history is studded with inventions so improbable and brilliantly unlikely that it’s hard to fathom just what spark of genius can have spirited them into being in the first place. Plate glass, for example: you could leave us alone with a bucket of sand for an eternity and it would never once occur to us to heat it up until it turned into a window. Or radio – what manner of madman decided that you could send intangible sounds over wiggly invisible lines through the air, and some magic piece of equipment in people’s homes could replicate the noises in real time? It sounds ridiculous. There’s no way it should
