Eight pressing questions I’ve left unanswered for decades

In the world of the internet, once a question appears in your mind it can usually be instantly answered. Yet I quite like leaving a few questions sitting there in my head, sometimes for decades.

Why is the tachometer so prominently displayed? In most cars it’s a huge dial, as big as the speedometer. I’ve driven both manuals and automatics and not glanced at it once. Do others use it? How do you even make use of it in an automatic, which now covers nearly all cars? Or is it just to make you feel like you are Jack Brabham going around the final corner at the Monaco Grand Prix, even though the automatic transmission is choosing when to change gears?

How do they get the sweetcorn off the cob? I think about this a lot. When making tacos, I boil some corn cobs and then slice off the kernels with a knife. That works fine, but the kernels have a sawn-off edge, unlike the perfection of the rounded kernels in a can of sweetcorn. So how do they do it? Is suction involved? Or is it centrifugal force like the Rotor at Luna Park, with the cobs constrained somehow in the centre and the kernels flying free? Are there chemicals involved or hot water? The biggest mystery in the universe is, of course, what existed before the Big Bang, but the removal of corn kernels from the cob must be second-biggest.

Why did fridges in my childhood have rounded tops? It meant you couldn’t put anything on top of the fridge, such as a radio or a box of fruit. It also created less space in the fridge. What did they have against right-angles? And what changed in the late ’70s that allowed the fridges to finally have flat tops?

Who created the international treaty that governs petrol-cap placement? Half the cars in the world have a fuel cap on the left side of the car, and half the cars in the world have it on the right side. This is obviously sensible as it results in equally sized queues at either side of the petrol station bowsers. Brilliant! But how was it arranged? Was there an international conference in 1944, the automotive equivalent of the Bretton Woods Agreement? Maybe. But how, in the years since, has equanimity survived, as various makers and models rose and fell in their popularity? Why didn’t the Americans, or the Japanese, or the Germans, dig in their heels and say, “we’re left-siders, always have been”, or “right is right, it is the Korean way”? Who constantly renegotiates the details? Why are they so good at it? Could they now turn their attention to global warming, the Middle East, and the battle for a universal mobile-phone charger? The truth may disappoint me – it’s probably random serendipity – but I like to thank these brilliant negotiators each time I fill up.

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Why can’t they make hoses that don’t leak? The brass fittings worked fine. So how come they now make them all out of plastic, leaving every gardener perpetually soaked?

Whatever happened to the DVD extras? The blooper reel and the deleted scenes were often the best bit. Even the commentary track wasn’t so bad. Then DVDs gave way to streaming services and the streaming services decided anything other than the movie was too much trouble. So how come? Don’t they have enough space on their servers for the odd blooper?

Why were wardrobes always slightly too shallow? For years there, you couldn’t close the doors without a shirt-cuff getting stuck. Did the hangers get bigger sometime in the mid-1950s and no one thought to tell the people who made the wardrobes? Was there a wood shortage, and making it 3cm deeper would have destroyed the war effort? I really don’t know, but thank god for the arrival of the built-in, a wardrobe finally wide enough to fit the hangers. Speaking of which, do hotels really need hangers that are impossible to remove? How much do the hangers cost? Two cents each? Would it kill them if a few went missing?