42 Times A Simple Solution Solved A Problem Everyone Overthought

The "Mind the Gap" warnings on the London underground (both audio and visual) are generally considered effective due to a combination of frequency, psychological impact, and clarity, which contributes to overall passenger safety despite significant increases in passenger numbers.

Small children don't wake up from smoke detector alarms consistently, so researchers created one that just had a woman's voice saying "Wake up, the house is on fire." It was much more effective at getting them up and out of bed.

Barbed wire was revolutionary for farming.

It was cheap and allowed for the erection of large scale fencing for the first time, ultimately leading to the industrialisation of agriculture.

Putting a little image of an insect in the men’s urinal helps the aim better and reduces a serious amount of people splattering outside it.

Oh I have a good one. So, with lung transplants, an issue has always been "how long can the lungs be out of the donor and still be viable". Traditionally, you store them on ice around 4 degrees Celsius and 5 to 6 hours is kinda typical for the ischemic time, longer you start to have issues. This creates many logistical issues. Now there's more and more devices out now that can extend that, keep it warm, pump blood through it, oxygenated, etc, but those are all complex and Hella expensive.

Turns out, if you just store the lungs in a fridge at 10 degrees Celsius, the ischemic time can be increased to 12 hours or even more without worse outcomes vs traditional cold storage.

Outhouses. In many areas without plumbing or outhouses people just kinda go walk out into the woods and p**p. This makes them vulnerable to hookworms. Outhouses separate p**p from the walking places and limits infection. 


Hookworms can result in calorie deficiencies and as result people can be lethargic and not as intelligent. So outhouses can literally improve test scores and society at large just by digging a big hole in the ground and pooping through a hole in a bench.

Instead of digging the Panama Canal (took long time exposing workers to tropical diseases longer), build a dam and partially flood the same path. Use locks to navigate height.

One I was personally involved in:

We had dozens of cnc machines all exactly alike and making automotive parts. The engineering team had miscalculated and the coolant supply was inadequate, causing hundreds of faults daily. Every fault required an operator to manually reset and restart the machine. Those operators were so busy resetting faults that they could not perform other tasks.

A friend of mine asked me to help him solve the issue. We went out there together and figured it out in about 10 minutes. We had an engineer add 2 seconds to the pressure switch timer. The coolant switch now waited that little bit extra time before it would fault out, allowing the pressure to build. As soon as all the machines were modified in this way, the faults went from hundreds every day to just a handful.

Everybody was super happy and my friend and I split a max suggestion award, which was $12,500 each. We literally saved the company millions by eliminating downtime and not having to replace expensive coolant systems.

Scientists had been trying to get a single layer of graphite, called graphene. Graphite is just a specific structure of carbon atoms, so for a single layer, we're talking about a single carbon atom thick. It's the thinnest two dimensional material known to man or mollusc. They tried all the fanciest equipment. Teams of people at competing companies, universities, and agencies were trying to crack it.

One of those fancy tools was a laser. To prep graphite block, they would use scotch tape to remove dust. IIRC, one night, after some drinking, one of the scientist had a "brain blast" moment, called his coworker, raced down to the lab, and immediately found the graphene! Turns out that the tape would pull graphene sheets off the block, so they had been throwing graphene in the trash the whole time. They won a Nobel prize in physics for their experiments with graphene.

Anyway, graphene is cool because it's conductive, strong, flexible, and transparent. Problem is that the scotch-tape method isn't a great method for mass production. There's been a few other methods tried with varying success and promise. Most people will probably never see a device advertised as containing graphene, but it, and it's mimics, will be everywhere. [Here's more information](https://www.science.org/content/article/twenty-years-after-its-discovery-graphene-finally-living-hype).

The person who realised some of the water wells were contaminated with human waste and that was a reason for all the deaths - no one believed him - there was one family who got really sick but no one in the area got sick but that was coz they walked all the way to a different well because they liked the taste….

Personal story here.

First job - I was in charge of preparing a weekly excel report that ran into multiple hundreds of lines. Mostly automated with visual basic. In one of the review meetings, a bunch of these lines were deemed unnecessary, and all heads turned to me, asking how long before I could update the sheet and the code to remove the unwanted lines. Everyone had mentally prepared for a 2 week cycle on this.

My suggestion was to just hide the unwanted rows and roll out the “updated” version immediately.

No one clapped, but there definitely were a couple of startled laughs!

At least according to Malcom Gladwell, Korean air safety was improved dramatically by simply ensuring every pilot spoke English well enough to effectively communicate with international air traffic control.

The Hubble space telescope was launched with fault mirrors that collected light incorrectly. The team at NASA discussed a lot of potential options would fix the issue but weren't feasible to do. They ended up removing the least used piece of equipment to install the equivalent of eye glasses. This gave us some of the most amazing pictures of space that anyone has seen.

The game series Wing Commander used more memory than the base memory limit of the (pre-Windows) Microsoft DOS operating system, which means it requires expanded memory management which is more complex.

During development of the first game in the series, there was a defect that after a user exited the game the expanded memory manager would output a specific error message to the command interface, which looks bad but is a non-issue because the game is exited.

To buy themselves some time to fix the issue while still being able to demo the game to stakeholders, one of the developers edited the expanded memory manager itself to change that one specific error message to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander”.

I worked at a company branch where there was lots of f**kery afoot. Lazy managers who didn't do their jobs, favored employees, nepotism, and theft. The owner solved it by firing everyone and dissolving that branch of the company.

Type 2 diabetes. It runs in my family. I was on my way. I cut back on sugar, and stopped snacking after dinner. Completely reversed.

The longitude problem. Centuries of complex maths and astronomy failed the solution turned out to be a good clock. Knowing the time difference instantly told sailors their longitude. Simple idea, huge impact.

Captain cook cured scurvy with sauerkraut. Maybe an oversimplification but still applicable since he didn’t know why at the time.

The man who invented the automatic sensor for bathrooms, had a problem after installing them. He couldn’t figure out why the men’s rooms worked, but the women’s wouldn’t work all the time. He couldn’t figure out a solution until he went home and explained it to his wife who immediately knew what was going wrong. She explained to him that a lot of women don’t actually sit on a public toilet seat, that actually a lot of them hover over the toilet seat. So the solution was to put the sensor higher than it had originally been.

Using base two arithmetic in computers. The early models tried to use base ten and it was ugly. Then they discovered that it was quite simple to represent a 1 or a 0 based on voltage level. Problem solved.


Twos complement arithmetic was also a magnificent solution to representing negative numbers in a register. (When you add two numbers together using simple binary arithmetic you get the correct answer, regardless of the signs.) It was the "wheel" of computing.