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By Root 510 0

of ourselves as living late in the history of consumer society, but the most sophisticated contemporary economy stands to be perceived by subsequent generations as no less primitive than we judge Europe to have been in the Dark Ages. It is a mere eighty years since deodorant was introduced, the remote-control garage door has been in existence for barely thirty-five and only in the last five years have surgeons discovered how safely to remove tumours from our adrenal glands and insert aortic keyhole valves into our hearts. We are still waiting for computers to help us identify whom we might confidently marry, for scanners to locate our lost keys, for a reliable method of eradicating household moths and for medicines which will guarantee us eternal life. Untold numbers of new businesses lie latent in our present inefficiencies and wishes. The fulfilment of a significant, and perhaps the most important, share of our needs remains untethered to the mechanisms of commerce.

2.

Looking through the brochure of attendees, I conceived a particular desire to meet Mohsen Bahmani, an Iranian who had invented a pair of shoes to help one to walk on water. Each shoe consisted of a spindle-shaped piece of fibreglass fitted with a miniature outboard engine, in which one could travel at fifteen kilometres an hour, while keeping one’s balance with the help of adapted ski-poles. Bahmani had spent five years fine-tuning his product, testing it in the waters near his mother’s house in the resort town of Mahmudabad on the Caspian sea, and envisioned application in both the recreational and military markets.

The two of us had made plans, via email, to meet for lunch at a Pizza Hut concession opposite the convention hall. I had just put in an order for some garlic bread and a bottle of sparkling water when I received the news that Bahmani had been detained at Heathrow on the suspicion of importing bomb-making equipment and taken for questioning to an immigration centre in Hounslow. The message was delivered by one of his colleagues, a scientist named Mohammed Shorabi, whose old-fashioned courtesy, cadenced English and tweed suit pointed to a strain of Anglophilia now unlikely except among those whose contact with the United Kingdom has been restricted or exclusively mediated through literary works of the pre-modern period. Shorabi told me that he had, at least, managed to get Bahmani’s promotional brochures through customs and had set them out across his stand. The two were colleagues at the Institute of Inventors, a research facility in Tehran set up by President Khatami in the hope of transforming Iran into a centre of innovation. Five of the Institute’s products, the shoes included, were being presented at the fair.

Because it was already past one-thirty and I knew that he must have expended considerable energy in tracking me down, I asked Shorabi if he might like to join me for lunch. So we ordered a couple of Super Supremes and discussed Shorabi’s own invention, a crash-protection system for cars and motorbikes. Based on exploiting what he termed mistakes in Newton’s first law of motion, it involved the strapping of a system of weights and pulleys to the front wheel of a bike or the fender of a car. ‘Nobody will ever have to die in a road accident again,’ Shorabi told me, paraphrasing his company’s slogan. He then pulled out from his suit pocket a sheet of yellowing newsprint torn from the Tehran Times, which featured a report on a successful test of his equipment conducted on a jeep at an army base in Mianeh – as well as, at the bottom of the page, an unrelated item about a strong finish by a member of the Iranian national ski team, Hossein Saveh-Shemshaki, at a slalom event in Turkey. Shorabi expressed regret that export constraints had prevented him from shipping a whole demonstration car to London, but he invited me to visit his stand after lunch to examine a child’s bicycle which he had been able to bring over and which, he said, supplied ample proof of the principles behind his invention. Once back in the hall, he needed no convincing