By Keith McDowell
Let’s see, should I go straight to the knife and dig away in
the bottle like some country bumpkin, or should I turn the bottle over on its
lid on the table and await the inevitable effect of gravity? I could display a
Type A personality by pounding on the heel of the bottle, or better, a Type B
by tilting and gently tapping on the neck while engaging my dinner partner in
scintillating conversation, sure to last for several minutes. But then who has
ketchup with French cuisine? Julia Child would be appalled.
Fortunately, such acts of feigned sophistication designed to
cloak abject frustration may soon become a thing of the past; that is, if we
believe the engineers at MIT. Of course, seeing is believing and like most of
you over the Memorial Day weekend, I chowed down on my ketchup-coated hot dog
and watched with fascination the endlessly repeated video-clip of ketchup
sliding effortlessly from the ketchup bottle. Dear God, I thought. It’s the end
of an era as I munched away and hummed Paul Simon’s tune Slip Slidin’ Away.
It’s called LiquiGlide.
Designed by Dave Smith, an engineer in the MIT laboratory of the
Kripa
Varanasi Research Group, LiquiGlide is a revolutionary, super-slippery
coating likely to become a disruptive technology and innovation. And even
better, it’s FDA approved. Let’s hope it doesn’t slide away into oblivion like
the Facebook IPO.
LiquiGlide is by no means the first non-stick coating to be
invented. Do you remember Teflon? Teflon was
discovered accidentally in 1938 by Roy Plunkett while working at Kinetic
Chemicals. Subsequently in 1954, the French engineer Marc Grégoire used Teflon
to create a non-stick pan
that entered the US market in 1961 as “The
Happy Pan” – never “happy” for those husbands who stupidly used a metallic
spatula while burning their fried eggs when their wife was away. And have you
noticed that we are back to the French and food?
Of course, in the Twenty-first century we’ve moved past
simple Teflon-coated pans into the age of stoneware and Orgreenic
pans. If the television and Internet commercials are to be believed, you don’t
even need to spray them with PAM!
Shucks! I like my daily dose of synthetic grease, reputed to be olive oil. What
better way to tantalize my taste buds while clogging my arteries.
And for the mountaineers and extreme sports enthusiasts
among us, who can forget the flowdown technology from Teflon known as Gore-Tex. Even better, the
concept of “non-stick” or low-friction material has entered the world of
competitive swimming. Led in many ways by Lance Armstrong and his desire to
achieve every ounce of competitive advantage from both low technology – shaving
the hair off his body - and high technology – cycling in a wind tunnel, the
effects of friction on swimmers has led the swimsuit maker Speedo to invent flex
skin and FASTSKIN3 based on the nano-level structure of shark or fish skins.
Sadly, the jock-strap version of a Speedo swimsuit really should be outlawed
for wear by some men. Where are the sharks when you need them? And, as always,
rock and roll lyrics were there first as The
Cadillacs crooned:
Well now, they often call me
Speedo
‘Cause I don’t believe in
wastin’ time.
And for the less fortunate husbands among us whose wives
have bionic hearing, able to hear every squeaky wheel and door hinge within a
radius of one mile, we have WD-40, yet
another innovative product that ranks right there with squeeze-tube graphite.
Humor aside, friction and wear is a major and costly issue
for our modern society, whether to get the ketchup out of the bottle, reduce
the wear and tear on all forms of machinery, or permit gas-guzzling automobiles
to use less fuel as they push through the air and roll on the pavement. It has
been reported that
“The annual cost of friction and wear-related energy and material losses is
estimated to be over $700 billion - - 5% to 7% of the United States’ $14
trillion gross national product.” Banning friction and wear would be a great
GOP issue for the coming election … if only Mother Nature would cooperate!
Even the business world has taken note of “Saving
Energy by Fighting Friction”. Of course, they were mostly concerned with
“cheeks burning for a piddling payoff” after sucking on a straw to drink one’s
favorite milkshake. Hmm, wait a minute! What happens if we marry LiquiGlide to
straws? Folks, you heard this idea here first from me, but don’t blame the
messenger for the ease with which you consume those extra – but tasty –
calories.
Yikes! Now I’m hungry. It’s time to finish off those hot dog
buns for lunch before they grow stale. Darn, I’ll have to get that !&%#@ ketchup
out of the bottle!
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