Problems and solutions
By Dr. Selim Erhan, TLT Editor | TLT From the Editor January 2025
Some common parts of modern life were once serious problems in need of creative solutions.
Happy New Year to everyone! Hopefully it will be a good year, with joy, good health and challenges that will make the year interesting. I was thinking of challenges when I had a very minor one that made me think. I was opening the cap of a new bottle of vitamins trying to get the seal off the inside of the cap. Whoever had designed it had made one section easy to lift so we could hold and pull it off. As I worked at it, because it was slipping from my fingers, I remembered that a while back, someone had poisoned some of the bottles on the shelves of stores forcing the whole industry to come up with seals to prevent a similar incident in the future—seals under caps, seals over caps, seals that actually require tools and reading glasses to find where to rip it off of an otherwise impossibly strong material.
At this point I remembered that instead of getting irritated and spreading negative energy, I should switch to a positive mood, and I started thinking about all the work that went into making these various kinds of seals. It must have been such a series of issues with such big pressure to solve them in a very demanding timeline! Most of these containers are filled in assembly lines, by robotic mechanisms. So engineers had to design and squeeze in an extra series of assembly units in an already compact design. The seal material had to be set up, had to be fed and had to enclose the container. Programmers had to program the timing and make it compatible with the rest of the assembly line.
Meanwhile chemists must have been frantically looking into what kind of material would best suit the purpose. These containers would go through various levels of mechanical friction, be exposed to extremes of temperatures, pass food grade tests and toxicity tests and still be easy to remove. At least be relatively easy to remove. I remembered the time when we were given the project to come up with adhesives for self-adhesive stamps so people would not have to lick the stamp before applying it. Now we take it for granted, but at that time it was a huge project! At least there was not a very big pressure to complete it. Ultimately it went to another group, and I don’t know how long it took but we suddenly had self-adhesive stamps! They did not fall off when they were rubbed, they did not discolor the envelope, they did not stick to the paper they came on, they did not dry after a few months and the list of requirements and the solutions most probably went on and on!
We should all cheer each other up for all the contributions we make toward the well-being of our societies and give thanks to all the people that came before us that have made all these comforts possible for us. Everywhere we look there is a great achievement, which was once a big problem: electricity, the wheel (especially the wheel), flushing toilets, heat on demand from a tiny thermostat on the wall, mouse for the computers, telephones and the list goes on. We should always remember the magic sentence that I had heard, “Where there is a will, there is a way!” It is so true; it works every time as long as there is a will!
So, in the new year and beyond, there are only challenges and opportunities to make our creativity work! Happy New Year!
Dr. Selim Erhan is director of business development for Process Oils Inc. in Trout Valley, Ill. You can reach him at serhan@processoilsinc.com.