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It was impossible to say who'd been
stuffed the most: Zymurgy Inc. for failing to patent the Nitrox
Snorkel, or the would-be divers trained to believe that technology
really is a replacement for knowledge! |
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Vol.3 No.2
CounterStrike
Stuff and Nonsense
By: David Strike
Not many people realise that the idea of stuffing olives was hit upon
by an obscure sect of Spanish nuns who, when there was a seasonal
glut of the things, came up with a neat idea for taking out the pit
and substituting it with a pimento. Their stuffed olives proved so
popular - and financially rewarding for the convent - that it
gave rise to a major industry with, it is said, a good nun being able
to stuff up to 600 olives a day.
Needless to say their role in this entrepreneurial venture was soon
forgotten when a money-grubbing industrialist mechanised the process
and - able to produce more stuffed olives in an hour than a nun could
in a day - captured the market and put the convent out of business.
It's the sort of trivia that Krabbmann sometimes comes up with
as a prelude to talking about ways of making money out of the diving
industry.
"It's sad," he said, "to think of those nuns
spending years stuffing olives in order to raise money for charitable
purposes, only to have somebody with greater resources capitalise
on their discovery and reap all of the rewards. But that's market
forces for you.
"Diving's no exception," he continued. "Look
at Haldane! The same thing happened to him; except that he spent years
stuffing goats into recompression chambers - rather than pimentos
into olives - in order to formulate a set of decompression tables
that would alleviate the bends.
"Having laid the groundwork, his freely available findings were
taken up by later generations of researchers, many of whom developed
their own proprietary tables that they now sell at a profit to other
users. Stuff happens!" Krabbmann said, philosophically.
Having gone down a similar path, I sympathised with the nuns and Haldane.
As the President of Zymurgy Inc., (an international not-for-profit
consortium of diving technologists committed to providing divers with
equipment so ahead of its time that no recognisable need for it yet
exists) I played a prominent role in the design and development of
the world's first Nitrox Snorkel, the 'Uranus'.
With the intention of sharing all of our designs with the entire diving
community, we never considered slapping a patent on 'Uranus',
a snorkel that, in outward appearance, resembled the 1954, U.S. Divers
model; the one with a ping-pong ball valve at its upper end.
With all of the usual characteristics of a conventional snorkel, what
set 'Uranus' apart was the inclusion of a membrane adsorbent
located in a canister midway along the stem of the snorkel: a mechanism
that served to filter unwanted gases from the mix while allowing the
operator to select the appropriate oxygen mix via a manually operated
spindle valve attached to the reservoir well at the snorkel's
lower end.
Unlike modern snorkels the top of ours curved downwards and was fitted
with an open sided 'cage' housing the microchip sensor
device, a ping-pong ball shaped instrument that automatically switched
the mix to 21% oxygen on the surface.
However, and despite positive comment from that small core group of
divers interested in pushing technology to its limits, sales of 'Uranus'
weren't even sufficient to cover our R&D costs (probably
because of our insistence that every purchaser paid an additional
fee for the mandatory two-day training course in its use.)
Turning our attention to other more lucrative projects, we told the
distributor to, "sit on Uranus", and then promptly forgot
about it. Until just recently, that is, when another diving organisation,
realising the enormous profit potential in the compulsory training
programme, launched their own version of the Nitrox Snorkel.
A shameless copy employing the same technology as our original design,
the only difference between their unimaginatively named, 'E-Snorkel'
and 'Uranus' was the replacement of our manually operated
spindle valve by an automated electronic gizmo. An innovation that,
they claimed, gave the E-Snorkel greater appeal by eliminating the
need for users to think for themselves, thereby reducing the time
and cost of training and encouraging more sales.
It was impossible to say who'd been stuffed the most: Zymurgy
Inc. for failing to patent the Nitrox Snorkel, or the would-be divers
trained to believe that technology really is a replacement for knowledge!
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