By BBG Staff
Perfection? Some gadgets are already perfect. They don't need further technological advancement. They're pure. If you change one thing about them significantly, you make them worse. You change their nature entirely. When someone finally comes up with a significant improvement to a pure gadget's tech, it will cease to be: it becomes something else. We're calling these gadgets "perfectly pure" and here's ten of them, for the passive absorbption into your cerebral membranes.
The Wristwatch
From the automaton-makers of Rhodes to the battery-powered blinkenlights of a crazy Tokyoflash timepiece, we've always loved machines that work to a schedule. Strip out the modern fad for electronics, however, and the basic workings of the not-so-humble wristwatch haven't changed an awful lot since the mechanism was miniaturized about a century ago. Permitting pocket watches — and a lot of genuine advances in accuracy — and we can look back as far as the 16th century.
In an uncharacteristic flourish, even Wikipedia's army of officious tone-editors allows its entry on the matter to note our enduring love for the wristwatch's "old world craftsmanship." For the rest of us, however, this is a mere a prelude to its introduction to another world—one of escapement mechanisms, differential gears, and other cogporn—that we know we'll love to revisit even when we all have personal atomic clocks embedded in our marrow.
For millennia, the cloddish neanderthal method of toast production reigned haute cuisine — much like a gazelle's torso or the scooped out brainmeats of a blood enemy, toast was best prepared by lancing it with a skewer and holding it over an open flame. There were, of course, sophistications: silver-coated cages used to dangle, to toast unevenly. But it wasn't until the 20th century that the toaster perfected itself, transforming from a helpful kitchen accessory into a nearly Platonic form: the pure mechanical interpretation of the verb to toast.
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