Picking the best inventions

Published 9:18 am Wednesday, July 23, 2025

By TJ Ray

Columnist

Someone asked me a while back what I wanted for my birthday.  My answer really surprised them:  a trip through the Toyota or Nissan plants. 

Not to see workers bolting things onto a frame or installing windshield wipers.  What I would like to do is walk down a long, long, long floor that had every single individual piece of a car lined up, from the smallest screw to the wire between the steering wheel control button and the computer memory chip that sets speed.

No need to wonder at my strange desires. I’ve always had a fascination for how things are built.  

The only way that a tour of an unassembled car could be improved would have been to have the person who made each part standing beside it. I should say “the persons” because most things require multiple hands.  

That smallest screw had to have a mold of some sort made by someone else for another person to inject metal into. And at the head of the line, of course, would have been the team standing by a drawing board or computer scratch pad that created the car’s very concept.

Well, you see where all this leads.  We live in a very multiplexed world that engages many, many folks in almost any production.  When we put our hand to a product, we don’t even think of the many hands that crafted it.  Even something as delicious as a piece of fried fish in a good restaurant.  Think quickly of the geography alone that the fish traveled from a far off body of ocean to a processing plant to the grocery store to your plate.  And without everyone in the chain of delivery doing his job, you would have missed that pleasure.

Thinking about the web of our lives, I tried to think of the thing I would most like to watch being made if some genie granted me a wish. My choice:  the toothpick.  A long time back a 15th-century wiseman counseled people about him: “Pick not thy teeth with thy knyfe, but take a stick, or some clean thyng, then doe you not offend.”  

Evidence exists that shows signs of Neanderthals picking their teeth.

The toothpick, that little smidgen of wood that we absently pick up as we pay for the fish we just ate.  We use and quickly discard it.  When I asked where the toothpicks were in a grocery store not long ago, I was directed to the pharmacy area.  The only things I could find there were elaborate electromechanical gadgets.  Took me several minutes of stalking up and down aisles to find a small box of plain wooden toothpicks:  750 for 99 cents.

Yes, I wondered as I took the box, whence came these tiny necessities.  Seems a fellow named Charles Foster up in Maine thought up a way to take very big birch or poplar trees and reduce them to smooth sticks to put in one’s mouth—and still make a profit.  But the process. . . .  Yes, the process got my attention.  

A logger goes into the woods and returns with the rawest material, usually birch.  Someone made a debarker that in two passes reduces the log to a smooth cylinder.  Another inventor figured out a way to take that smooth log and pass it through an unraveling machine, which strips the log like paper (1.06mm thick) using 12 blades.  

The results:  a billet (1.8 kilos) is removed by another set of hands and carried to a puncher (another inventor’s work), which cuts identical toothpick strips fairly quickly.  How quickly?  8,000 toothpicks per second.  Now that, Charlie Brown, is fast.  

The pick is almost ready for use, but before that happens it is hardened in a dryer for 12 hours and then polished with talcum powder and friction for another four hours.  Ready to use?  No.  The batch goes through a machine that discards broken ones, then gets sorted into a blower and conveyor that counts them at the rate of 747,500 per hour.

Okay, now you can get that shred of fish from between your molars.  I don’t need to go to science fiction movies to see wonders or smoke grass to experience fantastic scenes.  All I have to do is wonder “How many people put that together?”  Then realize that all folks who stand by that line of unassembled car parts, who have never met one another, together created something fantastic.  

P.S.:  And don’t forget those folks who dispose of the leftover fish, those guys who hang on the sides of sanitation trucks and dump garbage cans into the hopper.  Yes, they are quite as important as the cook who fixed your dinner.  You see, everyone who works in our world wears an invisible badge that proclaims:  I’m needed!