(hose)

Alas, hail the mighty hose! The genius who invented it (Jan Van der Heiden, Dutch, 1652) was without doubt a practical man, and thinker on shortcuts to hard work. My guess is he never fully realised the later implications beyond fire fighting, which begs the question: Why didn’t they open a dyke and channel it?
The medical uses of today such as ramming it through the oesophagus or the other direction to take pictures of yucky innards probably were beyond his wildest imagination. Back then sharp rusty blades were the implements of exploratory surgery. That painful thought increases admiration for the Dutch chap.
Some later genius who lived a couple of generations later apparently didn’t like the flailing and leaking of the original cloth and leather varieties so he improved on it, building a metallic one and called it a pipe. This only increased the acceleration of society’s evolution from agrarian to industrial to technological, debatably not a humane progression at all, yet seemingly inevitable. Kinda hard to go back and change Van der Heiden and ilk to dimwits.
But the real acclaim and glory for the hose isn’t in practicality at all; it’s in play. Steal and carve a piece of mirror, combine with hose, and you have periscope. Wait until Mother isn’t watering the garden with lead from said, and you have your own backyard fountain or fiendish water weapon, infinitely superior to Bobby’s eighty-nine cent water gun. Be careful. If Mother’s not aware, it may be she who comes unsuspectingly around that corner of the house.
Remove from tap and you have a sound corridor, a telephone system with no bells, even allowing for a more profound and audible version or talking to yourself, perhaps being the origin of the term ‘hoser’, definitely not in the same genetic line as those hose geniuses of lore.
I say, “All glory to the hose!”