Ode to inventions that changed their purpose

Disclaimer. The editorial staff of The Global Technology Magazine reverently respects all inventions and is equally reverent to those who created them. This article is a reminder that every inventor wants to make people’s lives better, but sometimes people don’t use their inventions the way the inventors would like them to.

‘What the heck is this!’ said a balding gentleman with anger in his voice and raised the collar of his gray coat. ‘We live in the 21st century, navigators receive signals from space, cars are controlled by autopilot, to which experienced Martians show the right way! The highest level of technology! Not at all! I’ve managed to get lost in this hole after all!’

The gentleman stopped and looked around. He found himself all alone in an unfamiliar city, where his work brought him. In the daytime the city looked like an ordinary provincial settlement with dusty roads and not very presentable facades of buildings. But as soon as evening came, the people of the city seemed to hide somewhere or “went crazy,” as a passerby, whom the gentleman mistook for Oprah Winfrey, accurately noted. 

The gentleman managed to drink a cup of cold coffee at a local diner, got his feet wet, and missed his bus. In addition, a strong wind began to blow, it began to attack the remaining lights with particular fury, causing an unpleasant metallic scraping sound all over the street. 

On a normal day, the gentleman would have paid attention and perhaps even listened to the disgusting, ear-splitting sounds, but not now. Now he needed to find a hotel to take a hot shower and feel like a prisoner of provincial comfort for a while. But the hotel didn’t want to catch his eye. 

‘Aliens, artificial intelligence, microorganisms, yeah. Why can’t they calm down, why do they keep inventing something?’ muttered the Gentleman arguing with the wind, wrapping himself in a prickly collar and stubbornly moving forward. ‘If I come across another house that will be a twin of the previous one, I swear I’ll make such a complaint against those inventors and this whole damn town that they’ll be in trouble!’

The gentleman, without breaking stride, envisioned the city’s municipal office and waved his hand in the air at them.

‘H.O.T.E.L, hello! I need a hotel! Is it really so much to ask?’

The Gentleman stopped again and looked at a wobbly street lamp. There was a grinding sound, the lantern tilted, the bulb of the lantern burst, releasing millions of transparent shards into the darkness. Neighboring lanterns rumbled, and a jerky crackle ran through the wires connecting them – it got dark outside. 

‘Perfect!’ the Gentleman splashed his hands in despair and swore. ‘This is the last thing we need now!’ 

He slammed his eyes frantically, trying to get used to the darkness, and began to pat his pockets with all his might. Having found a saving telephone in his pocket, the Gentleman rejoiced – now he would not be able to find his way! But the wind, as if reading his thoughts, began to push the Gentleman in the back with all its might, ordering him to go forward. 

The man tried to resist the wind for a few minutes, but his legs, unable to withstand the pressure of the elements, involuntarily carried him further down the street. 

The man tried unsuccessfully to dodge the thorny branches that were trying to hit him on the head and bent down diligently as the wind carried piles of garbage and pieces of slate torn from roofs past him. Leaves thrown by the wind from the trees flew straight into the Gentleman’s face, and one, especially dodgy leaf managed to get even behind the coat’s scruff, from which the Gentleman jumped as if he was stung.

‘What on earth is this!’ he shouted, pulling out a naughty leaf from behind his coat collar and getting another portion of wind in his face. ‘When will it all stop! Wait a minute…..’


The gentleman threw the leaf away and exhaled slowly. A brightly colored “Hotel” sign was right in front of his face. The gentleman closed and opened his eyes several times to make sure the sign was real, but after all the manipulations, the sign remained hanging in its place. 

The Gentleman took a few steps forward and saw the figure of a short man wearing glasses. The figure, without paying any attention to the Gentleman, stood still for a few moments, looked at the ceiling, scratched thoughtfully at the  back of his head and immediately vanished into thin air. 

While the gentleman was trying to realize what he had seen, another figure approached him from behind and looked at him from head to toe and asked him a question, ‘Is it true that electricity in an instant transformed the world of things into a gigantic quivering nerve spread over a hundred kilometers?’

The gentleman flinched and muttered timidly, ‘What? what nerve? Are you talking to me?’

The figure, without waiting for an answer, immediately vanished. 

The Gentleman shrugged his shoulders and headed toward the silver capsule, where he hoped to see a hotel reception desk or a store counter or at least someone who could sell him hot soup and put him in a room with a comfortable bed.   

