The Modern Can Opener Turns 100

It's difficult to believe, but the modern can opener is only 100 years old. As Bill Bryson details in his excellent book, At Home:

... early cans, made of wrought iron, were heavy and practically impossible to get into. One brand bore instructions to open them with a hammer and chisel. Soldiers usually attacked them with bayonets or fired bullets into them.

Lighter materials led to mass production. In the early 1800s, one man could produce 60 cans a day. By 1880, a machine could produce 1,500. But the can opener we use today was still nowhere to be found:

Surprisingly, getting them open remained a serious impediment much longer. Various cutting devices were patented, but all were difficult to use or nearly lethal if they slipped. The safe, modern manual can opener—the sort with two rolling wheels and a twisting key—dates only from 1925.

Bicycles had a similarly slow evolution. The "running machine", invented in 1817, had a seat between two wheels with front-steering. But it was propelled by pushing one's feet against the ground. It took almost 50 more years until pedals appeared on penny-farthing bicycles in 1866. And it took almost another 20 years until the modern bike arrived. Author Vaclav Smil describes:

It wasn't until 1885 that two British inventors, John Kemp Starley and William Sutton, began to offer their Rover safety bicycles with equally sized wheels, direct steering, a chain and sprocket drive, and a tubular steel frame. Although it was not quite yet in the classic diamond shape, it was a truly modern bicycle design, ready for mass-adoption.

The path of innovation is strange. Steam engines (1765), locomotives (1829), and electricity (1882) are older than the modern bicycle. We had automobiles (1886), radio transmission (1897), and airplanes (1903) before the modern can opener.

What as-of-yet unknown mechanical device will bewilder future historians for its notable absence in our own time?

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