TABLE TALK #162
History tends to remember the winners.
The lightbulb. The telephone. The internet. The things that “changed everything.”
But for every invention that reshaped the world, there are dozens that tried earnestly, ambitiously, sometimes hilariously, then slipped away.
This week’s Table Talk is for them. The conceptual wonders. The almosts. The beautifully strange ideas that didn’t quite make the cut, but are an ode to human creativity at its finest.
🍝 MAIN COURSE 🍝
Take the hay fever hat.
A perfectly serious attempt to protect the pollen-plagued among us, complete with a clear visor sealing off nose and eyes from airborne misery. Practical? In theory, absolutely. Socially seamless? Perhaps less so. They never quite swept the nation, but you have to admire the conviction.
Or the LED slippers, designed to illuminate your path on nocturnal journeys to the loo. A solution to the treacherous 3am toe-stub, delivered with the subtlety of a runway strip attached to your feet.
And then there were bed glasses, ingenious periscope-style spectacles from the 1930s that allowed you to read flat on your back without lifting your head. They looked faintly steampunk, and yet the logic was unimpeachable. Why strain your neck when mirrors will do the work?
Photo Credit: Nationaal Archief/Flickr
Elsewhere, invention turned its gaze to the streets.
Paris once installed more than a thousand open-air urinals - the elegantly named pissoirs - designed with a certain brisk efficiency. Not exactly subtle, but admirably committed to solving a problem. They became such a fixture that at one point you could barely stroll a boulevard without encountering one.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that the same city later unveiled the Cyclomer - an amphibious bicycle promising seamless transitions from road to river. The Cyclomer felt equal parts practical ambition and romantic fantasy. You can almost picture it: pedalling with intent toward the Seine, convinced that land and water were simply administrative distinctions.
Back in Blighty, solutions were no less imaginative. There was the rolling bench, created so that after rainfall you could simply rotate to a clean, dry surface rather than abandon the park altogether - an elegantly simple answer to a very British problem.
Back in Blighty, solutions were no less imaginative. There was the rolling bench, created so that after rainfall you could simply rotate to a clean, dry surface rather than abandon the park altogether - an elegantly simple answer to a very British problem.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
🍮 SWEET ENDINGS 🍮
It’s tempting to laugh at these inventions from the comfort of hindsight, but really they're proof of how entrepreneurial instinct endures.
Across decades and cities, people have looked at inconvenience and thought, there must be another way.
Not every idea survives. Most don’t. But the willingness to test them anyway, to risk looking a little ridiculous in pursuit of something better, is arguably the noblest part.
The hay fever hat may have vanished. The Cyclomer may never glide past you on the Thames. But the habit of tinkering and trying again - that has never gone out of fashion.
And thank goodness for that.
🍷 WHAT'S NEW
FROM
WEDNESDAY'S DOMAINE? 🍷
This week I’m in Spain, overseeing our next production run and spending time with the brilliant wine makers and collaborators who make everything possible.
It’s one of the most exhilarating parts of the job - and easily the most nerve-inducing. These blends are finely balanced, and honouring the flavour, ritual and craft of traditional wine while doing something new requires real precision. Big tanks. Big volumes. Big stakes.
There’s always a lot that can go wrong. But there’s also something deeply satisfying about being hands-on at this stage - watching the next chapter quite literally take shape.
Until next time,
Luke x