While the Gentleman was moving towards the capsule, he was blocked every now and then by silhouettes of people who appeared in front of him and gnawed a pencil thoughtfully. Someone came down from above and waved to the man, someone stood still and wrote something in a notebook very quickly. But as soon as the Gentleman came closer to the figures, they immediately burst like a soap bubble.  

‘Everybody’s gone crazy, everybody’s gone crazy,’ the Gentleman mumbled unhappily, seeing another figure bursting. 

‘What can I do for you?’ a woman’s voice sounded from somewhere above.

The gentleman looked up and saw a small, gaunt old woman dressed in a school uniform. 

‘So what can I do for you, Sir?’ the old woman repeated her question with a sweet smile. 

‘Won’t you disappear? Are you real?’ the gentleman asked the first thing that came to his mind, but immediately hesitated, thinking that he was acting like a child. Remembering that he was still a respectable man, the gentleman coughed and continued, ‘Hello miss, I would like to get a hotel room and something to eat, like soup, please.’

The old lady smiled even wider and handed the Gentleman a form.

‘We will give you any room on the second floor and we can even give you the whole second floor, please fill it out.’

The gentleman took the sheet in his hands and began to look around the reception desk for a pen as a figure immediately appeared in front of him with a piece of parchment and a writing pen. As soon as the man reached for the pen, the figure disappeared. Tired of all these disappearing tricks, the gentleman crumpled up the hotel letterhead and threw it like a pitcher hoping to hit the vanished figure, but he missed and the ruined letterhead landed right under the old lady’s feet.

Paying no attention to this, the old lady continued, ‘You can use our store and take all the things you like from there….’

‘Great! I have dollars,’ the Gentleman interrupted the flow of formal politeness impatiently. ‘Let’s hurry up!’

 The old woman smiled again, ‘Oh no, no, we don’t accept dollars. Everything we have in the store will be covered with a cloche, but if you guess what’s under it, you take the contents with you for free.’

The gentleman, thinking that he was participating in the “Punk’d” show, looked carefully at the old lady wearing the school uniform.

‘You have an interesting service,’ he said disapprovingly. ‘I can’t understand whether I should be happy about this generosity or, on the contrary, get out of here as soon as possible.’

But looking at the way the wrinkles on the old woman’s face smoothed out while she smiled, and realizing that he had no strength to challenge the rules of raffles or anything else, the Gentleman agreed.

‘But is there soup in there at least?’
‘There is,’ the old lady replied cheerfully. ‘Please follow me.’

The gentleman followed the old woman up one of the spiral staircases. After taking a couple of steps down the stairs, the Gentleman looked down just in case, to memorize the way back, but to his amazement he didn’t find any other stairs down or the capsule where he met his escort, he didn’t even see the floor. Everything had evaporated just as the figures had vanished in an utterly unfathomable manner. If thoughts could have raced against each other, they would certainly have made a race in the man’s mind, so fast were they changing, but the old woman stepped forward steadily, and the Gentleman reluctantly obeyed her.

At last the old woman stopped and clapped her hands twice. A door opened in front of her, behind which there was a completely different room.

The whole room was decorated with red cloth, and right in the middle there was a huge table with various dishes covered with a cloche. No matter how the gentleman tried to estimate by sight the size of the table, he could not understand where the beginning and where the end were, they were simply not visible. But despite all the beauty and tantalizing covered dishes, the man wanted to finish this pointless quest as soon as possible. He tore his gaze away from the table and stared humbly at the old woman. 

‘So,’ the old lady said in an affectionate voice to the astonished Gentleman, ‘What would you like to start with?’

The gentleman hesitated, but his hungry stomach immediately ordered him to think faster.

‘I’d like to open dish number three!’ commanded the man at random. 

The old woman approached the dish, which was covered with a cloche with number 3 on it. 

‘Under the lid there is a substance that has been eaten in hopes of curing digestive ailments, inhaled for respiratory disorders, and rubbed into the skin in hopes of curing rashes and burns,’  the old woman recited resoundingly.

The gentleman looked at the cloche in surprise, but the iron dome gave him no clue.

‘It doesn’t look much like soup according to the description,’ the man quickly began to reason. ‘Hardly anyone would think of rubbing vegetable liquid into the skin, though….’

Hoping to read the correct course of his thoughts, he looked at the old woman wearing the school uniform, but she stood motionless and smiled sweetly.

‘There must be a plant on this dish,’ suggested the gentleman. ‘You can make soup out of the plant, and it can be used for medicinal purposes. Let’s say it’s spinach.’

‘So, what’s your answer?’ the old lady asked smilingly.

