The instructions included are in their most basic form. Watt realised that copies of his letters would be very useful to others and so he invented a machine that transferred damp ink from a freshly written letter to another sheet of paper, creating a copy of it. But the machine wasn’t a steam engine: it was an office copier.

The earliest instruction manual that Bridgman found during his tenure was attached to a machine made by famous engineer James Watt. How they have evolved tells us about how we’ve changed too.Īccording to Roger Bridgman, a former curator at London’s Science Museum, “instructions are there to compensate for the inabilities of machines by employing the abilities of users, and therefore tell you something about the state of both at the time they were produced.” More than just a practical how-to list, instruction manuals can reveal much about the time and society in which they were written. The useless design features in modern products.“Wherever you are in life, there's always a manual somewhere, hidden behind the scenes,” says Paul Ballard, Managing Director of 3di, a company that specialises in technical writing. What’s more, they are not an especially modern invention: they have, in fact, been around for at least two centuries. They exist for a multitude of purposes and take many different forms. While we may think of them as the dense paper booklets that fall out in a tumble of bubblewrap and polystyrene when we are unpacking our new bedside cabinet, instruction manuals are much more.

Either way, and even if it’s only months after your purchase, there is almost always a time and a place when instruction manuals come in handy. Or perhaps you ‘file’ the information in the kitchen drawer never to be found again – preferring to rely on instinct (and perhaps a degree of stubbornness) in assembling a new piece of furniture. Maybe you diligently read an instruction manual from cover to cover before you even turn on a new product.

Ikea manuals