The Wiki Man

31 January 2009

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

I suspect fans of the HST will mostly enjoy Slow Tech, by Andrew Price, a book which describes itself as ‘a manifesto for an over-wound world’. The author believes that an obsession with ‘efficiency at all costs’ has led to an over-engineered approach to everything from business systems to cars. He cites the Aga stove and the vintage Bentley as examples of the robust technologies he admires.

To his list of demons he could add what for me is one of the worst example of senseless complexity — the europlug. At some point in the last century some idiot, possibly at the French ministry of plumbing, decided that the system of retaining water in a bath or basin with a simple plug attached by a chain was far too simple. So he came up with a stupid system of levers and rods that raises and lowers a metal disk at the bottom of the basin, on a good day by as much as half a millimetre.

In my experience this moronic contraption works less than half the time, either failing to seal or failing to drain. The device is unhygienic, hard to repair and hopeless for anyone who shaves (or vomits). There is no single way in which this device improves on the simple plug and chain it replaces.

Yet this most un-British device is slowly taking over here in Blighty. Are we too late? Could we have a campaign, ‘Stop the Europlug’, with Tory MPs wearing little gold plugs and chains on their lapels? Something for Kenneth Clarke, perhaps?

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Alan Challoner

January 30th, 2009 11:27am Report this comment

Your comments on the levered plug in wash basins seems to show that you have not been around as long as I have. They were in use long before the EU came into existence. They may have been developed in the 1930s but possibly even earlier.

They are unlikely to be removed and in that respect are more secure than the plug and chain.

Thomas L. Aabo

January 30th, 2009 12:41pm Report this comment

The british do the AGA best? I is a swedish invention!

Rory Sutherland

January 30th, 2009 5:18pm Report this comment

The Aga was designed by a Swede, but manufactured and popularised by Brits. And perhaps owes some of its early success to the efforts of a Scottish salesman, one David Ogilvy - who later became known in advertising.

Rory Sutherland

January 30th, 2009 5:22pm Report this comment

I can't quite buy the anti-theft argument for the Europlug. A stronger chain might solve the problem just as well. (I suppose at a pinch you might argue that the device is so stupid that noone would want to steal it).

Besides, this argument may hold some weight when the plug is used in public washrooms - although French public lavatories of the 30s were mostly guarded by a demented old woman. But why in private homes? I have some pretty dodgy friends, but none I think who would steal my household plugs.

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