‘Spinach!’ answered the gentleman. ‘Open the cloche and give me these green leaves.’

The old woman smiled at the man again and lifted the lid with number 3 – there were no green leaves on the plate: there was a small pile of some gray substance, which, in addition, gave off an unpleasant smell. 

‘What’s this?’ the man exclaimed in bewilderment.

‘It is gunpowder,’ replied the old woman smiling.

‘Are you making a fool of me, miss?’ the gentleman asked threateningly. ‘Was gunpowder used for food and medicine? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but gunpowder was invented for other purposes. Bring me the spinach at once!’

‘That’s exactly what it’s for,’ said a long male voice with a strong oriental accent from across the table.

The gentleman turned in the direction of the sound and saw that the voice belonged to a short man with a long beard and an eye slit characteristic of East Asia.

‘I mixed sulfuric, wood and nitrate acids to make fertilizer and save the crops from rodents. Then I decided to compress and dry the mixture, and that’s how I got the powder,’ the short man began to tell the story, stroking his beard. ‘But the mixture was so effective that it was used for literally everything: as salt, as soda, and instead of disinfectants. And only later, when one of the rulers didn’t like the quality of the dishes with gunpowder and ordered to throw all the dishes into the fire, that’s when the new properties of gunpowder were discovered: there was an explosion, the kitchen was filled with acrid smoke. Gunpowder began to be used at festivals, when they wanted to organize fireworks, and only after several centuries, gunpowder got to weapons. Just think, a means of securing carrots and cabbages became a weapon of mass destruction.’

The gentleman looked in horror at the plate of explosives.

‘I told you, everyone’s gone crazy,’ he summarized, pushing the plate of gunpowder away from him to a safe distance. ‘How could they come up with eating explosives? By the way, if I am not mistaken, in India and Asia saltpeter is extracted from the soil itself, isn’t it?’

The gentleman approached the gray-bearded man to ask him his question in his ear, but he disappeared as suddenly as he had appeared, leaving behind a memory in the form of a long gray hair from his beard and a round seal on which there was written: “Scientist Li Tang”.

The old lady approached cloche number 17.

‘Means for keeping balance in a battle,’ she read it as she approached the lid. 

‘It’s getting more and more interesting,’ the man said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. ‘It’s probably not gunpowder, and it’s probably not soup.’ 

The old woman smiled enigmatically. 

‘Since we are talking about balance, it is logical to assume that there are motion sickness pills under the cloche. Although, I don’t know why I need them, and why I need all this at all.’ The gentleman tapped on the iron lid, ‘Take off the cloche!’


The old woman straightened the folds on her school skirt and smilingly fulfilled the man’s request: leather women’s shoes with thin stilettos were on the dish, glittering in the rays of the crystal chandelier.

‘Weeeeeeell, I get it,’ the man stretched out. ‘You’ve decided to drive me crazy too. Tell me, did my ex-wife hire you?’

The old woman shook her head and pointed to the chandelier. 
The man saw two Persian sheikhs near the chandelier. They were arguing fiercely about something. Listening to their words, the dumbfounded man realized that the sheikhs were arguing about high heels: one sheikh spread his hands apart, showing the size of a stiletto and proving that such shoes help shooters to keep balance when riding a horse, because the stilettos perfectly cling to the stirrups. 

Twirling a finger around his ear, the Gentleman looked at the stilettos on the plate, then looked at the sheikhs again, but they magically vanished into thin air. Their place near the chandelier was taken by a stately lord in a wig and a camisole with long slits in the sleeves, through which you could see a white shirt. The feet of the stately man were adorned with high-heeled shoes decorated with bows of satin ribbons. 

‘Listen to my decree!’ he said loudly and looked imperiously at the gentleman and the old lady. ‘I command that everyone be assigned a certain heel length depending on their social rank: ½ inch for commoners, 1 inch for bourgeois, 1 ½ inches for knights, 2 inches for nobles, and 2 ½ inches for princes.

The gentleman looked unhappily at his soggy boots, which he would have to throw away when he got home, but he would never have agreed to trade even such weather-ravaged boots for a woman’s high-heeled shoes. 

‘Listen, Dear,’ he turned to this upstart in a wig, wanting to bring him to light. ‘If high heels are so good for balance, then why haven’t some women learned to walk on them well?’

The Lord looked at the Gentleman unhappily, took the stilettos from the dish, and vanished into the thin air. 

He looked around carefully, hoping to find out the right answer or to meet one of those characters that tend to suddenly appear and disappear, but he saw only an insistent hanging chandelier, a large table and a smiling old woman.

