books and gadgets to precisely track the time. Gadgets to automate mundane tasks and do things better than humans could alone.
And today we live in a world of gadgets. Gadgets to cool our homes and entertain our evenings. Gadgets to challenge our minds and take a load off our feet. Gadgets to speed up our days and make them more productive. Gadgets to make us wealthy, while we sleep at night.
The history of gadgets…how, oh how, did we get this wonderful world of gadgets. And boy am I glad to live in such a world.
