“Necessity is the mother of invention;  yea, yea, we know. So now the question is asked; is there a daughter of invention? Maybe. There are some great inventions in this world, but what about the little “icing on the cake” that makes them even better? There is a peanut butter sandwich, but is it far better with jelly? Can there be the shoelace, and no Aglet? Just as a review, the Aglet is the metal or plastic tip at the end of a shoelace. The word comes from French, which came from Latin, which means “needle.”  To stray into an urban myth, or lack thereof, I have found no evidence that the Aglet was invented by one person who went on to become excessively wealthy the same way the “alleged“ simple-minded inventor created a carburetor in his basement that could get a car 450 Miles Per Gallon. As we all know, that inventor secretly sold his invention to the auto industry, disappeared, and went on to buy a small private island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; probably Australia.

Then one day texting came along, bursting on the scene with the heat of the sun, and showing no signs of cooling off; not even when it’s cold outside! Hello texting gloves! They come in all shapes and sizes, but there are two basic kinds that are unique if you still want the electronic device to operate properly. There are the gloves that at one time were only seen by actors playing homeless people; the cloth type with the fingers cut off. New models have emerged base on style, and design from companies like Nordstrom. There are also practical  ideas taken from the military used in extreme environments. Of course, with progress comes danger. Well documented stories aside, the latest health risk to people texting comes from frostbite. Let’s face it; on-coming traffic, open man holes, and operating driving vehicles won’t stop people from texting, why should a little cold; until their fingers turn blue and fall off; “hey, you have 8 more!”

The second kind of glove is more high-tech, and the answer comes to us from the “wiseGeek” website;

Texting gloves allow people to operate a touch screen on a tablet PC or mobile phone without having to take their gloves off. One might reasonably ask, “Why can’t any pair of gloves be compatible with touch screens?” The answer lies in something that many touch screens use: capacitive touch. Capacitive touch screens register movement by picking up on fluctuations in the screen’s electrical field, which means that something applying pressure to the screen is only registered it if too has an electrical current. Our skin works wonderfully on most touch screens because we give off electrical impulses. Most cloth, however, doesn’t hold an electrical current, rendering it useless on most touch screens. Texting gloves solve that problem by using conductive material, or fabric that’s able to transmit an electrical current.

If there is a daughter of invention, I’d like to meet her!