The Radio
By Julian Beinart
Walking down a street in the middle of Durban, South Africa’s most racially mixed city, I passed a boy carrying a wooden transistor radio. It was about six inches long and two inches wide, with a wooden handle and a hinged wooden dowel antenna about two feet long tapered to a small knob at its end. On top of its body, one of three square wooden buttons was pressed down. A slit of broken glass covered a rectangular dial behind which was a piece of an old paper calendar numbered one to twelve. A red pointer was stuck on three; it could never move. Although it looked like a Braun transistor radio, the object never produced a sound. I asked the boy about it and he said: “It can’t play music, but I sing when I carry it. One day I’ll have a real one.”
Everywhere there were objects of emulation and imagination. Often they were copies of sophisticated machines now made by hand out of recycled, thrown away material…Cheaply available, highly visible and linguistically subtle , material from products carrying popular brand names and out-of-context messages (Coca-Cola, Sprite and Fanta, among others)…design responses to a technology that could not be purchased by poor people..
‘Necessity is the mother of invention’
It is commonly misattributed to Plato due to Benjamin Jowett's popular idiomatic 1871 translation of Plato's Republic, where in Book II, 369c, his translation reads: "The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention." Jowett's translation is noted for injecting the kind of flowery language popular among his Victorian-era audience. (Wikipedia)