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Home Series Everyday Things With Strange Origins
Most of the ordinary things around us began as something else. Bubble wrap was meant to be wallpaper. The first jigsaw puzzle was a map for teaching geography. The word robot was born in a Czech play, and tea left China by two roads. This collection follows the surprising beginnings of objects and words you use every day.
Every story here is documented — by patents, museums, archives and dictionaries — and each article lists its sources. New origin stories join the collection as they are published.
Part 1
Fact-based How It Started
Long before there were puzzles of kittens and lighthouses, a London mapmaker glued a map of Europe onto a thin wooden board and cut it up so that children could learn where every country went.
Part 2
Fact-based How It Started
Two inventors sealed a pair of plastic shower curtains together in 1957 hoping to make stylish textured wallpaper, and it took them years and a computer to find out what they had really made.
Part 3
Fact-based How It Started
That little pocket tucked inside the front pocket of your jeans is older than phones, earbuds and even wristwatches: it was made to carry a pocket watch.
Part 4
Fact-based How It Started
Before it was squashed into dinosaurs and pretend pizzas, the world's favourite modelling dough was sold for rubbing soot off wallpaper.
Part 5
Fact-based How It Started
The first one was a pair of wooden folding chairs on wheels with a basket on top, and shoppers refused to push it so firmly that the shop had to hire people to demonstrate.
Part 6
Fact-based How It Started
A chemist trying to make a super-strong glue made a very weak one instead, and it took a choir singer with runaway bookmarks to work out what it was for.
Part 7
Fact-based Nature Did It First
The long flippers of a humpback whale are lined with knobbly bumps along the front edge, and when scientists tested them in a wind tunnel, the bumps turned out to be worth copying on fans and turbines.
Part 8
Fact-based Word Journeys
English and Spanish say tea and té, Russian says chai, and all three are the same Chinese word, split in two by whether it travelled west on a ship or on the back of a camel.
Part 9
Fact-based Word Journeys
Robot, the Russian robot and the Spanish robot all come from a single stage play written in Prague in 1920, where a writer's brother suggested an old Czech word for hard, dull work.
Part 10
Fact-based Weird Facts
The word you use for hurry up is also a genuine technical term, and depending on who is using it, a jiffy lasts anything from a fiftieth of a second to a few trillionths of one.
Part 11
Fact-based Weird Facts
The dot over a lowercase i or j has its own name, it began as a handwriting helper in medieval manuscripts, and it may be hiding inside the phrase to a T.
Part 12
Fact-based Weird Facts
Other countries picked eagles, bears and lions, and Scotland chose a creature nobody has ever seen, then kept it in golden chains just to be on the safe side.