This is an object that, at least if you live in the Western world, you have almost certainly cherished and cuddled and held close to you at some point in your life. You have probably slept with one of these in your bed!

safety-eye.jpg

It’s a safety eye. These little plastic or glass beads form the eyes of almost all modern teddy bears. The beauty is that once the safety eye is in the toy, it can’t be pulled out.

Now, this cultural history website credits the invention of safety eyes to Wendy Boston, a teddy bear manufacturer working in Wales in the 1950s.

Before the invention of the safety eyes, teddy bear eyes were frequently made from simple beads or buttons. These objects could be pulled off and were a choking hazard for children.

Thus, basically every child who has grown up in the Western world since the mid-1950s has had a lower risk of choking to death due to the skill and ingenuity of this Welsh woman in teddy bear design.

How many objects in our life are like this—literally stopping people from dying every day, but completely unknown to almost everyone?

(An aside: This is why I sometimes become frustrated by poor design—design preferences can seem trivial, but poor design is often both preventable and dangerous. This danger tends to disproportionately affect the already vulnerable people.)

(Another aside: This argument reminds me of my mother, who frequently remarks that one of the things she is most grateful for is that my generation has high standards for how they would like to be treated, whereas her generation would not have had the ability to hold those high expectations.)

(This argument is essentially similar to part of the argument made by Steven Pinker in the book Enlightenment Now, which is a book I do recommend.)