Peas as Large as Beets

In an article by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. in the December 1900 issue of Ladies Home Journal, he made a few predictions for what life in America would be like in the year 2000. Prediction #12 included that peas and beans would get to be as large as beets, and prediction #1 suggested that, "There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America." While he was off the mark on those, he did get it right with #9 when he said that, "If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later," and "Photographs will reproduce all of Nature's colors."

But one thing he didn't foresee was the Sorapot. Bryn ordered one of these a while ago and just received it last week. (Now he's "into" tea. I give it a month.) The Sorapot is pretty slick though, really nicely designed from an aesthetic standpoint, and seems to function very well too. I guess some serious tea afficionados feel that it brews too much tea at a time since with high-end teas one is supposed to steep them several times. But I think it is pretty awesome, and for a project that an industrial design student cooked up in class, it rocks. I like that he had a lot of interest in it, but didn't sell out his design for large-scale manufacture. Instead, he produced 300 initially, and recently had another 300 made again. Nice. An architectural form and a simple function created from stainless steel, Pyrex, and food-grade silicone.