‘Change the look of the walls…’ the Gentleman said slowly. ‘Change the look of the walls…. There must be wallpaper on the dish?’

The old lady put her hand to her mouth and giggled quite a bit, because on the dish, there was the very same bubble wrap for packaging beckoning with elastic bubbles.

‘How come?’ shouted the annoyed man. ‘Bubble wrap for the walls? You’re all out of your minds here!’

The old woman, frightened by the man’s loud shouting, jumped back, but her frail body was supported by a couple of young men who came out from behind the table. One of them had a shower curtain rolled up several times in his hands, the other one was holding a tape measure and periodically started measuring some invisible patterns in the air with it.

The young man with the tape measure in his hands approached the Gentleman and began to take his measurements, from which the Gentleman grumbled unhappily and looked at the young man reproachfully.

‘Get away from me, young man, or I’ll have to…’ trying to snatch the tape measure from the hands of the insolent man, the gentleman hissed.

‘You’ll have to do what?’ asked the young man, handing the tape measure to his friend.

The old woman moved away from the table just in case, realizing that a scuffle was about to break out, but then, as if by magic, someone’s velvet voice sounded. 

‘Sounds like someone just needs to relieve some stress.’
 
The gentleman and the old lady turned to the owner of the voice and saw a middle-aged man with amazing blue eyes in front of them, and both young men, throwing aside the bath curtain and the tape measure happily approached the stranger and shook his hand.

‘Wait a minute,’ said the Gentleman extending his hand to the stranger. ‘I think I know you. You are Thomas John Watson Jr., the second head of IBM. But why are you here?’

The man shook hands with the Gentleman and gestured to the old woman.

‘Everybody knows me, Young Man,’ he said, ‘But not many people know these guys.

The head of IBM approached the young men and shook hands with each of them once again. 

‘Their names are Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, and they’re both from New Jersey.’ 

The young men smiled embarrassedly, and Thomas John Watson continued.

‘Once upon a time, these two guys put two shower curtains together and then squeezed them so tightly together that little air bubbles showed through on both sides of the curtains. The guys were so inspired by their invention that they started selling it as a home decoration, like wallpaper. But nothing good came of it, did it?’

The young men lowered their eyes to the floor.

‘You have wisly noticed, my friend, that few people wanted to hang bath curtains instead of wallpaper on the walls of their homes,’ Thomas John Watson continued, ignoring the young men’s embarrassment. ‘However, such a shame didn’t stop the young men. They quickly changed their positioning and began to sell their invention to farmers as an insulating material for greenhouses. Business was booming, but not all farmers agreed to change their usual ways of covering greenhouses for such a bubbly invention. And then….’

The head of IBM took a breath and looked at the young men with admiration. 

‘And then,’ he continued, ‘These guys decided that their invention could be useful in packaging products. That’s when they found me. IBM became their first customers and started using bubble wrap to protect shipments of IBM 1401 computers.’

‘Later we founded Sealed Air Corporation,’ said the young man with the tape measure in his hands.

‘And the offices of large companies celebrate Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day every last Monday in January,’ said the IBM CEO and picked up a piece of the same bubble wrap that was on the dish. He walked over to the Gentleman and handed him the piece of wrapping. ‘Ducky, well you really need to de-stress. Pop some bubbles, don’t be shy.’

The gentleman twirled the piece of packaging in his hands confusedly and gently popped a couple of bubbles. 

‘Thank you,’ the Gentleman mumbled to himself. But as he was popping the bubbles, the figures of the Head of IBM, the young man with the curtain in his hands, and the young man with the tape measure began to fade into thin air until they disappeared altogether. 

‘Well, these ones have disappeared as well,’ the Gentleman said disappointedly. ‘And I  haven’t had time to ask what kind of glue was planned to attach the bubble wallpaper to the wall and what could be used to remove them.’

The old woman turned on her heels and began to read the description, ‘The product on this plate has been used as a wallpaper cleaner for over 20 years and, despite the fact that it is not to be eaten, it has been sincerely loved by all children.’

The gentleman looked carefully at the smiling old lady, who at the moment reminded him of an elementary school teacher. The man went to school late and liked to attract the attention of his classmates more than to learn the basics of science. And what he disliked most about school was that the teacher always approached him with that smile and demanded answers to questions he didn’t know. 

The Gentleman experienced the same feeling now. He mentally recited to himself the description of the dish ‘Wallpaper cleaner that kids like’ and gave out the only answer that seemed logical to him.

