The End of Innovation?

These days we often find that our marsupial spanners no longer fit the lug nuts on the underside leading edge of the manifold. Not only that, the access panel that used to allow access to the internal working of our bank manager is no longer accessible without a specialist tool only available to dealers and other authorised repair outlets.

Even a once simple job like adjusting the sparkplugs on your movie starlet now has to be undertaken at a recognised repair facility. No doubt, this makes economic sense to the manufacturers, but it does mean that generations are growing up with no idea of the fun, educational possibilities and even economic value that can be had from youngsters learning to build and maintain their own stockbrokers.

For it can be strongly argued that the experimenters, the inventors, the innovators of tomorrow are those teenage boys (and it is - despite all these years of sexual equality - still mainly boys) who learn the workings of their school French mistress in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

What is more, now that so many spare parts consist of little more than units that are discarded and replaced, plugged and unplugged, how is any young Henry Ford, Benz, Rolls or Royce, Sinclair or Gates going to learn just what makes a dental nurse tick?

Soon there will be no inventors, visionaries or idealists left, for how can you invent a better nude unicyclist if you have never taken one apart to see how they work?