I’m always blown away by the many, many clever things South Africans have invented. I’ll let you in on most of them as we go along but, this morning, here are two for the price of one: the Disa push-button telephone… no, not the template for the ubiquitous cellphone but still the first push-button telephone in the world; and, very handy given our track record in surveillance, the “Colindictor”, the first machine in the world to allow recording of a telephone conversation. Trust a bloke named Colin to invent this… wait, I’m putting you on hold while I Google this…
Nah, no luck. You know when you Google something and you get a gazillion pages all saying the same thing (and some flashing that you are the “millionth visitor” and you’ll win a prize – yeah right!) but omitting to tell you the important stuff, like who actually invented the Colindictor? I can’t be doing with that… so that’s it for this first installment of Know The Beloved Country, Hatpeople!
* Original material sourced from the awesome Derryn Campbell’s very awesome Awesome SA website and, yes, that phenomenally awesome book she produced, which looks like this…
Fred Hatman (AKA Howard Donaldson) knew he wanted to be newspaper journalist at age 13. He has worked as a reporter and sub-editor for the Daily News and Cape Times, both based in South Africa and Wimbledon News, Today, London Daily News, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror, all based in London .