‘There is syrup in there.’

The old woman raised her eyebrows in surprise.

‘Syrup?’

‘Syrup,’ the Gentleman confirmed his guess. ‘Now I know that the riddle has a trick. Syrup cannot be eaten and all children love it. And there must have been some kind of syrup that could even be used to clean the walls. After what I’ve seen here, I’m not surprised at anything.’

The old woman shrugged her shoulders and picked up the cloche, but instead of syrup there were colorful pieces of plasticine on the plate. 

The gentleman took a piece of modeling clay in his hands and began to knead it.

‘I could spend days with you here, but I would never have guessed that the plasticine was used to clean the walls with,’ the gentleman put the plasticine back on the dish. 

‘You should try,’ said the man who suddenly appeared near the wall wearing construction overalls and a helmet, ‘It’s very handy.’ 

The gentleman and the old woman took the plasticine and began to apply it to the wall one by one. The pieces of plasticine immediately turned red: dust and particles of thread stuck to them instantly. 

‘What did I tell you?’ the man in construction clothes asked triumphantly. ‘That’s how I demonstrated my invention to people, I asked them to put the plasticine to the wall, but the plasticine was different then and it was cleaning the wallpaper from the remains of coal.’

‘Coal?’ the gentleman got even more surprised.

‘Yes, exactly. In the past, all the rooms were heated with coal or wood, and they often left traces of soot on the wallpaper,’ explained the builder. ‘So I was asked by Kroger Grocery to come up with a unique product that could effectively clean wallpaper. I experimented for a long time with different non-toxic substances and came up with a putty that would be enough for all the walls in the house. But then the war came, and after the war people started switching to gas heating systems and vinyl wallpaper en masse. The market collapsed.’

The old lady and the Gentleman looked at each other and nodded understandingly. 

‘However, my nephew told me that the kids liked my putty and were using it to make crafts. My nephew and I reworked the formula one more time, painted the putty a bright color and put it in colorful jars. My goodness, it’s been years!’

The man in construction clothes flipped a piece of putty from one hand to the other.

‘I forgot to introduce myself,’ he held out his hand to the gentleman. ‘Noah McVicker, inventor of Play-doh modeling clay.’

The gentleman absent-mindedly put a piece of plasticine in his coat pocket, wiped his hand on it, and held it out to the inventor. The inventor shook his hand warmly, patted him on the shoulder, and then vanished into thin air and in the meantime, the multi-colored slime began to slowly slide off the walls, taking the remnants of dirt and memories with it. 

The old woman, having completely cleaned her shoes of traces of the sticky substance, looked sympathetically at the Gentleman. 

‘We’ve been playing with you for a long time, and you still haven’t been able to eat anything,’ she said courteously. 

‘I will. Anyway I should lose some weight,’ the gentleman replied and touched his stomach. Frankly speaking, he was very hungry, but he could not understand why he was so attracted to this room. 

He closed his eyes, imagining the thick nutritious slurry usually served in a deep plate and, without opening his eyes, touched another cloche. 

‘Cloche number 555,’ the gentleman opened his eyes and read. ‘I wonder what’s in there.’

‘Let’s see,’ the old lady answered enthusiastically. ‘Well, well, well….This dish contains something that cannot be forged.’

‘Documents?’ the gentleman voiced his hunch immediately. ‘Are there documents under the cloche? Documents mustn’t be forged.’

The old woman shrugged her shoulders and lifted the cloche, but the dish that covered the pastry dome was empty. 

‘I don’t understand anything,’ the old lady got worried and looked under the cloche once again. 

The man tapped the metal plate and even looked under the table, but there was nothing like documents under the table. 

‘A glitch in the matrix,’ the man joked and immediately bent over in pain as he felt a metal object that had fallen from the ceiling hit him painfully in the back of his head. 

The gentleman looked around apprehensively, he had not expected such a turn in the game. Neither had the old lady, who began to dance as small metal objects began to hit her as well. The metal objects were hitting harder and harder, and the old woman danced even more with each hit. 

The man admired the old woman’s ridiculous dance for a second, but suddenly the blows that made her dance stopped, and instead there was an oppressive silence. The gentleman and the old woman heard a sharp rumble, like thunder, which warned of the coming of a storm. 

‘Take cover,’ the man immediately commanded, and dragged the old woman after him.
 
No sooner had they gotten under the table than they heard the metallic rain begin to drum desperately on everything in the room. The sound was so strong that the Gentleman had to cover his ears with his hands.

