Tools Never Go Extinct

If someone tells you a useful working dog breed has gone extinct, be on alert.

Tools generally don’t go extinct.

The observation that tools almost never go extinct is not my own, but that of Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine and Whole Earth Review.

Robert Krulwich of NPR did not believe the claim, but damn if he could find an exception.

If you listen to our Morning Edition debate, I tried carbon paper (still being made), steam powered car engine parts (still being made), Paleolithic hammers (still being made), 6 pages of agricultural tools from an 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue (every one of them still being made), and to my utter astonishment, I couldn't find a provable example of an technology that has disappeared completely.

So Krulwich being Krulwich went out to the NPR universe and after thousands of people spent scores of thousands of hours pondering and suggesting they could only come up with three:

• Radium suppositories made by quacks in the 19th century and which caused quick cancer;
• A Roman "corvus," a military boarding device used in naval warfare in the First Punic War against Carthage, and;
• The ferrite "core" of a Seeburg Jukebox of the 1950s.

To be fair to Kelly, his original claim was that no species of technology has ever gone extinct, in which case all three of the above items have, in fact, been replaced by better off-the-shelf items that do the exact thing promised in the original, only quicker, cheaper, and without killing you.