Gottleib Daimler was born today in 1834. He was one of the many pioneers of the motor car and aren't we all grateful that cars were named after their inventors' surnames rather than Christian names, otherwise we'd have had, along with the fabulous Gottleibs, Henrys, Charleses, Karls, Andre-Gustaves and Edsels ... oh, wait a minute, there really was an Edsel.
You take my point.
In other news ...
It's one of those irritating pub quiz questions; who invented the elastic band? The answer is Stephen Perry, who was born today in 1845. One wonders why he did it. I'd like to think it was to twang bits of screwed up paper around a classroom to annoy his teachers, but it couldn't have been because, looking at his dates, one of them would have (quite rightly) beaten him to death.
