Look what ive just bought for £4.70 off ebay.
Its a 1970’s bottle cutter (or as they call it a “bottle chopper” – which sounds a little less sophisticated I think). I need to cut the end off some bottles for a project I’m working on (more of that another time) and I wasnt having much luck with some of the techniques I was trying – check out this site for some great, if not dangerous, bottle cutting techniques – http://mikegigi.com/bottle.htm#HOTWIRE. And so I did a search for for a bottle cutting tool that I seemed to remember from my Blue Peter watching days. They aren’t very common on ebay, but they do come up now and, then and after some aggressive 5 pence biddings with another bidder – I got it! And it works really well.
Now, look closely at the device…… its a few bits of 1/2″ x 1/8″ aluminum, a bunch of screws, wingnuts and washers, and a glaziers glass cutting tool. To be honest it looks a bit like a schoolboy GCSE project…. But heres the interesting thing; the one page instruction leaflet proudly states “As seen on BBC television’s Tomorrows World”. ‘Tomorrows World”!!?? Tomorows World was THE programme to watch for emerging science. Imagine; Is this suggesting that in the 70’s people thought that wing-nuts and bent aluminium bar was a vision of the future!
But perhaps I’m missing the point here. Perhaps the point was not that the tool was of interest, but the fact that it could facilitate the RE-USE of waste products. Perhaps Tomorrows World had been way ahead of it time and spotted that in the future we would be consumed by the desperate need to reuse and recycle in order to protect our environment and natural resources.
And so, now with the aid of my ‘precision tool’ from Yesterdays World, I shall from here on do my bit for the environment by making all my friends and family some lovely tumblers, candle-stick holders, vases and ashtrays
iWonder 