You have an excellent point. When you come down to it, MOST simple devices have at this point been developed and refined and tweaked until about all there is left to do is polish the rivets. Look at the hammer, for example ... it's evolved into a number of different specialized forms, the forging hammer, the carpenter's claw hammer, the geologist's sampling hammer, the machinist's ball-peen hammer, but none of them has really evolved significantly in probably a hundred years beyond changing the handle material. The saw? Well, people keep coming out with different incremental variations on tooth form and materials, but a saw is a saw is a saw. There have been refinements for specific uses, like the ultra-thin-blade Japanese saws that cut on the pull stroke, or the "toothless" structured tungsten carbide blade for cutting ultra-hard materials like ceramic tile, but all the significant advances in cutting things in the last fifty years have been in bladeless alternate cutting tools like plasma cutters, water jets, and lasers.
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