‘What the hell is going on in here?’ with a dish as a shield, the man asked the frightened old woman.

‘Don’t you see?’ she replied, trying to shout over the clinking sound. ‘It’s raining coins.’

Suddenly the rain of coins stopped and the room was filled with the usual light. The gentleman cautiously peeked out from under the table and looked around.

‘You know, Dear,’ he said to the old lady. ‘I didn’t sign up for this. You give me gunpowder instead of spinach, you give me plasticine instead of syrup, and now it turns out that I can be killed here. And you’re crazy if you think I can’t find a way out of here! I can! And then I’ll write such a complaint about your storefront hotel that they’ll tear it down as soon as they read it!’

There was a rustle of footsteps in the room. While the gentleman was trying to figure out what surprise to prepare for this time, the old woman pulled him by the sleeve of his coat and beckoned him back under the table. 

‘Look,’ she said to the man in a whisper. ‘Look over there.’ 

‘They have perverted the very essence! They have perverted the meaning of the great idea!’

The gentleman and the old woman heard a phrase spoken by the man, who was nervously pacing the room.

‘Time! That’s what can’t be forged, it’s time!’ the man continued to shout. ‘We have done everything for them! When will they quench their appetites?’

‘What are they talking about?’ the old lady asked the gentleman quietly.

‘It doesn’t sound like they’re talking about food,’ the gentleman replied in a whisper. ‘But both of these men look like the first people to describe a cryptographically secure blockchain – Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta. And they proposed using blockchain to put an indelible timestamp on every important document. This could help protect documents from forgery and could very well come in handy in court. But 20 years passed and Satoshi Nakamoto found another use for the blockchain – that’s how bitcoin came into being, followed by other cryptocurrencies.’

The gentleman and the old lady looked out from under the table again: one of the mathematicians was writing something on the computer, while the other mathematician continued to shout excitedly, ‘They want money! Not enough for them, not enough! So choke on your money!’

As soon as the man said the last word, there was a rumble and metal coins fell from the ceiling with a new, indomitable force. The old woman and the gentleman barely had time to hide in the shelter before the iron rain began to shatter the crystal chandelier into tiny shards, mixing the loud metallic sound with the thin voice of the fragile glass.  

‘It seems to be the end,’ the gentleman said doomedly and took the old woman’s hand. ‘My dear lady, you look like my teacher, and I am glad that it is you who is sharing with me the last minutes of my life….’

The old woman looked at the man in surprise, smiled and stroked his unshaven cheek. Then she snapped her fingers, and at exactly the same moment everything in the room acquired a completely different position – the table, snapping and swaying, threw off the remnants of coins and glass, then flipped several times in the air and smoothly descended to the ceiling. The remains of the chandelier hanging from the ceiling did a somersault in the air and moved to the floor. The red cloth that adorned the room turned green, which made the room look like a casino, and the cloches, like flying saucers, hung in the air with the dishes.

‘Wow,’ said the gentleman with his head up. ‘I guess we’re alive.’

‘I guess so,’ the old woman smiled, and adjusted her school dress.

‘Why are you, my dears, so careless,’ said a confident voice reprovingly. 

The gentleman and the old woman shuddered and saw a stately man with a beard, dressed in a vintage suit from the 19th century, walking towards them with a smile.

‘Come quickly into our hall, we are waiting for you,’ the man said and raised his hands in greeting. 

The gentleman and the old woman followed the man. Hanging dishes with cloches flew obediently after them.

The new hall was much larger than the previous one. There was no big table, but there were many different comfortable chairs where different men were sitting and smelling their own cigars. The gentleman noted that almost every one of these men looked like the animated caricatures of the scientific journals of yesteryear.

He looked at his adventure-worn coat, his nearly ruined shoes, and sighed regretfully that his appearance was no match for such presentable company. He looked around for the most inconspicuous place, and as soon as he found it, the voice of the man who had brought him and the old woman to this hall sounded.

‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen! May I have your attention, please?’ he demanded. ‘We have an important guest in our secret society.’

All who were in the room turned their heads and looked with interest at the gentleman, who, in surprise, squeezed himself even more into his coat. 

‘Please excuse our peculiar hospitality,’ said the man, smiling at the gentleman. ‘We didn’t mean to frighten you at all. We never meant to frighten anyone, but people have often been frightened by our creations.’

‘There must be some mistake,’ the gentleman said timidly.

The room murmured so desperately that the man had to tap the water carafe to call everyone to order.

‘Haven’t you noticed yet, my friend, that everything you use in the modern world is a mistake?’

