Nature's Inventions

It’s in Nature’s Nature to be Natural: Inventions of the Wild By Professor Donald A. Rich, Sr. In 1898, a U.S. Patent Commissioner idiotically asserted that everything that was going to be invented, had already been invented and that there would be no more inventions. When Mount Saint Helen’s erupted in 1980, if he hadn’t been long dead, the lava splashing on his face would have been like a metaphor about getting egg on your face because nature pulled a fast one on him: it invented Mount Saint Helens, which then erupted. Nature: 1, Late Patent Commissioner: 0. Now that 110 years of invention have passed since his foolish statement, giving us many new inventions like cameras, windshield wipers and no-wrinkle cotton shirts, we can say with confidence what that patent commissioner could not: everything that was going to be invented, already has been – at least by man. But there is no Patent Commission for what is really man’s best friend: the natural world of nature. Let’s take a look at some of nature’s most intriguing – and sometimes unexplained – inventions:

	The Jack O’ Lantern While the large, orange gourd-like pumpkins have been around since Indians showed them to the clothed civilized people who landed on the shores of the New World, how nature constructs and disseminates the pumpkin’s sinister cousin is unexplained. Every October, one can take a stroll around the neighborhood and see the spooky faces of the Jack O’ Lantern staring back at them from nearly every doorstep, their vile innards glowing brightly. They resemble a human head, with eyes, a nose and mouth, which usually come to points, instead of rounded like a real person’s features. How nature knows what we look like, how it reproduces the image and how it sets itself ablaze like a giant lightening bug – these have always been and continue to be a mystery, even to the Indians. Perhaps this explains why those brown savages died off or moved to a Dakota.
	Flight While many so-called “historians” credit Orville Wilber Wright for inventing flight in North Carolina, this is not the case. He was simply mimicking what nature had already taken care of; it was birds who first invented flight hundreds of years ago. Airplanes are simply copying it. Look it up.
	Swimming Pools The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans – like Lake Michigan and the Dead Sea – have been around at least as long as fish. But no one can explain the phenomenon of the swimming pool. The pond or lake-like natural features appear only in upper-middle class and wealthy neighborhoods but unlike ponds, are crystal clear, have natural filtration systems and smooth bottoms. Their occurrence gives rise to that age-old question: which came first, the large house, or the swimming pool? It is believed that fashionable homes sprouted up around neatly-arranged swimming pool fields, meaning there could be millions still out there in the unexplored tundra of Siberia or wastelands like the desert. Only nature’s all-seeing eye knows for sure. And probably birds.
	WTF, Germans? Did you know that the Germans don’t even have a word for "nature"? That’s what being industrialists will get you.
	Paint Walls, houses and artworks don’t just appear that way when they are bought or made into art. If you thought that, you are wrong. In fact, nature had to invent paint so that people could make those objects look that way. Like bottling water from a spring, people must go to the farthest reaches of the world to locate, bottle and transport paint so the Monets of the world can apply it to a canvas. The location of these colored springs is a closely guarded secret; a quick canvass1 of Home Depots and paint stores revealed only perplexed clerks unable – or unwilling – to tell this top academic where the paint geysers are located, though one guessed Yonkers.
	Insurance You are a massive, multi-national corporation. Some sad-sack stumbles on your chemicals and tries to sue you for everything you are worth. He wins and you have to pay up, right? Wrong. Nature, perhaps anticipating the waves of frivolous lawsuits that clog our court system2 went ahead and invented insurance, which was discovered in the 1950s in Hartford, Conn., the insurance capital of Connecticut. It has been paying dividends ever since, like a ripe coconut nourishing stranded island people who would ordinarily be sucked dry by overly litigious island neighbors. Were it not for naturally-occurring insurance, not only would a major New England economy be up a creek, but people would be too afraid to drive.
	Kissing "Frankly Scarlett, I don’t give a damn…about your lips." The line isn't as effective, is it? Why? Because nature thoughtfully fulfilled a deep human need and invented kissing – one human pressing their lips onto the lips of another person to express lust, sorrow or just as a very forward greeting. Most Lustorians (Historians of Lust) pinpoint the invention of the romantic (even if unwanted) lip-lock around the time John Maynard Keynes was filming "Birth of a Nation." It is lucky for Hollywood and Rhett Butler that this naturally-occurring embrace originated around the time movies were invented. Had it not been, Casablanca would have been a flop and people would talk more during sex.

 

¹Not a pun.

²Also an invention of nature!