I think that even the people who invent things figure there’s always room for improvement. Every creative endeavor involves an editing phase, after all.

That said, sometimes you really do nail it on the first try – and people think these inventions will never need any improvement at all.

You can’t beat perfection.

Pizza. You can change it up, you can ruin it, and you can fold it half like a crazy calzone munching madman, but you can’t beat perfection.

For its purpose.

I’ve heard the Pin setter machine in bowling Alleys has never had a redesign. It was perfect already.

The fundamental mechanisms behind it has stayed the same, but different pinsetters have made minor adjustments to make common issues, well, less common.

As of modern day, new high-end pinsetters have actually no perceivable way to change their core design.

Everyone has to clip.

I’d say nail clippers. Rich and poor people all use the same thing to clip their nails.

Simple and elegant.

P-trap – a simple elegant way to prevent odor from coming into your house via sink, toilet, etc.

A lot of Asia still doesn’t use this. Trust me it makes a huge difference.

Except for that.

Rubber bands. They work.

When I was a kid, rubber bands would last for years. Now most of them fail within a year or so.

Because they removed the cocaine

Until then.

The XLR cable. Until they can beam something directly into your head, we kind of hit a dead end for perceived sound.

The simplicity of what a cable can do by allowing both AC and DC power to flow through so you can power and draw signal from a microphone.

Plus the fact it’s so simple to remove the noise you get from outside interference makes it even more genius.

In their final stage.

Most professional classical music instruments are already in their final stage like piano and violin.

Taking the other tack: most orchestral scores do not feature saxophone because it wasn’t developed until the 1840s, which is extremely recent on the musical timeline.

So many life hacks.

Paper clip. Last major patent was in the 1880’s

On a similar note: the binder clip. Those little fuckers are the source of many life hacks.

Practically perfect in every way.

The spoon is a pretty incredible invention. It can often sub as a fork or a knife, and it has a great name.

Those special self-stabilising spoons to help people with hand tremors feed themselves are pretty cool. Over-engineered for most people but I’m happy they exist

The bone works best.

Those bones they use for tanning leather. people have tried using all sorts of different materials but bone always works best apparently

Yeah if I remember it correctly from my college classes, those weren’t created by humans. Like, WHAT. It was a tool created by Homo Erectus I believe, but it does predate anatomically modern humans.

No need for change.

The basic sewing needle. It really hasn’t changed in thousands of years. There is no need for change.

Who knew?

Cast iron skillet est. 1707

Rapunzel has entered the chat

Perfect physics.

The soda can. The physics behind it have been perfected. There is a cool YouTube video about it!

Thousands of years later.

The brick.

It has been made of mud, then mud with straw, then mud with clay, then finally with clay alone. That is as far as progress has taken the brick, in the (guess) 8,000 years since it was invented, and it is still in use today.

Someone, lost in the obscurity of ancient history, realised that you couldn’t build really strong stone structures with irregularly-shaped small natural stones, and hewing huge lumps of stone into regular shapes was just ridiculously hard work.

That person also observed that mud that fell into a fire was left hardened when the fire died down. So they figured that if you shaped mud into regular shapes, big enough to carry one in each hand, you would have all the advantages of small irregular stones and large geometrically-carved stones, but with none of the drawbacks of either.

This thought must have taken a second to dawn on the inventor. The practical work to prove the concept must have taken a weekend, at most. Perhaps a week or two to get the shape just right. And here we are, thousands of years later, and the damn thing has barely changed at all.

Too bad they don’t last longer.

Windshield wipers, my engineering professor always lectured us on how perfect the design is and how and new changes made are strictly aesthetic and don’t work any better.

Never say never, I guess.

I suppose we’ll have to just wait and see!