The gentleman opened his mouth in surprise and began to frantically select phrases. A man who looked like a famous writer came to his aid. 

‘For example,’ he said, ‘I was working on the creation of artificial dyes and as a result of my completely harmless experiments I got phosgene gas.’

‘That’s right!’ a bald man in a pince-nez supported him. ‘I worked all my life to invent a means to get rid of insect pests. But I’m famous for other things.’

‘Who could know that your invention “Cyclone B”, as well as my discovery of the chemical phosgene, would be used exclusively for the mass extermination of civilians during military operations. We are not remembered, our pictures are not on the pages of textbooks. Do you know what it’s like to realize that what you did for people will eventually turn against them?’

The gentleman swallowed convulsively, he seemed to realize who all these people were. 

‘I had nothing to do with it,’ said a young man in modern clothes who suddenly appeared. ‘I worked for a large IT company, where I was asked to invent a technology to test the resistance of systems to external influences. So I made a special closed-source software for experimental purposes to study network endurance: whether the maximum bandwidth of the network should be increased, how reliably it would function under a large number of requests, and so on. And how is this method being used now?’

‘What is he talking about?’ the gentleman gently asked his neighbor on the right. 

He looked at the man very unhappily and said in the voice of a strict teacher, ‘He is talking about DDoS technology, it is shameful not to understand such things, Dear. Well, you managed to confuse gunpowder and spinach….. I hope you at least recognize Humphry Davy, the inventor of phosgene and Fritz Haber, the creator of that very chemical.’ 

The gentleman shamefully averted his eyes. 

‘You haven’t recognized them,’ the man said. ‘Then you haven’t recognized me either.’

The man held out his hand to the gentleman.

‘Herman Hollerith, the creator of the famous punched cards that were mass produced by IBM in the United States in the early 20th century. I dreamed that my invention would be the first step in the creation of an intelligent machine, but they were used first for census and then for meticulous accounting of Jews, whose extermination was most carefully prepared in advance. It is believed that the IBM management knew about the use of their technique, but turned a blind eye to it, because it was too convenient to store data on my punch cards.’

The amazed Gentleman shook the man’s hand.

‘By the way, the first device that used punched cards for programming was a loom created in 1804 by Joseph Marie Jacquard. What could be more peaceful than a loom? And to go further, the mathematician Charles Babbage, who worked on the Analytical Machine, also did not think about the needs of the military and politicians. As for the first real computer ENIAC, created in 1944, it was designed for military use from the very beginning. Namely, for making artillery tables. Well? How do you feel about me now? After that, would you also want to shake my hand?’

‘I would,’ with pride, said the man who had been listening to the conversation between the two men. ‘Inventor… It even sounds proud!’

‘It’s easy for you to say, Mr. John Gorrie,’ intervened a man with a neat haircut and a snow-white beard. ‘Your invention is now used by everybody.’

‘Yes, but I invented it for a completely different purpose,’ said the offended man. ‘I invented a cooling capsule for yellow fever patients….’

‘And now your technology has become a refrigerator! I also invented a device that could amplify sound for the hearing impaired, and in the end, people started using this technology as a microphone. In fact, it was rejected because it wasn’t practical, and it wasn’t until Emil Berliner showed my technology to the world that people recognized what a microphone was. It’s a good thing that the telephone I invented is being used for its intended purpose, otherwise I would have gone crazy when I saw my name in the newspaper: “Alexander Graham Bell, a scientist and inventor of whatever.” Brrrr….’

‘I don’t understand what you are complaining about, gentlemen,’ a man in a wig intervened in the conversation with a strong French accent. ‘I always dreamed of being a musician like Mozart. I listened to the music of the wind, I listened to what the birds were singing to me about…… How much I wanted to transmit this wonderful music to you! Especially for this purpose I created an instrument that could reproduce musical fantasies and measure the average speed of a mosquito wing, the speed of sound underwater and the frequency of musical notes.’

The gentleman smiled happily at the fact that he hadn’t come across such a description in the previous room.

‘Excuse me, Mr. Cagnard de la Tour, have you brought the instrument you invented with you?’ Alexander Bell inquired briskly. ‘We would love to enjoy the beautiful music.’

The French inventor stood for a minute, then covered his face with his hands and with a cry “My God, why? Why?” ran quickly out of the room. 

Alexander Bell looked around at everyone present with an incomprehensible look and asked, ‘Am I alone now to completely misunderstand the behavior of our French colleague?’

The people in the room began to whisper, and the Gentleman looked around the room several times in the hope of seeing a hidden musical instrument somewhere.

