What’s Your Favorite Modern Invention?

[EDITORIAL NOTE: If you have written any blog posts on political issues this week, be sure to get links to me by Friday for the Sunday Election Issues post. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, see this post.]

When I was a little girl, we had a ringer washing machine, no dryer and no vacuum cleaner. The one electrical appliance in the kitchen was a toaster (the refrigerator was an ice box), and if you don’t count books, the only store-bought, family entertainment were a radio, a phonograph and board games.

We’ve come a long way since then. A glance around just my desk yields a cordless VOIP phone, a cell phone, a digital camera, the laptop, external speakers, a cable modem, a shredder, an external hard drive, a printer/scanner/copier, a cordless mouse, a radio and a router.

I thought I didn’t have many kitchen gadgets, but a quick survey turns up two kinds of hand mixers, a microwave, a toaster, a juicer, a blender, an electric tea kettle, coffee grinder, a mini-Cuisinart and a refrigerator that dispenses water or ice at the touch of a button. A rice cooker is on order.

There are also an extra computer in the guest room, hair dryer, the washer and dryer in the laundry room, vacuum cleaner, electric drill, a couple of battery-run clocks, not to mention kitchen and bedroom TVs and a DVD player, all with their remote controls. Somewhere in a drawer are a transistor radio (for blackouts) and an old cassette player.

With the exception of the plug-in radio and toaster, most of these things didn’t exist (or only in primitive form) in the early 1940s. Some of Time Goes By’s oldest-old readers might remember the days before indoor plumbing when the outhouse was a mad dash in the coldest weather.

In fact, well into the late 1940s when toilets were common except, perhaps, in some rural areas, my adopted grandmother still supplied a thundermug under the bed when I stayed with her so if nature called during the night, I didn’t need to make the trip downstairs to the bathroom.

Most of us have probably come to think of all the handy appliances created during our lifetimes as essential. So annoying was boiling coffee water in a pan on the stove that I was out the door as soon as the stores opened when my electric tea kettle died one day after nearly ten years.

That tea kettle is one of my small pleasures. I couldn’t tell you why a non-electric one on the stove wouldn’t serve my needs equally well; it just doesn’t. But there is another invention that, for me, shines above all, the star in the realm of modern conveniences, the one I would never again want to live without. If necessary, I’d give up the electric tea kettle for the battery-operated toothbrush.

It was two decades or more ago that my dentist suggested an electric toothbrush that at the time was a minor miracle. Not only did my teeth feel as clean as if I'd just seen the dentist, there was also no need for a glass to store it or a hanging holder to get icky from dried-out toothpaste.

But it was also a pain in the butt with the cord that seemed always to be tangled and way too easy to accidentally pull the little stand off a shelf.

I wondered, in those days, why someone didn’t invent a battery toothbrush and then one day a few years ago, there they were in the drugstore. No fanfare, no advertising at first, just fat-handled, battery toothbrushes mixed in with the hand-operated kind. I grabbed that sucker as fast as my fingers would move and rushed home to brush my teeth. I was thrilled.

And I still am. I’d like to kiss the anonymous engineer who designed it. Of all the inventions during my 67 years, many of which make chores easier and save a lot of time, the battery toothbrush is number one.

What about you? Is there a particular invention, new in your lifetime, that makes your life better than you'd ever imagined or pleases you as much as my battery toothbrush pleases me?

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Ken Mitchell explains the wonder of The Grip.]