The general whispering was interrupted by an old lady, who had already managed to change the uniform of a high school student into the uniform of a waitress of a roadside café of the 60s. 

‘Gentlemen, the instrument, or rather the sound that Mr. Cagnard de la Tour invented, you all know very well. It is loud and it has saved the life of each of you more than once,’ the old lady looked at the Gentleman attentively. ‘Can you guess this sound, Sir? It seems to me that tonight you have excelled in solving riddles.’

‘It’s indeed true. And now,’ she turned toward the hall, ‘Distinguished Gentlemen, welcome to dinner.’

Seeing the cloches hanging in the air following her again, the old lady added, ‘Oh, and, Mr. Einstein, would you be so kind as to lower the table hanging from the ceiling? Stop messing around with gravity.’

When Mr. Einstein obediently followed the old lady’s instructions, all the members of the secret society sat down to dinner.

________________



‘Wake up now! Do you hear me? Wake up immediately! Am I supposed to wake you up with a siren?’

A famous inventor tried with all his might to shake his assistant who had fallen asleep in his chair. But the assistant did not want to change the cozy embrace of Morpheus for a cramped and poorly lit room. 

‘Damn it, why did I take you as my assistant! Wake up!’ The inventor made the last attempt to wake up his colleague and smashed a glass decanter on the floor. 

The assistant woke up instantly and looked around with an incomprehensible look.

‘Where are the shoes?’

‘What shoes, Ducky?’ the inventor asked sarcastically. ‘Have you gone crazy?’

The assistant wiped his sleepy eyes. 

‘Professor, I saw you in my dream,’ he said quickly. ‘There were all the inventors whose inventions had been misused by a terrible coincidence. There were also dishes with riddles, rain of coins, a flying table, and even time travel.’

‘Very nice,’ the professor smiled indulgently, still resentful of his assistant’s frivolous behavior. ‘And what was I doing in this dream?’

‘You had a secret society.’

The professor’s face took on an intimidating look, he became furious and grabbed his young colleague by the scruff of the neck.

‘Have you lost your mind completely?’ he shouted, continuing to shake the assistant’s collar.

‘No, Professor,’ the assistant began to babble. ‘For example, the refrigerator was invented as an antipyretic, and phosgene was used to make artificial dyes.’

The professor let go of the assistant’s collar and put his hand on his forehead, thinking that there must be a good reason for such a raving lunacy.

 ‘Oh, you have a fever, Ducky. I’ll have some soup brought to you. Mary!’ he called in a loud voice to his housekeeper. ‘Mary! Bring me and my assistant what you call soup, and don’t forget to cover it with a cloche to keep it warm.’

In a few minutes an old woman appeared in the doorway of the professor’s room, holding a dish covered with a cloche. She carefully slid the papers lying on the table, set the dish down, and winked at the assistant. 

‘Eat your soup,’ the professor commanded and opened the cloche. ‘You and I still have a lot to do: we need to urgently finish work on the explosive mixture, which will help miners to develop new deposits and lay transportation tunnels.’

The assistant took a spoonful of soup into his mouth, remembered his dream and immediately coughed. 

‘Professor,’ putting aside the bowl with soup he quickly said. ‘Don’t do it. I know what fate awaits your invention.’

The professor put aside his notes in astonishment and looked at his assistant attentively, ‘What is it?’

‘I saw it all in my dream,’ the assistant continued confusedly. ‘What you do for people is certainly important, but people will not always use your invention for peaceful purposes. People will die because of dynamite, and you will be called a merchant of death.’

The professor was stunned. He had never imagined that his invention could suffer such a fate. Seeing the horror on the professor’s face, the assistant continued, ‘You are a very bright man, Professor, and you must go down in history with something bright. Maybe you will be the first person to support all inventors and scientists? And it will be your name that will be synonymous with greatness for every discovery?’

The professor furrowed his eyebrows and scratched his beard: this sleeping underachiever he had taken as his assistant was not so crazy. The professor closed his eyes, imagining the possible horror his brainchild would bring, but the clatter of a spoon against his assistant’s plate brought him back to reality.

‘The Alfred Nobel Prize for outstanding scientific research, revolutionary invention, or major contribution to culture, or the development of society. That’s actually a good idea! Finish your soup,’ he commanded his assistant, ‘We have a lot to do. But first we have to erase the black charcoal marks from the walls.’
The assistant nodded and absent-mindedly put his hand into his pocket. There was a small piece of plasticine in his palm.